Stanford Researchers Unearth 5,000-Year-Old Beer Recipe

A team of international researchers has discovered a 5,000-year-old beer recipe in China. And it includes an ingredient that gives clues about just how much beer-making was bringing early civilizations together.

The study shows an "an advanced beer-brewing technique" and claims to be the "earliest direct evidence" of beer-making in China.

Researchers, including two from Stanford University, studied ancient pots, funnels, furnaces and other tools found at a dig site in Northern China to complete their research.

They found residue of grains that had been damaged in the same patterns and ways that would be associated with beer-making. Jiajing Wang, a Stanford graduate student, and Li Liu, a Stanford professor of Chinese archaeology, flew out to the site to do analysis on the leftovers at the ancient brewery.

"We extracted residues from the artifacts and did residue analysis," Wang, the graduate student and lead author of the study, told Patch. "The results turned out to prove our hypothesis — people in China brewed beer around 5,000 years ago."

So what were the ancient Chinese using to make beer? The recipe included:

• broomcorn millet, a gluten-free grass;
• barley;
• "Job's tears," a grain native to Southeast Asia;
• and tubers, a sweet and starchy root.

Those were all fermented together to make the beer.

The most surprising finding was the barley, Wang said, because it wasn't grown in the area until about 1,000 years later. But it was being grown out West near Eurasia, where traders were likely bringing it over in high demand.

"We suggest that barley was initially introduced to the Central Plain as an ingredient for alcohol production rather than for subsistence," Wang said, adding that "the practice of beer brewing is likely to have been associated with the increased social complexity."

Beer-making is believed to have begun as early as 10,000 B.C. It appears that even thousands of years ago, nothing brought people together quite like getting drunk.

In what may be the coolest school project ever, Wang said her team did some "experimental brewing" with the ingredients. But that's as far as it got.

"The 'taste' is beyond our technical methods," she said. "I can only guess it might have tasted a bit sour (from fermented cereal grains) and a bit sweet (from tuber)."

Image: Ancient beer funnel, courtesy Jiajing Wang