5000 year old Chinese beer recreated at Stanford

Angela

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See:
http://news.stanford.edu/2017/02/06/recreate-5000-year-old-chinese-beer-recipe/

"Liu, together with doctoral candidate Jiajing Wang and a group of other experts, discovered the 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. The research, which was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provided the earliest evidence of beer production in China so far.The ancient Chinese made beer mainly with cereal grains, including millet and barley, as well as with Job’s tears, a type of grass in Asia, according to the research. Traces of yam and lily root parts also appeared in the concoction.
Liu said 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.
“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 said.

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 said."

Apparently mold floated on top, but still it was sweeter than modern beer.

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Exetremly intersting:

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An article entitled the Revealing of Chinese Beer-Brewing Formula Dated Back to 5000 Years Ago was published on the latest Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the United States of America(PNSA)recently.The achievements were jointly made by many research institutes including Stanford University of American, Shaanxi Archaeological Research Institute etc., revealing that Chinese ancestors have grasped the beer-brewing skill as early as 5000 years ago.
The conclusion was made by scientific analyses of the residues inside wine-container-resemblance pottery pots unearthed from two pits in Mijiaya Ruins in the eastern suburb of Xi’an.

Was it also pay stub?
Lots of pyramids are located around Xian. I think the pyramid culture continued to Qin Dynasty.(221bc)
In 1994, archaeologists discovered several pyramids near the Wei River, north of Xian. Hausdorf estimates there may be as many 90 to 100 pyramids in China, including the White Pyramid which is the highest of them all. All of them are mostly unheard of in the Western world.
http://www.eupedia.com/forum/threads/33035-Classify-me-(Chinese-guy)?p=493564#post493564
http://www.eupedia.com/forum/threads/33257-upside-down-pyramids

I am not sure, but the beer might be related to shang or sichuan people. The Rong peole resided in Shaanxi during shang dynasty(1,600bc).


"Xirong (Chinese: 西戎; pinyin: Xīróng; Wade–Giles: Hsi-jung; literally: "Western warlike people") or Rong were various people who lived primarily in and around the extremities of ancient China known as early as the Shang dynasty (1765-1122 BCE).[1] " by wiki

The historian Li Feng says that during the Western Zhou period, since the term Rong "warlike foreigners" was "often used in bronze inscriptions to mean 'warfare', it is likely that when a people was called 'Rong' the Zhou considered them as political and military adversaries rather than as cultural and ethnic 'others'."[6]
After the Zhou dynasty, the term usually referred to various peoples in the west during early and late medieval times. Prusek suggests relations between the Rong of Zhou and the Ren () tribes known in Shang.[7]

According to Nicola Di Cosmo,[10] 'Rong' was a vague term for warlike foreigner. He places them from the upper Wei River valley and along the Fen River to the Taiyuan basin as far as the Taihang Mountains. This would be the northwestern edge of what was then China and also the transition zone between agricultural and steppe ways of life.
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As I remember, the Rong culture is similar to Andronovo.
A highly noteworthy phenomenon is that during the first half of the secondmillennium BeE a number of metal cultures almost simultaneously flourished in the oases,valleys and basins around the Mongolian Steppe, including southern Siberia, Altai,northwestern and eastern Xinjiang, Gansu, Ordos and southwestern Manchuria. Metalweapons, tools and ornaments from these cultures bear striking sirnj]arities.

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(And First one: maya, second one: axe for human sacrifice in shang (1,600bc) in china, third : shu culture(2,000bc) in sichuan of China. They might be related with ANE)

http://www.eupedia.com/forum/thread...hey-are-just-paleo-people?p=501404#post501404 (#7)


--> How is the recipe different from the ancient middle east one?

pay stub shows that ancient workers were paid in beer

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In the ancient Mesopotamian city of Uruk, residents enjoyed many benefits of modern life. The city, located in modern-day Iraq, was home to massive ziggurats that would rival any of today's modern skyscrapers for sheer monumentality. People in Uruk exchanged goods for money, played board games, and sent each other letters on clay tablets using a writing system called cuneiform. They were also paid for their labor in beer. We know this because pay stubs were incredibly common documents at the time, and one such pay stub (pictured above) is now in the possession of the British Museum.
Writing in New Scientist, Alison George explains what's written on the 5,000-year-old tablet: "We can see a human head eating from a bowl, meaning 'ration,' and a conical vessel, meaning 'beer.' Scattered around are scratches recording the amount of beer for a particular worker." Beer wages were by no means limited to Mesopotamia. In ancient Egypt, there are records of people receiving beer for their work—roughly 4 to 5 liters per day for people building the pyramids. And in the Middle Ages, we have several records of the great fourteenth century poet Geoffrey Chaucer being paid in wine. Richard II generously gave Chaucer an annual salary that included a "tonel" of wine per year, which was roughly 252 gallons.
These salaries weren't just about keeping workers drunk so they would be more compliant. In the ancient world, beer was a hearty, starchy brew that could double as a meal. And during Chaucer's time, people believed that wine brought good health—which may not have been strictly accurate but was certainly a lure at a time when the Black Death was decimating the populations of Europe.
Even today, some employers are still paying workers in alcohol. In 2013, Amsterdam started a controversial program to help alcoholics get their lives together by paying them beer to pick up trash. And of course, many tech companies offer employees free booze on Friday afternoons as a perk. Thanks to one miraculously preserved pay stub, we now know that bribing employees with beer is a practice as old as employment itself.
https://arstechnica.com/science/201...shows-that-ancient-workers-were-paid-in-beer/

If Not for Beer, the Pyramids Probably Wouldn’t Exist

Well, this was a close call: According to Smithsonian magazine and Dogfish Head’s resident ancient-fermented-beverages expert, Dr. Patrick McGovern (he’s a professor by day), the Egyptian pyramids wouldn’t be here without the motivational capacities of sweet, sweet suds: “It was a source of nutrition, refreshment and reward for all the hard work. It was beer for pay. You would have had a rebellion on your hands if they’d run out. The pyramids might not have been built if there hadn’t been enough beer.”
We’ll take his word for it. For one thing, the pyramids are the only Wonder of the World that still stands today — the boozers must have been doing something right. Also, this guy “identified the world’s oldest known barley beer … the oldest grape wine … and the earliest known booze of any kind, a Neolithic grog from China’s Yellow River Valley brewed some 9,000 years ago.” Most recently, he helped Dogfish Head create Midas Touch, “a beer based on decrepit refreshments recovered from King Midas’ 700 B.C. tomb.”
We like his résumé, but we’ll be really impressed if he can figure out something special to do with the Coors Light we still have left over from our Memorial Day barbecue.
The Beer Archaeologist [Smithsonian]

==> my another problem is whether the beer was cold at that time?
 
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That stuff in the first picture, where the grains are all at the bottom, is probably more realistic from the ancient engravings I've seen, and it really looks disgusting to me, but then I hate even modern beer, so maybe I'd be no judge. :)

To add insult to injury they drank it communally a lot of times, with four or five men sucking at what look like straw type things from a big common container. Yuck. Of course, hygiene until the last century is seriously challenged, shall we say.
 

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