Secret Ingredient In A 5,000-Year-Old Beer Recipe Discovered

MessageToEagle.com – The first known beer, called kui, was brewed by the ancient Chinese around 7,000 BC. However, the oldest evidence of beer is believed to be a 6,000-year-old Sumerian tablet depicting people drinking a beverage through reed straws from a communal bowl.

For many centuries, beer was also primary and major food product for Egyptians and according to archaeological evidence found in ancient Egyptian tombs, the beer tradition goes back even further into the history of Egypt.

The beer was a drink that despite the strict hierarchy of Egyptian society was drunk by the representatives of all the classes, also in other locations outside Egypt.

Now, while examining ancient pottery jars and funnels discovered at the Mijiaya archaeological site in the Shaanxi province of China, scientists have found  a ‘secret ingredient’ in a 5,000-year-old beer recipe that has been recreated with the help of the residues on China’s prehistoric pots.

The examination unveiled signs of oxalate and residues from different ancient grains and plants. Oxalate is a beer-making byproduct that makes a scale known as ‘beerstone’ in brewing equipment. The grains consisted of broomcorn millets, ‘Job’s tears’ which is an Asian wild grain, plant roots tubers, and barley.

Barley is used in making beer because it is rich in amylase enzymes that encourage the conversion of starches into sugars in the fermenting process.

According to Jiajing Wang, a Ph.D. student at Stanford University in California, Mijiaya site’s prehistoric brewery contained ceramic pots, stoves, and funnels discovered in pits dating back to the Neolithic (late Stone Age) Yangshao period, roughly 3400 to 2900 BC.

The discoveries in Mijiaya, near the Wei River, may be the earliest solid evidence but other discoveries elsewhere in China indicate that beer may be double that age.

See also:

Egyptian Beer Brewing: A Legacy Of Ancient Times Also Found In Israel

Oldest Evidence Of Beer Was Found On A Sumerian Tablet In Mesopotamia

Ancient Welsh Recipe Can Help Fight Food Poisoning

“This beer recipe indicates a mix of Chinese and Western traditions – barley from the West; millet, Job´s tears and tubers from China,” Prof. Jiajing Wang from Stanford University said.

At the Mijiaya site, researchers also found two subterranean pits with tools that seemed to have been used in the brewing process, including pottery funnels, wide-mouth pots and jiandiping amphorae and stoves.

The finds in Mijiaya indicate that barley reached ancient China about a thousand years earlier than previously thought.

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