Slashdot Mirror
How Beer Brewed 5,000 Years Ago In China Tastes Today (thestreet.com)
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."
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.
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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 2005. Molecular archaeologist Dr. Patrick McGovern of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology calls on Dogfish Head to re-create another ancient beverage, and Chateau Jiahu is born.
In keeping with historic evidence, Dogfish brewers use brown rice syrup, orange blossom honey, muscat grape, barley malt and hawthorn berry. The wort is fermented for about a month with sake yeast until the beer is ready for packaging.