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."
Beer in ancient times was often a way of preserving calories (due to the alcohol) and a means of sustenance, as opposed to today when it is primarily a way to get goofy at NASCAR events.
see?
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
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
Shouldn't you be a food chemist to 'recreate' a recipe from a 5000-year old sample?
If it was brewed 5,000 years ago, I can't imagine it'd still be any good by now.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Paper and fireworks also come to mind. Communist revolutions aren't so glorious...Except to the dictators that inevitably run them.
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 was probably used for making an alcoholic beverage.
Here's a site with a very short example http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com... So let's all relax and have a beer!
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
There were humans 5,000 years ago? And they ate CARBS too? #falsenews
To be fair, China's decline predated Mao by several generations. You can't blame Mao for the Opium Wars.
' 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)
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.
archeologists need to stick to digging up things and leave beer making to the experts.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Yeah my first attempts at brewing beer disn't taste much like beer either.
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Sounds like infection. I wonder if they even understood what they were doing.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
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.
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...
Sadly, after the voyage, they decided they didn't want anything to do with the rest of the barbarian world. The emperor declared it a capital offense for anyone to own a ship with more than one mask, and ordered to build/rebuild the wall.
Incidentally, Zheng He was a Muslim.
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.
.
.
One of the main things that ancient beers provided was something potable that did not have serious infectious bacteria, which most of the water then did have. Drink been - get drunk. Drink water - get typhoid!
Sometimes, real fast is almost as good as real-time.
... the stuff they found was the waste water.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
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.
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. 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 residue of beer and figure out what they did 3000 years ao?
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/...
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.
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.
Ezekiel 23:20
This sounds more like an Ale whereas a lot of what we drink today is some form of Lager. A lot of today's Ales are milder (IBU) like what is described here.
We'll make great pets
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.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
China can be old but have a somewhat shorter history, with its beginnings shrouded in prehistory. These things happen.
Ezekiel 23:20
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 know? The real purpose is to deal with the analytical tools, to come up with likely percentages of ingredients, then throw together a guess and see what bubbles up. A lot of classes have this sort of thing. Build Robots and have a Robo-War. My University has a extended class where Mechanical Engineering students build from the ground up, small racing cars that they then compete with other colleges. They learn a lot while enjoying themselves. They would claim much more than lecture only classrooms. I believe them.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.