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posted by janrinok on Wednesday May 25 2016, @03:42AM   Printer-friendly
from the let's-have-a-drink-to-celebrate dept.

Archaeologists have unearthed an approximately 5,000-year-old brewery in China:

It's the oldest beer-making facility ever discovered in China – and the evidence indicates that these early brewers were already using specialized tools and advanced beer-making techniques. For instance, the scientists found a pottery stove, which the ancient brewers would have heated to break down carbohydrates to sugar. And the brewery's underground location was important for both storing beer and controlling temperature – too much heat can destroy the enzymes responsible for that carb-to-sugar conversion, explains Patrick McGovern, a biomolecular archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania Museum in Philadelphia, who was not involved in the current research.

[...] The research group inspected the pots and jugs, and found ancient grains that had lingered inside. The grains showed evidence that they had been damaged by malting and mashing, two key steps in beer making. Residue from inside the uncovered pots and funnels was tested with ion chromatography to find out what the ancient beer was made of. The 5,000-year-old beer "recipe" was published [DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1601465113] on Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.


Original Submission

Related Stories

5,000-Year-Old Chinese Beer Recipe Recreated by Students 3 comments

Stanford University students have attempted to recreate a beer using a recently described 5,000-year-old recipe:

The ancient Chinese made beer mainly with cereal grains, including millet and barley, as well as with Job's tears, a type of grass in Asia, according to the research. Traces of yam and lily root parts also appeared in the concoction.

Liu said she was particularly surprised to find barley – which is used to make beer today – in the recipe because the earliest evidence to date of barley seeds in China dates to 4,000 years ago. This suggests why barley, which was first domesticated in western Asia, spread to China. "Our results suggest the purpose of barley's introduction in China could have been related to making alcohol rather than as a staple food," Liu said.

The ancient Chinese beer looked more like porridge and likely tasted sweeter and fruitier than the clear, bitter beers of today. The ingredients used for fermentation were not filtered out, and straws were commonly used for drinking, Liu said.

YouTube video (2:12).

Revealing a 5,000-y-old beer recipe in China (open, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1601465113) (DX)

Previously: Archaeologists Unearth 5,000-Year-Old Brewery in China


Original Submission

13,000-Year-Old Beer Residue Found in Prehistoric Cave in Israel 15 comments

'World's oldest brewery' found in cave in Israel, say researchers

Researchers say they have found the world's oldest brewery, with residue of 13,000-year-old beer, in a prehistoric cave near Haifa in Israel. The discovery was made while they were studying a burial site for semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers.

Brewing beer was thought to go back 5,000 years, but the latest discovery may turn beer history on its head. The findings also suggest beer was not necessarily a surplus of making bread as previously thought. The researchers say they cannot tell which came first, and in October's issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, they suggest the beer was brewed for ritual feasts to honour the dead [DOI: 10.1016/j.jasrep.2018.08.008] [DX].

When will Dogfish Head seize the research?

Related: Beer Domesticated Man
Archaeologists Unearth 5,000-Year-Old Brewery in China
5,000-Year-Old Chinese Beer Recipe Recreated by Students


Original Submission

Beer Archaeologists are Reviving Ancient Ales 18 comments

Beer Archaeologists Are Reviving Ancient Ales — With Some Strange Results

Patrick McGovern is scientific director of the Biomolecular Archaeology Project at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. The author of Ancient Brews: Rediscovered and Re-Created, he is known as the "Indiana Jones of Ancient Ales."

McGovern took a swing at ancient chicha, too, with the brewery Dogfish Head in Delaware. "We chewed the red Peruvian corn for eight hours. The insides of our mouths were pretty cut up and our jaws were aching and so on, but it worked," he says. The final product involved peppercorns and wild strawberries. Dogfish Head has been making chicha ever since, both serving it to customers at the brewery and shipping it out.

The trouble with re-creating ancient brews is that it's actually an impossible task, even for McGovern, who uses techniques like mass spectrometry and gas chromatography to figure out what an ancient vessel once contained.

"You don't have 100% certainty by any means," says McGovern. "The basic ingredients I think we can be pretty sure of. What we don't know about is likely microorganisms, the bittering agents, or other additives that we might have missed." In a way, we will never truly be able to taste what King Midas was drinking, or the brews of Machu Picchu. Or even something much more recent, like George Washington's favorite porter.

Ancient chicha = chewed corn and quinoa partially fermented in spit.

Boston Dogfish Beer Head Company should patent all the ancient ales.

Related: Beer Domesticated Man
Archaeologists Unearth 5,000-Year-Old Brewery in China
5,000-Year-Old Chinese Beer Recipe Recreated by Students
13,000-Year-Old Beer Residue Found in Prehistoric Cave in Israel


Original Submission

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  • (Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 25 2016, @03:58AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 25 2016, @03:58AM (#350639)

    Did not use Linux. Is not relevant to my interests. Linux forever!

    • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 25 2016, @05:01AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 25 2016, @05:01AM (#350657)

      Oh so you don't want the Linux monomaniac troll. How about the millennial troll.

      I don't care about beer, because I'm a millennial, and millennials only drink wine, don't you know.

      • (Score: 2) by julian on Wednesday May 25 2016, @05:26AM

        by julian (6003) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday May 25 2016, @05:26AM (#350664)

        You've got it wrong. I'm a millennial (26yo) and my alcohol consumption is almost exclusively beer. I sometimes drink wine and never drink hard alcohol.

        But fair trade organic yerba mate is my main drink--excluding filtered water which I pound hourly from my reusable metal Contigo/Sigg bottle.

      • (Score: 2) by PinkyGigglebrain on Wednesday May 25 2016, @06:14AM

        by PinkyGigglebrain (4458) on Wednesday May 25 2016, @06:14AM (#350670)

        Beer: bleh!

        Wine: meh

        Sake: Oh Yeah!

        --
        "Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
      • (Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Wednesday May 25 2016, @06:38AM

        by q.kontinuum (532) on Wednesday May 25 2016, @06:38AM (#350672) Journal

        Now I'm feeling soooo young. I appreciate Linux, and I prefer red wine compared to beer. Considering I'm from the seventies, you really made my day. Thanks!

        Of course, when I started to like GNU/Linux, we didn't have this systemd-crap. Those days it was a real GNU/Linux. If you wanted to use a fancy "mouse" and "GUI" you had to invest your time to go through the config files. Setting up a sendmail server was like a final exam to linuxiness, emacs stood for "eight megabyte and constantly swapping", and eight megabyte were considered HUGE. Linux userland tools adhered to the concept of having small tools for small tasks, and a combination of small tools for big tasks. "Java" was a hot cuppa coffee with lots of milk and sugar. The sun was a computer in our basement, and trolling was a art, not a pass-time. Now ge'roff my lawn, youngster!

        --
        Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
        • (Score: 2) by Gaaark on Wednesday May 25 2016, @04:15PM

          by Gaaark (41) on Wednesday May 25 2016, @04:15PM (#350854) Journal

          Ah, messing with the xorg config file in RedHat: good times, good times. :)

          Now all i have time for is messing with i3wm config files, and barely that. :(

          Linux is too easy now, lol. All the 'fun' is gone! :)

          --
          --- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
          • (Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Wednesday May 25 2016, @08:59PM

            by q.kontinuum (532) on Wednesday May 25 2016, @08:59PM (#350969) Journal

            It's not "Linux", unless you are talking about the Kernel only. It's Gnome/Linux! (Some time ago it used to be GNU/Linux, and soon it will be "systemd, powered by Linux")

            --
            Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 25 2016, @03:43PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 25 2016, @03:43PM (#350842)

        Would it cause you to have an aneurysm to know that I also am eating organic kale with my wine?

  • (Score: 5, Informative) by q.kontinuum on Wednesday May 25 2016, @06:08AM

    by q.kontinuum (532) on Wednesday May 25 2016, @06:08AM (#350668) Journal

    In other news: Chinese brewery joins Disney in fight to extend IP validity duration to at least 5100 years. Recent discovery proves that knowledge gets lost when IP rights are lost for the licensing business, extended patent validity periods are essential for human development.

    --
    Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
  • (Score: 3, Funny) by aristarchus on Wednesday May 25 2016, @09:16AM

    by aristarchus (2645) on Wednesday May 25 2016, @09:16AM (#350706) Journal

    User #51zXXXXX (no)Info):

    I don't need to scratch my head and search my soul to figure out whether God created the universe. I was there. I saw the whole thing.

    God didn't create the universe. Well, He did, but not intentionally. God just wanted a beer. But you can't just create a beer floating in the middle of the void -- there's nothing satisfying about it. It would be like a book written by an illiterate person -- sure, he could put lots of black squiggles onto a bundle of pages that would vaguely look like a book, but it wouldn't mean anything.

    So for a proper beer, God pretty much had to make up physics. I'm not just talking about the refinements needed to get it to foam just right -- I'm talking about the whole deal. After you drink some, there should be less left over, not more. Drinking a beer should not make you turn into beer yourself. Beers should not be smarter than the drinker. Well, not the first few, at least. The state of drinking beer needs to contrast with something, so the state of not drinking beer must also exist. In fact, that's where most of the world came from, because having the world exist in only two states (currently drinking beer/currently not drinking beer) just seemed too lame to a clever guy like God. Same idea for water and other liquids -- if He can drink beer, He really ought to be able to drink not-beer, just so He can say He chose the beer instead.

    And then there's the whole question of origins. A beer is so much less interesting if it creates itself or just spontaneously comes into existence. A truly full-bodied beer needs a background, a character, a story. God went a little crazy with that, inventing those 'human' things with enough cleverness to invent stuff, curiousity to try things out, and a desperate need to get sloshed, smashed, trashed, and basically totally drucking funk. And all that cleverness and curiousity necessitated science. And dinosaur fossils. And religion. (God got a real kick when he realized he'd have to invent religion, I remember. Of course, he wasn't exactly sober by that time...)

    Oh, and you know that bit about "...and on the 7th day He rested?" Purely an excuse to keep us from bothering Him during His hangover. We're still on the 7th day, see. I'm not even sure if He thought far enough ahead to make an 8th day. He was having some trouble with the notion of Time, and I recall Him saying something like "aw, screw it. Nobody's going to be drinking any beer at the speed of light anyway. I'll see you later -- I'm gonna go get wasted."

    Not mine. Not sure whose. But it beats a Flying Spagetti Monster and Merlot!

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 26 2016, @04:30AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 26 2016, @04:30AM (#351102)

    Harbin and Tsingtao were founded around 1900. And the Chinese from get go ones after 1980s. Funny and sad how knowledge disappears.