A new discovery from an archaeological site in Mijiaya, northern China have revealed a 5000-year old recipe for brewing beers. A residue examined from a pottery in the site shows an early evidence of people who already mastered an advanced technique in beer brewing.
According to the study posted in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the brewing technique used is a combination of East and West elements. There were different shapes of pots discovered in the archaeological site that dated between 3400 and 2900 BC. According to the researchers, it corresponds to different stages in brewing the beer. One of the pots was used in heating. They figured out that it goes to a simple process from brewing to filtration and storing of the finished product.
As reported by NPR, there is an underground location which is very ideal for beer storage where the temperature is controlled. A biomolecular archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania Museum in Philadelphia, Patrick McGovern, who was not part of the study said that "too much heat can destroy the enzymes responsible for that carb-to-sugar conversion." So this means the people in that time already knows this technique.
As they unraveled the pieces, they found out that the recipe of the historic beer were a combination of barley, broomcorn millet, grains called job's tears and tubers coming from China. The lead researcher, Jiajing Wang said that it is hard to determine the taste of the historic beer but it could be a combination of sour and sweet basing on the ingredients used.
Archaeologists were surprised about the finding of barely as one the ingredients in brewing the historic Chinese beer. Barley is known to be one of the first major grains cultivated in Eurasia and they believed that it was initially introduced to China 2,000 years ago. The findings of this study suggested that barley was already introduced to China as a beer brewing ingredient long before it was accepted as a staple food.
Wang and his co-researchers proposed that in the past thousands of years, beer helped in improving social relationships and shaping societies in China. Because of the beverage's special ingredients and distinctive taste, they use it to impress their friends and other people.