Scientists Discover 5,000 Year Old Secret Beer Recipe with Chinese Pottery (VIDEO)
Scientists have announced the discovery of pottery vessels at the Jijaya in northern China that reveals beer brewing clues that are 5,000 years old.
Archaeologists found ancient "beer-making tool kits" in underground established between 3400 and 2900 B.C.
The kits included funnels, pots and specialized jugs. The shapes of the objects show that they could be used for brewing, filtration and storage.
It's the oldest beer-producing facility ever found in China and the finhding shows that these early brewers were already using specialized tools and advanced beer-making techniques.
"This beer recipe indicates a mix of Chinese and Western traditions - barley from the West, millet, Job's tears and tubers from China," Jiajing Wang of Stanford University, who led a study, told the AFP.
"Our findings imply that early beer making may have motivated the initial translocation of barley from the Western Eurasia into the Central Plain of China before the crop became a part of agricultural subsistence in the region 3,000 y later," the authors wrote.
Wang and her team were able to remake the recipe by scraping a yellow residue off the inside of the remains, and analyzing it. Apart from barley, they found a variety of different grains, plus tubers like yams and lilies, which would make the sour beverage a bit sweeter.
They couldn't actually brew the beer because they don't know the exact ratio of the ingredients, according to The Washington Post.
Therefore it is not possible to know exactly how the beer tasted, researchers said, because they do not know the ingredients' exact proportion.
"My guess is that the beer might have tasted a bit sour and a bit sweet," Wang said.
"Sour comes from fermented cereal grains, sweet from tubers."
