The History Of Mead And The Lindisfarne Mead

Recipereminiscing

If you’ve read mythology, you’ve undoubtedly run across mead, this drink of heroes, gods, lovers and kings.

The god Odin gave an eye to drink mead and gain wisdom. The hero Beowulf drank it and bragged about his valiant deeds. It was drunk in Ancient Greece and Medieval Europe, where spiced mead was a favourite of the English kings.

Lindisfarne – The Holy Island

Mead is one of the oldest alcoholic drinks, a drink brewed from honey, water and yeast and quite appropriate for a God, or even your best friend. That’s right, mead is still made today by St Aidan’s Winery. Its name is Lindisfarne Mead and is a great, unique gift for a favourite family member or even newlyweds.

You might be scratching your head right now, wondering why newlyweds would want mead. In pre-Christian Europe, mead was one of the traditional wedding gifts. When a couple was married family and friends would supply them with enough mead for a month to ensure that they would be happy and fertile through their marriage. Hence, we still call the first month after marriage Honeymoon even though few newlyweds nowadays drink mead.

Many people mistakenly believe that mead is a historical myth or that the recipe and skill to make it has been long lost, but the magical elixir is ready for order from this unusual winery on Holy Island in Northumberland.

St Aidan’s Winery offers a wide variety of ales, fruit wines and spirits and – of course – mead, and also serves as an outlet for Celtic jewellery and other local crafts.

You may wonder how an island called Holy Island could possibly be the home to liquor or mead. The answer is simple: in Medieval times mead was usually made by monks as they were the ones to keep bees on a large scale. They also believed that mead was a cure for many illnesses and restored their body while God watched their soul.

Lindisfarne’s monks are long gone, but their recipe for mead has been preserved on the island and is still used to produce the delightful pale-gold beverage in the same fashion as they did in yesteryear. Therefore, you get the same good taste that Friar Tuck might have enjoyed.

Lindisfarne Mead is available directly on the island from the winery shop – where you can taste before you buy – but can also be bought online. Alongside full-size and half bottles, St Aidan’s Winery also offer a Mead Miniature Bottle that holds just 5 centilitres.

This is for those who want to test the mead before committing to buy a large size, or those who just want a conversation piece to set on the shelf. The prices are very reasonable, so you can afford to try the largest available without breaking the bank. Imagine your next get together where, instead of champagne you break out the mead, for medicinal purposes, of course.

The 18th-century craze for gin

history extra

Gin Lane, a print issued in 1751 by painter and printmaker William Hogarth. It depicts the perceived evils of the consumption of gin. (Photo by Universal History Archive/Getty Images)

 Gin causes women to spontaneously combust. Or, at least, that was the theory. There are two documented cases of British ladies downing gin and going up in smoke, and a few more of European women doing the same with brandy. The matter was taken seriously enough to be discussed by the Royal Society in 1745.

We don’t take stories of spontaneous human combustion that seriously any more (for reasons I’ll get back to), but for a historian, the stories are fascinating because they’re part of the great Gin Panic. This was the moralising and serious counterpart to the great Gin Craze that swept London and much of England in the first half of the 18th century and produced (aside from the ignited ladies) mass public nudity, burning babies, and a mechanical gin-selling cat.

Alcoholic spirits were a pretty new commodity in 18th-century society, though they had actually been around for a long time. They started as a chemical curiosity in about the 10th century AD. They were being drunk by the very, very rich for pleasure by about 1500, as shown when James IV of Scotland bought several barrels of whisky. But even a hundred years later, in 1600, there was only one recorded bar in England that sold spirits to the curious (just outside London, towards Barking).

James IV of Scotland. We know that alcoholic spirits were drunk by the very rich since 1500, as the king is known to have purchased several barrels of whisky. (Photo by National Galleries Of Scotland/Getty Images)

Then in about 1700, spirits hit. The reasons are complicated and involve taxation of grain and the relations with the Dutch, but the important thing is that gin suddenly became widely available to Londoners, which was a good thing for the gin-sellers as Londoners needed a drink. The turn of the 18th century was a great period of urbanisation, when the poor of England flocked to London in search of streets paved with gold and Bubbles from South Sea [the South Sea Bubble was a speculation boom in the early 1710s], only to find that the streets were paved with mud and there was no work to be had. London’s population was around 600,000. There were only two other towns in England with populations of 20,000. London was the first grand, anonymous city. There were none of the social constraints of a village where everybody knew everybody’s business. And there were none of the financial safeguards either, with a parish that would support its native poor, or the family and friends who might have looked after you at home. Instead, there was gin.

A craze among the poor
It’s very hard to say which was bigger – the craze for drinking gin that swept the lower classes, or the moral panic at the sight of so many gin drinkers that engulfed the ruling classes. Anonymous hordes of poor, often homeless people wandered the city drinking away their sorrows, and often their clothes, as they readily exchanged their garments for the spirit.

Before the industrial revolution and the rash of cotton mills that would fill the north of England a century later, cloth was very expensive. Beggars really did dress in rags, if at all, and the obvious thing to sell if you really needed money fast was, literally, the shirt on your back. The descriptions left to us by the ‘Gin Panickers’ would be funny – if they weren’t so tragic.

A print of an 18th-century liquor seller. (Photo by: Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images)

Indeed, the most notorious single incident of the gin craze was the case of Judith Defour, a young woman with a daughter and no obvious husband. The daughter, Mary, had been taken into care by the parish workhouse and provided with a nice new set of clothes. One Sunday, in January 1734, Judith Defour came to take Mary out for the day and didn’t return her. Instead, she strangled her own child and sold the new clothes to buy gin.

 Judith Defour was probably mentally unwell anyway, but her case became a public sensation, because it summed up everything that people thought about the new craze for drinking gin: she was poor; she was a woman and she was a mother. Judith was selling clothes for alcohol and as the clothes had been provided by the workhouse, she was therefore taking advantage of the rudimentary social security system, combining benefits fraud with infanticide.

The arrival of gin
Before gin had come on the scene, Englishmen had drunk beer. English women had drunk it too – up to a point – but beer and the alehouses where it was served had always been seen as basically male domains. Gin, which was new and exotic and metropolitan, didn’t have any of these old associations. There were no rules around gin. There were no social norms about who could drink it, or when you could drink it, or how much of it you could drink. A lot of places served it in pints because, well… that’s what you drank. A country boy newly arrived in the city wasn’t going to drink a thimbleful of something.

This was, quite literally, put to the test in 1741, when a group of Londoners offered a farm labourer a shilling for each pint of gin he could sink. He managed three, and then dropped down dead. It’s amazing he got that far, as gin, in those days, was about twice as strong as it is now and contained some interesting flavourings. Some distillers used to add sulphuric acid, just to give it some bite.

And so the efforts to ban drinking among the lower classes began. And they didn’t work very well. When authorities decided to ban the sale of gin, there were fully fledged riots. The poor didn’t want their drug of choice taken away. They loved ‘Madam Geneva’, as they called the spirit.

A satirical cartoon relating to the Gin Act, depicting a mock funeral procession for ‘Madam Geneva’ in St Giles, London, 1751. (Photo by Guildhall Library & Art Gallery/Heritage Images/Getty Images)

In any case, the government decided to tax the living daylights out of it. But people simply didn’t pay the tax, so government tried to pay informants to hand in unlicensed gin-sellers. This attempt turned ugly as a number of mobs formed to attack even suspected informants, and several people were beaten to death. Not that the informants were necessarily that nice; they could, and some did, run the whole thing as a protection racket – “pay me or I’ll claim the reward from the government”. And into this chaos it’s almost unsurprising that a mechanical cat should make an entry.

The Puss-and-Mew machine
The contraption known as the ‘Puss-and-Mew machine’ was simple. The gin-seller found a window in alleyway that was nowhere near the building’s front door. The window was covered boarded over with a wooden cat. The gin-buyer would approach and say to the cat: “Puss, give me two pennyworth of gin,” and then place the coins in the cat’s mouth. These would slide inwards to the gin-seller who would pour the gin down a lead pipe that emerged under the cat’s paw. The crowds loved it and the inventor, Dudley Bradstreet, made three or four pounds a day, which was a lot of money. As nobody witnessed both sides of the transaction, no charges could be brought.

A display featuring a ‘Puss-and-Mew machine’ at the Beefeater Gin Distillery in Kennington, London. (Image used with permission from Beefeater Gin Distillery in Kennington, London)

 The Gin Craze was a classic example of a drug without social norms. Every society on earth has had its narcotics (and almost every society has chosen alcohol). But those narcotics have come with social rules about when, where, how and why you ‘get blasted’. Every age and every society is different. Today, young adults tend to get drunk on a Friday evening, while in medieval England, the preferred time was Sunday morning. In ancient Egypt, it was the Festival of Hathor and in ancient China, it was during the rites that honoured the family dead.

Nowadays, gin is just another spirit, but in the 18th century, gin had no norms, no rules, no mythology and no associations. It was anyone’s, and that was its danger: a danger that in the popular imagination was easily transmuted into spontaneous female combustion.

 A final note on these combustible ladies: they were all reasonably old and reasonably well off. The strange thing about spontaneous human combustion is that in all cases the body is reduced to a small pile of ashes, whilst nearby objects – however burnable – are not even singed. A human body actually burns at around 1,200 degrees Celsius. A burning house rarely gets above about 800 degrees. So, while the stories don’t stand up scientifically, a society that believes such stories is very good for those who stand to inherit the victim’s fortune.

Mark Forsyth is the author of A Short History of Drunkenness: How, why, where and when humankind has got merry from the Stone Age to the present (Viking, November 2017).

Alcohol as medicine through the ages

Ancient Origins

While no one knows exactly when alcohol was first produced, it was presumably the result of a fortuitous accident that occurred at least tens of thousands of years ago. However, the discovery of late Stone Age beer jugs has established the fact that intentionally fermented beverages existed at least as early as the Neolithic period around 10,000 years ago, and it has been suggested that beer may have preceded bread as a staple. Wine clearly appeared as a finished product in Egyptian pictographs around 4,000 BC, and residues of wine samples in Greece date to the same period. But alcohol was not consumed in the same way as it is today. In fact, in ancient times, alcohol was seen as an important medicinal ingredient and as an essential part of the diet.

From the moment the first alcoholic beverages were discovered, man has used it as a medicine. Apart from the stress relieving, relaxing nature that alcohol has on the body and mind, alcohol is an antiseptic and in higher doses has anesthetizing effects. But it is a combination of alcohol and natural botanicals, which creates a far more effective medicine and has been used as such for thousands of years. It is the origin of the most famous toast, “Let’s drink to health”, which exists in many languages around the world.

One of the earliest signs of the use of alcohol as a medicine dates back around 5,000 years to a jar found in the tomb of one of the first pharaohs of Egypt, Scorpion I. With extremely sensitive chemical techniques, bioarchaeologists were able to identify the different compounds within the residue left in the jar. They found that the remnants contained wine, as well as a number of herbs known to have medicinal properties Wine was also a frequent component of ancient Roman medicine. As is well known nowadays, alcohol is a good means of extracting the active elements from medicinal plants.

Wine was the only form of alcohol known to the Romans as distillation wasn’t discovered until the middle ages. Herbs infused in wine were a regular medicinal stratagem which would have a degree of effect given the alcohol’s ability to extract the active compounds of a number of herbs.

 One of the most famous practitioners of alcohol-based herbal remedies was the father of modern medicine, Hippocrates, whose own special recipe for intestinal worms was known as Hippocraticum Vinum. Hippocrates was making a crude form of vermouth in approximately 400BC using local herbs in wine, but herbal infusions took on a whole new level of potency once distillation was discovered.

The spread of Christianity with the crusades from 1095 onwards brought knowledge about the art of alchemy and distillation from the early Arab scholars. The ‘Water of Life’ was being refined all over Europe (known as such due to it being safer to drink than disease-ridden water) and soon commercial apothecaries grew from the spread of the knowledge of distillation and botanical extraction selling both raw ingredients and herbal tinctures. Throughout antiquity, available water was polluted with dangerous microbes, so drinking alcohol, which involved the liquid being boiled or subjected to similarly sterilising treatments, was seen as being healthier and safer.

One of the earliest records of medicinal alcohol dating to this period comes from Roger Bacon, a 13th Century English philosopher and writer on alchemy and medicine. According to the translation (published in 1683) Bacon suggests wine could: "Preserve the stomach, strengthen the natural heat, help digestion, defend the body from corruption, concoct the food till it be turned into very blood." But he also recognises the dangers of consuming in excess: "If it be over-much guzzles, it will on the contrary do a great deal of harm: For it will darken the understanding, ill-affect the brain... beget shaking of the limbs and bleareyedness."

Alcohol as medicine in the Middle Ages ( public domain )

European colonisation during the 15 th and 16 th centuries gave the apothecaries an abundance of exotic herbs, spices, barks, peels and berries to add to their medicine cabinets and from this point until relatively recently, a large percentage of medicines were made with an alcoholic base.

Gin is a good example of a spirit which was originally designed to be used as a medicine; the use of Juniper as a diuretic was believed to be able to cleanse the fevers and tropical diseases that the Dutch settlers were suffering from in the newly colonized West Indies. Many of today’s brands such as Chartreuse and Benedictine were born in the monasteries of Europe designed as stomach tonics and general elixirs.

However, by the 18 th century, there were growing concerns about the more harmful effects of alcohol, including drunkenness, crime, alcoholism and poverty. In 1725, the first documented petition by the Royal College of Physicians expresses fellows' concerns about "pernicious and growing use of spirituous liquors". By the 19th Century, temperance movements began to emerge in Britain - at first some advised restrictions on certain drinks only, but over time their stance shifted to call for total abstinence.

An 1820 engraving warning of the dangers of alcohol ( public domain )

The irony is that we now live in an age where although alcohol is socially acceptable, classing it as ‘good for you’ is frowned upon and is a notion which seems to have been born from the development of modern medicine.

 Old-fashioned pharmacies with their jars of coloured macerations died out in the early part of the 1900’s when science was able to synthetically reproduce the key properties of nature therefore no-longer needing alcohol as a base. Drug companies have also been keen to brush over the fact that organic-based medicine is free whereas tablets are not. You can’t patent nature, but you can patent pills.

By April Holloway

Ancient Humans Liked Getting Tipsy, Too

Smithsonian

Ancient Humans Liked Getting Tipsy, Too In a new book on the archaeology and chemistry of alcoholic beverages, Patrick McGovern unravels the history of boozing image

For as long as there have been humans, there have been humans getting drunk—or at least that’s what biomolecular archaeologist and brew connoisseur Patrick McGovern thinks.

 The jack-of-all-trades researcher tackles the subject at length in his new book, Ancient Brews: Rediscovered and Recreated. Part travelogue, part natural history, part cookbook, the story has McGovern hopscotching across the globe to prove the ties between human evolution and the creation of fermented beverages. He describes archaeological digs and the migrations of ancient humans from one continent to the next; the chemical analysis used to discover which ingredients went into the drinks; and his forays into “experimental archaeology” with Sam Calagione, founder of Dogfish Head Brewery, in which they recreate nine ancient beverages.

 “Taking all the available evidence we have, we wanted to see if we could recreate the drinks and make something that’s palatable for the modern human,” McGovern says.

 These drinks (despite the moniker “brews”, they include wines, beers and “extreme fermented beverages” that use any combination of ingredients to produce an alcoholic drink) run the gamut from the oldest-known alcohol, which comes from China, to a chocolate concoction based on research from Mesoamerica.

 “We usually do not have an airtight argument that a particular recreated beverage was made in antiquity in the same way or with all the same ingredients,” McGovern writes in his book. “Our ultimate objective is to gather as many well-verified pieces of the puzzle as possible, hypothesize about what ingredients most likely went into the brew and how it was brewed, and then try to replicate it.”

 In addition to exploring the intoxicating ingenuity of these ancient people, McGovern also digs deep into human evolution and the dawn of civilizations. First, he tackles the question of what Paleolithic people (the era begins with hominid tool-making around 3.4 million years ago and continues till 10,000 years ago), may have been drinking.

 It’s a hard question to answer, archaeologically speaking. Alcohol evaporates from containers even if they’re sealed, leaving nothing but dust for chemical analysis. Even then, the oldest container shown to have traces of rice, grapes or hawthorn fruit and honey—ingredients necessary to make a fermented beverage—is from only 9,000 years ago. There are no surviving containers from the Paleolithic.

 But McGovern sees plenty of evidence for our alcohol affinity in the body itself. “We’ve got an enzyme in our saliva that breaks down carbs into sugar, we have alcohol dehydrogenase [enzymes that break down ethanol] in our mouths, all through our gut and down through our liver.”

 All these physiological elements point to traits inherited from our early ancestors, about whom archaeologists only have limited information. But in case the physiology of modern Homo sapiens isn’t enough to go off of, humans also share genes with primates and other animals that prove we’re not the only ones hooked on getting buzzed. This “drunk monkey” hypothesis states that animals whose diets are largely composed of fruits and nectar regularly imbibe naturally occurring alcohol when the fruits ferment.

 There’s the Malaysian tree shrew, “a living model for extinct mammals” that drinks the human equivalent of nine glasses of wine each night. Fruit flies, like humans, contain multiple genes that dictate how they metabolize and respond to alcohol. Even bats get tipsy from eating fermented fruits, though inebriation seems to have no negative impact on their ability to fly.

 Somewhere along the way, drunk monkeys became drunk hominids, and those hominids became modern humans. This is when the “bread or beer” question comes up: Did humans start agriculture to use the grain for food or for a ready supply of fermented drinks?

 “We don’t know for sure and have limited archaeological evidence, but if you had your choice, which would it be?” McGovern says. “Once you have fermented beverages, it causes a change of behavior, creates a mind-altering experience. I think that could be important in developing language, music, the arts in general and then religion, too.”

 The idea of beer or some other alcoholic beverage being a key component of human development has been echoed elsewhere. “It has long been speculated that increasing demands for cereals for the purpose of brewing beer led to domestication,” write researchers in a 2013 study published in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory. “The most complex communities [in the Near East] seem to have been complex hunter/gatherers who could be expected to have hosted competitive feasts in which brewed beverages would have been highly valued.”

 Or as psychiatrist Jeffrey P. Kahn writes in the New York Times, “Beer was thought to be so important in many bygone civilizations that the Code of Urukagina, often cited as the first legal code, even prescribed it as a central unit of payment and penance.”

 Just consider what the fermentation process must have looked like to humans who had no concept of how yeast and sugars combined to create alcohol. The containers holding the liquid would’ve moved around as carbon dioxide was released, the liquid would turn foamy, the smell and flavor at the end would be far different than they had been at the start. Combined with the brain-altering effects of drinking these elixirs, it’s no surprise humans imputed the miraculous transformation to the work of the gods.

 From there, McGovern says, the beverage became the center of social life. It’s a pattern he’s seen around the world, from winemaking in the Middle East and Europe to sorghum beers and palm wine brewed in Africa.

 For all he’s uncovered about alcoholic beverages of the past 10,000 years, there are plenty of questions that remain to be answered—including the advent of distilled liquors in the New World. McGovern concludes his book by delving into ongoing research into whether the Aztecs or other civilizations of the Americas created distilling methods before the Spanish arrived with their rum stills.

 As for his readers, McGovern hopes some might be inspired to try the recipes in the book. But if nothing else, he says, “I hope they come away with an appreciation for how fermentation is really an essential part of life on this planet and in human societies. It has had a profound effect on what we are today.”

 Homebrew Interpretation of Chateau Jiahu by Dough Griffith (based on McGovern, 2009/2010)

 Ingredients
5 gallons Cool water
 4 pounds Extra light or light dry malt extract
2 pounds Rice syrup solids
1/2 pound Dried hawthorn berries
1/4 ounce Simcoe hops
1/2 ounce Sweet orange peel
3 pounds Honey
1 packet Fermentis Safbrew Abbaye, White Labs WLP530 Abbey Ale, or Wyeast 4143 Sake
1/2 quart White grape concentrate
1 cup Priming sugar

 Starting gravity: 1.088
Final gravity: 1.015
Final target alcohol by volume: 8.5%
International Bittering Unites: 10
Finished volume: 5 gallons

 Process
If using the liquid yeast, we recommend making a starter 24 hours before brewing to maximize yeast cell counts.

 1. Fill a brewpot with the 5 gallons water and bring to a boil.
 2. As the water is beginning to boil, remove the pot from the heat.
 3. Add the dry malt extract and rice syrup solids. Stir to prevent clumping and scorching on the bottom of the pot. Return the pot to heat.
 4. Allow the wort to come to a boil, and boil for 30 minutes. If using defoamer to help prevent boilovers, add per instructions.
 5. While the wort is boiling, put the hawthorn berries ina blender, cover with wort (liqwuied from the brewpot—caution: hot), and carefully purée.
 6. At the 30-minute mark of the 1-hour boil, add the puréed hawthorn berries. Boil for 30 more minutes.
 7. 50 minutes into the boil, add the Simcoe hopes and orange peel.
 8. At the 60-minute mark, turn off the heat. Add the honey. Stir the wort for 2 minutes while building up a whirlpool effect. Stop strring and allow the wort to sit for 10 minutes.
 9. Chill the wort with a wort chiller or in a cold water bath until it is under 75°F.
 10. Transfer the wort into a fermenter; aerate (rock the baby) for 1 minute.
 11. Pitch the yeast into the fermenter.
12. Top up the fermenter to the 5-gallon mark with cool water.
 13. On the second day of fermentation, add the white grape concentrate.
 14. In about 14 days, the beer should be ready to bottle. It can be siphoned to a 5-gallon carboy to allow extra time for clearing if desired, for about 7 days.
 15. Before bottling, clean and sanitize the bottles and caps and create a priming solution of 1 cup boiling water and the priming sugar.
 16. Siphon the beer into a sterilized bottling bucket, add the water-diluted priming solution, and gently stir. Bottle and cap the beer.
 17. Allow the beer to condition for another 10 days at 70 to 75°F; it should then be ready to drink.

No One Questions that Vikings Drank; But Did They Make Wine?

Ancient Origins

Further evidence that the Vikings weren’t just beer-swilling, raping, and pillaging savages comes out of Denmark with the discovery of two grape seeds that may indicate the Norsemen didn’t just drink but may have even produced that most sophisticated beverage: wine.

It seems not everyone in Viking society was allowed to drink the more refined beverage, but many of them did enjoy their tippling of whatever kind of alcohol they could get. The lower echelons drank beer, which was easier to produce in the northern climate. The higher strata of society apparently enjoyed wine - when they could get it.

Viking drinking horns. (Mararie/ CC BY SA 2.0)

The question is, was the wine produced locally, or was it imported from France or other parts south? An article on Videnskab.dk explores these questions with interviews of archaeologists involved in the research of the two tiny grape seeds. Botanical archaeologist Peter Steen Henriksen, a curator at Denmark’s National Museum who found the two tiny seeds said:

 "This is the first discovery and evidence of viticulture in Denmark, and all that it entails in terms of status and power. We do not know how they used the grapes. Was it just has to put a great bunch of grapes on a table, for example? But it is reasonable to believe that they made the wine."

Dr. Henriksen found the seeds in soil at a distance from each other of about 600 meters (1968.5 ft.), and they grew between 100 and 200 years apart. He mixed the sand and dirt from the settlement of Tissø with water and found plant material, including the grape seeds. The remnants of the settlement are in Zealand.

An analysis of the strontium content in the two seeds proved one of the seeds was grown in Denmark, according to National Museum Professor Karin Margarita Frei. As Professor Frei says:

"We can safely say that it has a local strontium isotope signature, suggesting that it could be a grape grown in Zealand. This means that the first time we can say that they may have produced wine in Denmark. Before we had only conjecture, now we can see that they actually had grapes, and thus potential to make it themselves. Suddenly it becomes much more real.”

Harvesting grapes for wine. (Public Domain)

 The speculation that elites enjoyed wine may be confirmed by the nature of the settlement of Tissø, which the article calls “one of our richest sites from the Viking Age in Denmark. It is an example of how a royal family—or at least something resembling—has manifested itself in the same place for a very long period. It stretches from the late Iron Age to the end of the Viking Age, from 550 to 1050 AD.”

The settlement of Tissø, which was rich and may have been the seat of a Viking monarch, was near this large lake, which is connected to the sea by a river. (Vastgoten/CC BY SA 3.0)

Sandie Holst, a co-author of the article explaining the results of the research, published in the Danish Journal of Archaeology, says the wine may have set the elites apart from ordinary people in Viking society. It was like saying, “I can drink wine, and you can only drink beer,” she tells Videnskab.dk.

Top image: Drinking from a Viking drinking horn. (CC BY SA 3.0) Oak wine barrels. (Sanjay Acharya/ CC BY SA 3.0)

By Mark Miller

Would You Drink a Lumpy Beer? People Living in China 5000 Years Ago Did!

Ancient Origins

Researchers have discovered a 5,000-year-old beer recipe by studying the residue on the inner walls of pottery vessels found in an excavated site in northeast China. It’s the earliest evidence of beer production in China so far.

 On a recent afternoon, a small group of students gathered around a large table in one of the rooms at the Stanford Archaeology Center.

 Li Liu, a professor in Chinese archaeology at Stanford University and coauthor of the study on the beer recipe published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, recently stood before students and a collection of plastic-covered glass beakers and water bottles filled with yellow, foamy liquid. “Archaeology is not just about reading books and analyzing artifacts,” says Liu.

“Trying to imitate ancient behavior and make things with the ancient method helps students really put themselves into the past and understand why people did what they did.”

So That’s Why Barley Went to China
The ancient Chinese made beer mainly with cereal grains, including millet and barley, as well as with Job’s tears, a type of grass from Asia, according to the research. Traces of yam and lily root parts also appeared in the concoction.

Liu says she was particularly surprised to find barley—which is used to make beer today—in the recipe because the earliest evidence to date of barley seeds in China dates to 4,000 years ago. This suggests why barley, which was first domesticated in western Asia, spread to China.

A blend of milled malted barley for beer brewing. (CC BY SA 3.0)

“Our results suggest the purpose of barley’s introduction in China could have been related to making alcohol rather than as a staple food,” Liu says.

The ancient Chinese beer looked more like porridge and likely tasted sweeter and fruitier than the clear, bitter beers of today. The ingredients used for fermentation were not filtered out, and straws were commonly used for drinking, Liu says.

Mashing or Spitting At the end of Liu’s class, each student tried to imitate the ancient Chinese beer using either wheat, millet, or barley seeds.

“People looked at me weird when they saw the ‘spit beer’ I was making for class.”

Some of the students’ creations. (Youtube Screenshot)

The students first covered their grain with water and let it sprout, in a process called malting. After the grain sprouted, the students crushed the seeds and put them in water again. The container with the mixture was then placed in the oven and heated to 65º degrees Celsius (149º F) for an hour, in a process called mashing. Afterward, the students sealed the container with plastic and let it stand at room temperature for about a week to ferment.

Alongside that experiment, the students tried to replicate making beer with a vegetable root called manioc. That type of beer-making, which is indigenous to many cultures in South America where the brew is referred to as “chicha,” involves chewing and spitting manioc, then boiling and fermenting the mixture.

Madeleine Ota, an undergraduate student in Liu’s course, says she knew nothing about the process of making beer before taking the class and was skeptical that her experiments would work. The mastication part of the experiment was especially foreign to her, she says.

“It was a strange process,” Ota says. “People looked at me weird when they saw the ‘spit beer’ I was making for class. I remember thinking, ‘How could this possibly turn into something alcoholic?’ But it was really rewarding to see that both experiments actually yielded results.”

Ota used red wheat for brewing her ancient Chinese beer. Despite the mold, the mixture had a pleasant fruity smell and a citrus taste, similar to a cider, Ota says. Her manioc beer, however, smelled like funky cheese, and Ota had no desire to check how it tasted.

 The results of the students’ experiments are going to be used in further research on ancient alcohol-making that Liu and Wang are working on.

 “The beer that students made and analyzed will be incorporated into our final research findings,” Wang says. “In that way, the class gives students an opportunity to not only experience what the daily work of some archaeologists looks like but also contribute to our ongoing research.”

The “beer-making toolkit” from the site Liu and Wang are studying: (A) Pit H82 illustration in top and cross-section views, (B) funnel 1, (C) pot 6 in reconstructed form, (D) pot 3 in reconstructed form, and (E) pottery stove. (Wang et al.)

What Caused a Revolution?
For decades, archeologists have yearned to understand the origin of agriculture and what actions may have sparked humans to transition from hunting and gathering to settling and farming, a period historians call the Neolithic Revolution.

Studying the evolution of alcohol and food production provides a window into understanding ancient human behavior, says Liu.

Late Neolithic Period (ca. 2500 - 2000 BC) large gray mug of the Henan Longshan Culture. (CC BY SA 2.5)

But it can be difficult to figure out precisely how the ancient people made alcohol and food from just examining artifacts because organic molecules easily break down with time. That’s why experiential archaeology is so important, Liu says.

“We are still trying to understand what kind of things were used back then,” Liu says.

Top Image: A more modern beer – without the lumps. Source: Public Domain

The article, originally titled ‘Ancient Chinese recipe makes lumpy, tasty beer’ by Stanford University was originally published on Futurity and has been republished under a Creative Commons license.

Ancient People of Teotihuacan Drank Milky Alcohol, Pottery Suggests

By Charles Q. Choi

The Pyramid of the Sun in the ancient city of Teotihuacan with ruin walls in the foreground. Credit: Barna Tanko | Shutterstock.com

Ancient pottery confirms people made and drank a milky alcoholic concoction at one of the largest cities in prehistory, Teotihuacan in Mexico, researchers say.
This liquor may have helped provide the people of this ancient metropolis with essential nutrients during frequent shortfalls in staple foods, scientists added.
The ancient city of Teotihuacan, whose name means "the city of the gods" in the Nahuatl language of the Aztecs, was the largest city in the Americas before the arrival of Christopher Columbus. At its zenith, Teotihuacan encompassed about 8 square miles (20 square kilometers) and supported an estimated population of 100,000 people, who raised giant monuments such as the Temple of Quetzalcoatl and the Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon.
Much about Teotihuacan remains unknown, including the origin and language of the people who lived there. To shed light on the mystery of this ancient city, scientists investigated what the people there might have eaten and drank. [In Photos: Human Sacrifices Discovered in Ancient City of Teotihuacan]
Corn, also known as maize, was a key crop for the people of Teotihuacan, but the low rainfall and limited groundwater resources of the area made growing maize there risky. In addition, while maize is high in calories, it contains only low concentrations of several vital nutrients, such as iron, calcium and B vitamins.
Murals in Teotihuacan depict agave plants, which are also known as maguey plants and physically resemble aloe. A number of these paintings may also depict scenes of people drinking a milky alcoholic potion known as pulque, which is made from maguey sap. (Tequila is also made from agave plants, but these liquors are made from the baked hearts of these crops, not the sap.)
Prior studies hinted that pulque might have helped keep people in Teotihuacan alive. Maguey withstands frost and drought better than maize, and pulque could have provided vital calories, most essential nutrients and probiotic bacteria.
To learn more about the diet and culture of the people of Teotihuacan, scientists analyzed more than 300 sherds, or fragments, of pottery from within and nearby the city that dated to between about A.D. 200 and 550. The researchers cleaned and ground up the potsherds, and then scanned the resulting powder for any materials that the gotten unglazed ceramic might have absorbed. They focused on residues of the alcohol-making bacterium Zymomonas mobilis, which gives pulque its punch.
"This project pushed the detection limits of absorbed organic residue analysis," said lead study author Marisol Correa-Ascencio, an archaeological chemist at the University of Bristol in England.
The scientists discovered 14 sherds with the earliest direct chemical evidence for the making of pulque in Central America. Researchers found that this fermented maguey sap may have been stored in distinctive, vaselike pottery vessels that were sealed with pine resin, as well as in other less-specialized vessels.
"These findings are a critical first step in providing new information about the subsistence patterns of the inhabitants at Teotihuacan that could not have been gathered using traditional archaeological methods," Correa-Ascencio said.
In its future research, the teamwill analyze ancient potsherds from other areas in Central America for similar residues, Correa-Ascencio said. She and her colleagues detailed their findings online Sept. 15 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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