"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. "
So the recipe was arrived at by reverse-engineering residues in pottery vessels, and not written down 5000 years ago. In contrast, the Hymn to Ninkasi, which contains an ale recipe, was written down in Sumerian on clay tablets 4000 years ago. Translation at http://www.piney.com/BabNinkasi.html
"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."
The heat would have killed off any yeast in the wort, and sealing the container would have prevented any yeast getting in after the wort cooled, so this cannot be correct. The correct process is to boil the wort, let it cool down, and leave it outside (or open the windows) to allow wild yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) and other microorganisms to blow in and inoculate the wort. This process is called spontaneous fermentation, and is still used in Belgium to produce Lambic. Spontaneous fermentation causes bacteria (Lactobacillus and Acetobacter species) to also settle in the wort, eventually turning the beer sour. In other beer styles, yeast is deliberately added after the wort cools.
"The ancient Chinese beer looked more like porridge and likely tasted sweeter and fruitier than the clear, bitter beers of today."
It's an ale rather than a beer. To be a beer, it would have had to contain hops, which give beer its bitterness and act as a preservative. Unless drunk very quickly, like Lambic it would have also gone sour.
That's according to the 15th-century strict definition by the English that "ale" include no hops or other additives. This probably had to do with an early interpretation of hops as bad for you, since it made people tired or sleepy. Modern definitions make "beer" a general category that includes both ale and lager, and allow for either ales or lagers to include hops or not, just like they can be either top- or bottom-fermenting (though they usually stick to their respective category's defaults)
The fact is that different yeasts growing at different temperatures for different amounts of time with different additives could have resulted in vastly different beers, and while we have an idea what a more likely production method could be, it doesn't discount the idea that brewers could have experimented for hundreds of years and developed different styles. So we really don't know for sure what ancient beer tasted like.
Also for anyone who likes beer and is visiting the UK, I would recommend having a look at their good beer guide to find the best pubs for beer, or perhaps try to go to one of their sponsored beer festivals.
> It's an ale rather than a beer. To be a beer, it would have had to contain hops, which give beer its bitterness and act as a preservative. Unless drunk very quickly, like Lambic it would have also gone sour.
It's highly unlikely the Sumerian concotion would even pass for a beverage, let alone a beer vs ale. More like a soupy, alcoholic bread. It would have been filled with still-substantial grains; you would have drank it with a straw.
Ancient beers and other grain beers (rice, millet and so on) and non-grain beers (corn, cassava, fruit, so on) will blow your mind.
Hops are a flavoring for beer. Beer is the drink that results from the fermentation of wort (starchy water) without distillation. There are many many (millions) of ways to derive a wort.
Hops weren't even found in beer until the 9th century. Beer has existed longer before hops were introduced than since.
So we agree on the facts, but disagree on the precise meaning of words. Other than recreating ancient brews, it's moot anyway as all ale sold nowadays contains hops.
I occasionally brew in very small batches. I've brewed ales without hops, including one which was loosely based on an Ancient Egyptian recipe. Recipes here: http://web.onetel.com/~hibou/Ale%20Recipes.html
The video made no mention of sealing it, so its possible the article was incorrect. It's unlikely an original recipe involved sealing the vessel after heating.
The crucial steps are malting the grain and inoculating the wort with yeast. Only after the wort is inoculated can fermentation begin, after which the vessel can be sealed.
I'm curious how different it would taste if the containers weren't sealed during fermentation. It would be informative to see what their gravity readings were to understand how much fermentation took place during the experiment.
This seems a bit like finding an ancient pastry recipe and trying to make it without knowing anything about baking. There's quite a bit of domain-specific knowledge that the people who made the recipe would have that a random scientist wouldn't have. Beer requires a lot of care to get the right result. Among other things, the selection and maintenance of a specific active yeast culture is critical for the right flavor.
Also, the story is at least misleading: they did not discover a recipe. They found trace particles on the walls of pottery. You don't just collect the ingredients of a baked good and then claim you have a recipe. There's quite a bit more to actually making it.
How do they know what they were examining ("ancient beer would have looked more like porridge") wasn't just the mash or sparge stages of beer making, which often looks like porridge?
"This test was not a complete waste, however. Though it should perhaps be repeated in a warmer climate, it indicated that the earliest beer was not likely produced by the simple accident of grain being soaked by rainwater. The earliest beers likely did not appear until some process for mashing or malting was developed, either in the form of a gruel or a sprouted bread."
The idea of cultivating yeast for brewing is critical. Before people had any concept of microbiology or yeast, they were still able to maintain a quality yeast strain. The same material was used for successive beers, and excess yeast would accumulate on the brewing medium, which could be a fabric used in the brewing vessel, or a stick used to stir the mash. It was quickly learned that re-using these objects led to better beers that started faster, and these objects may have been passed down for generations.
A good example of having the right yeast is sourdough bread from San Francisco.
Boudin Bakery was founded in San Francisco, and used a french baking process with fermented dough. All of their bread has continued to be made with the same starter dough and yeast from 1849. It even survived the great SF earthquake and fires of 1906, as Louise Boudin threw some starter dough in a bucket and got the hell out of town.
The particular yeast and lactobacilli they use interacts with the environment of the SF bay and produces a bread unique to that starter and that area. Making beer is a bit like baking bread in this way, but has more complex steps to achieve different results, so controlling the brewing environment is necessary for consistent results.
Unfortunately it was completely finished. They may be making it again next year. IIRC the cost of materials and time were much greater than their other beers, so it was a bit of a loss leader.
At the end of Liu’s class, each student tried to imitate the ancient Chinese beer using either wheat, millet or barley seeds.
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.
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.
I don't know much about brewery, but is there a reason this method might have been lost to time and why the more familiar 'china wines' took over popularity?
I don't know which 'china wine' you mean as there are many chinese-origin fermented beverages, but rice wine is popular because it's ridiculously easy to make. All you need is rice, water, and a yeast culture. It's used a lot in cooking as well as for drinking, so you can make a huge batch for pennies and and have several uses for it.
Even tea prep has changed as dramatically over 1200 years in China. As my (Taiwanese) tea dealer reminded me recently, if not for the Japanese adopting Matcha, it would be almost unheard of today, because it's rare to see it in China now.
5000 years is a long time. Cultures rise and fall, people come and go, wars/famines/etc. Think about how much things changed in the US in a few decades. There was a time when we used to eat horse meat and there was a time when the idea of eating raw fish would have been viewed as horrific.
I doubt we'll ever find a definitive reason due to the paucity of historical records from that time. But it probably is a mix of change in fads, wars, cultural shift, etc.
One practical anthropological explanation I've heard about early beer recipes is that they were basically a way to preserve their ingredients a little longer than they might have otherwise lasted. By that logic, the beverage would change with the ingredients at hand.
Coincidentally, a few years back, one of my application essay for Stanford undergrad was about "Cooking archeology", and how re-creating dishes from the past could deliver contextual insights for historical and anthropological studies among other things.
So the recipe was arrived at by reverse-engineering residues in pottery vessels, and not written down 5000 years ago. In contrast, the Hymn to Ninkasi, which contains an ale recipe, was written down in Sumerian on clay tablets 4000 years ago. Translation at http://www.piney.com/BabNinkasi.html
"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."
The heat would have killed off any yeast in the wort, and sealing the container would have prevented any yeast getting in after the wort cooled, so this cannot be correct. The correct process is to boil the wort, let it cool down, and leave it outside (or open the windows) to allow wild yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) and other microorganisms to blow in and inoculate the wort. This process is called spontaneous fermentation, and is still used in Belgium to produce Lambic. Spontaneous fermentation causes bacteria (Lactobacillus and Acetobacter species) to also settle in the wort, eventually turning the beer sour. In other beer styles, yeast is deliberately added after the wort cools.
"The ancient Chinese beer looked more like porridge and likely tasted sweeter and fruitier than the clear, bitter beers of today."
It's an ale rather than a beer. To be a beer, it would have had to contain hops, which give beer its bitterness and act as a preservative. Unless drunk very quickly, like Lambic it would have also gone sour.