How Beer Brewed 5,000 Years Ago In China Tastes Today (thestreet.com) 109
schwit1 quotes The South China Morning Post: Stanford University students have recreated a Chinese beer using a recipe that dates back 5,000 years. The beer "looked like porridge and tasted sweeter and fruitier than the clear, bitter beers of today," said Li Liu, a professor in Chinese archaeology, was quoted by the university as saying. Last spring, Liu and her team of researchers were carrying out excavation work at the Mijiaya site in Shaanxi province and found two pits containing remnants of pottery used to make beer, including funnels, pots and amphorae. The pits dated to between 3400BC and 2900BC, in the late Yangshao era. They found a yellowish residue on the remains of the items, including traces of yam, lily root and barley...Liu taught her students to recreate the recipe as part of her archaeology course.
One student following a second ancient beer recipe created a beverage that "smelled like funky cheese."
One student following a second ancient beer recipe created a beverage that "smelled like funky cheese."
Makes sense. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: Makes sense. (Score:1)
Beer, especially without hops, and bottled without knowledge of sanitation, spoils really quickly. I doubt they were preserving calories for a couple of weeks, when the raw product (dry grain) survives decades.
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You can recover at least some o
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It was made by BOILING something in water...
In those days, a drink of water was an insane gamble due to things like E. coli, cholera, dysentery, and the many other gifts of raw sewage and runoff. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterborne_diseases [wikipedia.org]
Here is what beer REALLY did for us:
https://vimeo.com/23278902 [vimeo.com]
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I did read that the only time the British Army refused to march during the Peninsula Campaign was when they didn't get their beer ration, but I can't find a link now, so maybe the story is a
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The pyramids weren't built by slaves. That was just a B movie.
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Re:Makes sense. (Score:5, Informative)
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Thats a myth.
Clean water is not difficult to optain.
And 'unclea' water is not necessarily poisoness.
Man kind lived millenia without beer and just drank water any other animal was drinking.
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and died at 22-25.
A lot of what we do when we cook dates back to preserving health. Most of kosher and halals techniques are used today in commercial kitchens, without the religious overtones.
Beer, or any boiled substance, is sterile and thus less likely to kill you. People who drink boiled water live longer, and have more children who survive to have more children. It's simple, really. Once agriculture started, and cities started to form 7,000 years ago, people had to have some form of sanitation.
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Titus Petronius died with 66 ... suicide. ... murdered.
Gaius Julius Caesar died with 65
The idea that people died around 22-25 is idiotic. We have plenty of Neanderthalian graves with remains of people in their 60s or older.
Why did I bring the two romans as example (could bring a few hundred if you want)? Because they had aqueducts bring fresh water -- untreated -- into the cities and sewers that transported waste water considerably far away.
The idea that rain water or water from a creek can not be drunken o
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A bit of research will bear out what I said. The AVERAGE expectancy in the Roman Empire was 20-30 years. Sure, the wealthy lived a long time but those in the countryside died young. The wealthy always live longer.
The reason we can drink the water from rivers today is because of stringent surface water regulations; as recently as 60 years ago rivers burned quite regularly. I went to high school in New York City; if you fell into the Hudson River they would take you to the hospital and pump your stomach,
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You could not drink surface water because of modern industries poisoning it.
The average live expectancy was low because plenty of people died as children.
Also taking Rome as an example, my fault, means we have to include slaves, which where "burned" especially on farmland and in mines.
If you go out into the Rockies or Apalachians you can drink most surface water untreated ... or can clean it with extremely simple means.
If water would be "poisonous" per se, then there would be no animal surviving 30 years or
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If you go out into the Rockies or Appalachians you can drink most surface water untreated
Sure, there are many places here in Australia where you can still drink from a mountain stream. However the vast majority of our ancestors over the last 5-10,000yrs did not live in next to a pristine mountain stream. They lived in towns and villages with open sewers running thru the streets and into the waterways. The local water was not fit for human consumption, people did not drink it because even though they knew nothing of germs they knew that dirty water could/would give them cholera and/or dysentery,
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
When the high infant mortality rate is factored in (life expectancy at birth) inhabitants of the Roman Empire had a life expectancy at birth of about 25 years. However, when infant mortality is factored out, life expectancy is doubled to the late-50s. If a Roman survived infancy to their mid-teens, they could, on average, expect near six decades of life, although of course many lived much longer or shorter lives for varied reasons.[clarification needed] Although this figure
Re:Makes sense. (Score:4, Informative)
Well, don't forget how statistics work. Infant deaths tends to pull the average life span down. If you lived to be 60 you were above average, but not surprisingly so.
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My in-laws lived in rural Peru, and had 13 children. Five of the first eight died before their third birthday. Then they moved to the city where they had access to clean water, health care, and a variety of foods, and the next five lived to adulthood. If they all lived to 100 years old their average life span is under 63.
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and died at 22-25.
This is a known myth, listed on the Wikipedia page for common misconceptions. It's based on the mean lifespan of humans, which for most of human history is heavily skewed by infant mortality. Humans who survived infancy have always routinely survived into their 60s.
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And children died of mostly water-borne diseases like cholera and dysentery. Water borne diseases were quite common (and still are.)
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I'm not disagreeing with the idea that beer has utility in public health in certain contexts. I just don't like poor arguments.
Although, as to your argument, I may have an amendment. Besides boiling, there's some scientific credence to the idea that fermenting can help to protect humans from food poisoning. Here's a sample. [nih.gov] Of course, there's some notorious caveats with that, e.g. coconut tempeh is not legal to sell in some places due to its propensity to foster a lethal type of
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Is 2% alcohol bacteriostatic? Because it's damn sure not antimicrobial.
beer causes overpopulation (Score:2)
every homebrewn beer smells weird... (Score:2)
I have made a lot of beer, and every batch smelled like funky cheese or worse for the first few days or even weeks. That is normal. And as the alcohol is developing, you can drink it and get a buzz. I guess that the ancient chineese, and egyptians, and sumerians, and all other beer drinking civilizations found like me that it pays to be patient.
Paai
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They didn't always have the luxury of waiting though.
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It is not as if you could not exist without beer...
Paai
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Well, they could have just boiled the water, but I'm not entirely sure they knew that. They just knew that beer and wine was safer to drink.
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And by the way, that's sacrilege! ;) Mmmm.... beer.
Most interesting nugget buried at end of story (Score:5, Interesting)
I thought this was the most interesting thing from the whole article:
The research team was surprised to find barley in the ancient Chinese beer as barley had not become a staple crop for another 3,000 years.
Think about someone making beer but the ingredients not really catching on in a big way for three thousand years!
Or maybe the estimate of when barley because a staple crop is way off.
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I think beer is simply any drink that is fermented for only a short time and is relatively low in alcohol. The main distinction from wine seems to be mainly about acidity - wine is made from fruit and beer is made from starchy ingredients - which is why beer in many cultures was/is made by chewing stuff: saliva contains ptyalin, which breaks down the starch to glocuse, which can be fermented; the advantage of using malted barley (... wheat, rice, ...) is that the germinating plant has the same effect as che
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I thought this was the most interesting thing from the whole article:
The research team was surprised to find barley in the ancient Chinese beer as barley had not become a staple crop for another 3,000 years.
Think about someone making beer but the ingredients not really catching on in a big way for three thousand years!
Or maybe the estimate of when barley because a staple crop is way off.
Depends on what they mean by "barley". Corn and watermelon are unrecognizable compared to what they were just 200 years ago. This is mostly related to good old fashioned selective breeding. 3,000 years is a very long time in agricultural terms.
Chemist? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Stale, probably? (Score:2, Redundant)
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The only downside is the horrible curse that will destroy the life of anyone who dates taste the honey.
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Re: Stale, probably? (Score:2)
History = Fiction (Score:1)
Gotta love history. Make the whole thing up and pretend it's real.
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The odds that the absurd methods they used to recreate the recipe have anything to do with how beer tasted 5000 years ago is exactly the same as the odds that anything else in a history book about people 5000 is remotely realistic. Exactly Zero.
It isn't noted in anything I can find, but its almost certain that they determined the ingredients via proteomics and chromatography. The vegetable matter used in the process would have left proteins that would have been identifiable. The vessel used would give a good clue as to the purpose of putting those things in the vessel. Nothing is 100 percent sure, But Occam's razor will give you a good idea that a liquid holding vessel that contained the products that were determined by their protein signatures wa
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To take an approximate guess of the ingredients and then assume you can recreate the recipe is idiocy. Can you take a fresh bottle of modern beer as a finished product, analyze it in a lab and create an identical copy? Of course not. And we know all the modern beer making techniques. So you think you can take 3000 year old res
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Which is exactly my point. The process by which we make beer (or bread) is very, very non-obvious. 3000 years ago, it's likely they had very different ideas then we do today. To take an approximate guess of the ingredients and then assume you can recreate the recipe is idiocy.
Some folks find it as fun. I'm not certain why this has your hackles up. It is interesting to see what the ancients ate and drank.
I really don't think that anyone is believing that it is an exact copy. It's a fermented beverage made using the ingredients they sussed out via analytical methods.
So you think you can take 3000 year old residue of beer and figure out what they did 3000 years ao?
You can have a pretty good idea though.
I think you are getting a little wrapped around the axle about the wrong thing. The idea isn't to recreate the exact beer - as you note using other words, how would we even k
Wait?? (Score:2)
There were humans 5,000 years ago? And they ate CARBS too? #falsenews
Beer of the past was sweeter? (Score:3)
' The beer "looked like porridge and tasted sweeter and fruitier than the clear, bitter beers of today," '
Do you know how many types of beers there are today? Just go to any local microbrewery (well, maybe not in Germany- beer purity laws and all) and you will find 3-10 very different beers that are completely different from the next microbrewery.
So, someone 5000 years from now finds a beer recipe from some "ancient" brewery and concludes all our beer tastes like PBR (Pabst Blue Ribbon).
(OK, a little beer porridge might be fun to try)
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Do you know how many types of beers there are today? Just go to any local microbrewery (well, maybe not in Germany- beer purity laws and all)
The reinheitsgebot is a bullshit excuse. If your beverage doesn't meet its requirements, you simply can't call it beer. This has been explicitly the case since 2005, but there were already examples.
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Um... no. (Score:2)
If it looks like porridge then it's still in the middle of fermentation.
If it's sweet, ITS STILL IN THE MIDDLE OF FERMENTATION.
honestly, did they even look at some of the early recipes out of europe or the middle East? Pharaoh Beer is from 2570bc and if you do it properly is not sweet and not "like porridge"
What makes beers bitter is Hops, and if you don't have hops in it then it's not bitter Hops were not known to the middle east or china and were not even used until europe in the 9th century.
archeolog
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If it looks like porridge then it's still in the middle of fermentation.
If it's sweet, ITS STILL IN THE MIDDLE OF FERMENTATION.
Yeah, but lots of people drink beverages which are still fermenting, mostly people in the jungle. Booze made from palm trees and booze made from corn are commonly consumed while still young.
Amateurs (Score:1)
sour taste? (Score:2)
Sounds like infection. I wonder if they even understood what they were doing.
Dogfish Head - Chateau Jiahu (Score:2, Interesting)
Already Done.
Let's travel back in time again for another Dogfish Head Ancient Ale (Midas Touch was our first foray and Theobroma our most recent). Our destination is 9,000 years ago, in Northern China! Preserved pottery jars found in the Neolithic villiage of Jiahu, in Henan province, have revealed that a mixed fermented beverage of rice, honey and fruit was being produced that long ago, right around the same time that barley beer and grape wine were beginning to be made in the Middle East!
Fast forward to 2
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So you have evidence of the fermenting time? And the yeast strain? No, you don't. So, no, you don't have a historical beer. (And that's setting aside the fact that 'brown rice syrup' isn't brown rice. Etc... etc..)
In Actuality (Score:1)
5000 yrs beer:
It was actually expired fruit treat, but the Chinese ate them and found out it still tastes good.
5,500 bc cheese: /joke
It was actually expired milk, but the Egyptian ate them and found out it still tastes good.
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Ancient beers (Score:2)
Sadly ... (Score:2)
... the stuff they found was the waste water.
Ale vs Lager (Score:2)
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Just for some education on beer styles. The primary difference between Ales and Lagers is in both the strain of yeast used and what temperatures they ferment best in.
Ales are less cold tolerant, are most active on the top of the wort, and produce more fruity esters.
Lagers are far more cold tolerant, are most active on the bottom of the wort, and produce a cleaner "crisper" beer. Lagers are then left post fermentation in a 40 degree or cooler chamber for a couple weeks. A process which has come to be know
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The major distinction between ale and lager is the yeast, and then, due to the conditions the yeast requires, the temperature at what it was fermented. Other things, like the type of grains, other additives, amount of hops, are unrelated to whether it's an ale or lager.
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I'm not buying it.
I know you're trying to be funny but the Chinese up until Mao and Communism were some of the most original people in history. It saddens me to see what China has become.
Re: Chine did something original? (Score:2)
Paper and fireworks also come to mind. Communist revolutions aren't so glorious...Except to the dictators that inevitably run them.
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To be fair, China's decline predated Mao by several generations. You can't blame Mao for the Opium Wars.
Re:Chine did something original? (Score:5, Insightful)
It was the fatal consequence of blinding awesomeness: blinded arrogance. China was the wealthiest, most advanced civilization in the world for over a thousand years; at certain point it becomes natural to look at something like that as a birthright. And when that happens you stop looking forward and outward and start looking inward and backward.
When the epitaph of the United States is written, this is what it will say: "America: Killed by landing on the Moon." After that Americans simply can't believe anyone else in the world can do anything better than we can. We must have the best cell phone networks, the best healthcare system, and, even though we despise it, the best education system. We'd never look at what countries that are beating us in education are doing. If they're beating us they must be cheating; the system must be rigged.
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This. And The Wall.
The Great Wall was started before 200 B.C., but much of what we see today was rebuilt in the 1500s Ming dynasty, when Zheng He's epic around-the-world voyage occurred. His fleet was 300 ship strong, with the capital ship's size comparable to modern day aircraft carriers. Here is an image comparing Zheng He's ship and Columbus':
http://www.digitalhistory.uh.e... [uh.edu]
Sadly, after the voyage, they decided they didn't want anything to do with the rest of the barbarian world. The emperor declare
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When the epitaph of the United States is written, this is what it will say: "America: Killed by landing on the Moon." After that Americans simply can't believe anyone else in the world can do anything better than we can. We must have the best cell phone networks, the best healthcare system, and, even though we despise it, the best education system. We'd never look at what countries that are beating us in education are doing. If they're beating us they must be cheating; the system must be rigged.
Alternatively, 1969 was 24 years after the end of the Second World War. It would be reasonable to assume that it took at least that long for all the destroyed industrial capacity across Asia and Europe to be rebuilt.
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To be fair, China's decline predated Mao by several generations. You can't blame Mao for the Opium Wars.
To be fair, China's decline predated the Opium Wars by a few centuries as well. You can't blame Opium for the Manchu conquest.
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To be fair, China's decline predated Mao by several generations. You can't blame Mao for the Opium Wars.
To be fair, China's decline predated the Opium Wars by a few centuries as well. You can't blame Opium for the Manchu conquest.
To be fair, China's decline predated the Manchurian Conquest by some generations. You can't blame the northern barbarians for the slow decline of the Ming Dynasty.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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They have a longer history than that. I do and I am just native American.
In that case, you're probably talking about prehistory rather than history. History all but required writing.
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China has over 5,000 years of history.. Your country?
The PRC is less than 70 years old. The Republic of China (surviving in Taiwan) little more than a century.
In contrast, England goes back to the Norman conquest in 1066.
European history is of a similar age to Chinese. Of course, the Middle East was first.