Ancient yeast has been coaxed back to life, and the result is a pint-sized portal to the past. Israeli archeologists and brewers have made beer from millennia-old yeast strains in ancient pottery across Israel, offering a tantalizing taste of the ancient world. Reviving the flavors of the pastThe yeast samples were found in nearly two dozen ceramic jars at archeological sites in Egypt, Philistine, and Judea, dating from 3,000 B.C. to the 4th century B.C. The sites included a 5,000-year-old Egyptian brewery near the Gaza Strip and a Persian-era palace in Jerusalem. The earliest evidence we have…