THE ORIGINAL MICRO BREW

CALL THEM the ancient brew masters. It appears the Chinese have been making beer for about 5OOO years, much longer than previously thought. Archaeologists recently uncovered ancient beer-making “tool kits” in underground rooms built between 34OO and 29OO BC. Discovered at a dig site in the Central Plain of China, the kits included funnels, pots and specialized jugs. The shapes of the objects suggest they could be used for brewing, filtration and storage. 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.

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 5OOO-year-old beer “recipe” was published in the journal proceedings of the national academy of sciences. The recipe included a mix of fermented grains: broomcorn millet, barley and Job’s tears, a chewy Asian grain also known as Chinese pearl barley. The recipe also called for tubers, the starchy and sugary parts of plants, which were added to sweeten and flavor the beer, the researchers write. As to what it would actually taste like, lead researcher Jiajing Wang, an archaeologist from Stanford University, guessed that it would be “a bit sour and a bit sweet”. Discovering evidence of barley in the beer was surprising to the scientists as it had never been seen in China this early before. The new findings show that the Chinese were making barley beer in the same period as Iran and Egypt as well as the earliest wine-making facility in Armenia. Wang and her co-authors proposed that beer production and consumption may have helped shaped the hierarchical societies in the Central Plain of China thousands of years ago. It would have been considered something exotic that elites could have used to impress their friends and stay in power. Similar to the role that fine wine has historically played.