5,000-Year-Old Chinese Beer Recipe Gets Recreated by Stanford Students

A cou­ple of years back, we intro­duced you to what was con­sid­ered the old­est known beer recipe–an Ancient Sumer­ian recipe dat­ing back to 1800 BC. It turns out, how­ev­er, that the Chi­nese had the Sume­ri­ans beat.

Above, you can watch Stan­ford stu­dents recre­ate a 5,000-year-old beer recipe which Pro­fes­sor Li Liu revealed to the world last spring. Accord­ing to Stan­ford News, Liu and a team of researchers recent­ly found the recipe while “study­ing the residue on the inner walls of pot­tery ves­sels found in an exca­vat­ed site in north­east Chi­na.” As part of the course Archae­ol­o­gy of Food: Pro­duc­tion, Con­sump­tion and Rit­u­al, Pro­fes­sor Liu’s stu­dents recre­at­ed the dis­cov­ered con­coc­tion, fol­low­ing this gen­er­al process:

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 65 degrees Cel­sius (149 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.

You can dig up infor­ma­tion on the Chi­nese beer recipe by look­ing at the Pro­ceed­ings of the Nation­al Acad­e­my of Sci­ences of the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca.

via Stan­ford News

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