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Stanford students recreate 5,000-year-old Chinese beer recipe
- SurrealSoul 9y agoI 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?
- moogleii 9y agoI don't know, but if I had to guess, it'd be war. It's ravaged "the mainland" fairly frequently over the last 5000 years.
- baby 9y agoI don't know, but knowing the taste of baijiu I would not have tried drinking their ancient beer.
- peterwwillis 9y agoI 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.
- justin66 9y agoOne 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.
- awkwarddaturtle 9y ago5000 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.
- DonaldFisk 9y agoThe first Chinese history wasn't written down until around 100BC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Records_of_the_Grand_Historian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Records_of_the_Grand_Historian) and only covered as far back as the Yellow Emperor (2698BC to 2598BC), and the first Chinese writing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_bone_script https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_bone_script) didn't appear until about 1250BC, so we're entirely reliant on archaeology for the period in question.
- hinkley 9y agoEven 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.
- janekm 9y agoIt's back in force, KFC in China has Matcha ice cream now ;) (obviously back via Japan, of course...)
- peterwwillis 9y agoThis 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? Here's an account of one guy who tried to make beer (and bread) using semi-ancient methods: https://www.morebeer.com/brewingtechniques/library/backissues/issue2.5/hitchcock.html https://www.morebeer.com/brewingtechniques/library/backissue... I like that his experiments produced an actual hypothesis as to the origins of brewing: "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."
- jly 9y agoThe 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.
- peterwwillis 9y agoA 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.
- grimmdude 9y agoI can see it now: "Stanford Grad Starts Brewery Specializing in Ancient Chinese Recipes"
- louithethrid 9y agoI have my doubts this is as close to the original recipe as possible. Release the specimen samples to the public.
- coupdejarnac 9y agoMake beer free as in speech.
- Jonovono 9y agohttp://freebeer.org/blog/ http://freebeer.org/blog/
- blang 9y agoA Seattle micro brewery did a recreation of this for Chinese new year. It was delicious. http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/world/2017-03/20/content_28620346.htm http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/world/2017-03/20/content_286203... Full disclosure, the brewery is owned by a friend of mine, but I have no financial stake in the company.
- patleeman 9y agoThis is awesome, do you know if it's still available? I'd love to get a couple bottles.
- blang 9y agoUnfortunately 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.
- uptownfunk 9y agoYeah but because it wasn't Stamford it doesn't make it to HN, so it doesn't count, sorry.
- blang 9y agothe owners do lack a degree from Stanford, but the brewmaster/co-owner does have degrees in engineering from The University of Pennsylvania and UCLA.
- ohm 9y agoThat can't be true because Stanford doesn't exist https://www.reddit.com/r/ApplyingToCollege/comments/62bgi8/my_theory_stanford_doesnt_exist_let_me_explain_why/?st=j47b6vlb&sh=d0d04af4 https://www.reddit.com/r/ApplyingToCollege/comments/62bgi8/m...
- forgot-my-pw 9y agoSounds like a fun class. 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.
- relyio 9y agoCoincidentally, 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.
- zeroer 9y agoYou're bringing into clear relief why I wasn't accepted to Stanford.
- kevinmchugh 9y agoOriginal paper on the analysis of the beer: http://www.pnas.org/content/113/23/6444 http://www.pnas.org/content/113/23/6444
- DonaldFisk 9y ago"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 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.
- slezakattack 9y ago+1 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.
- peterwwillis 9y agoThat'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.
- faragon 9y agoTL;DR: wheat beer ("weiss beer" in German) was already made in China 5.000 years ago.
- api_or_ipa 9y agoWas there any issue with underage students taking the class?