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> Wine is the oldest alcoholic beverage ever produced. Is that true? I thought it was mead, and a brief search suggests mead does still have a greater claim to
by Jedd 4y ago
> Wine is the oldest alcoholic beverage ever produced.
Is that true? I thought it was mead, and a brief search suggests mead does still have a greater claim to that title.
Some references call mead 'honey wine', but to me that feels like like calling vodka 'potato whiskey'.
I accept the same yeasts can be used for wine and mead, but a) we don't know what yeasts they were using millenia ago, and anyway, b) yeasts will certainly influence the flavours, but generally don't determine the name of, the end product.
For example, some historically champagne-only yeasts are a relatively recent favourite for beer makers.
- dllthomas 4y agoI've heard that there's sufficient yeasts on the skin of a typical grape that you can get fermentation without human intervention. If that's true, then for a sufficiently broad definition of "wine" and "produced" it seems to follow that wine probably predated mead. Deliberate - and particularly large scale - production by humans is a more interesting question, of course.
- Jedd 4y agoSure, and at that point you get into the definition of beverage (is a mouldy bunch of grapes in a forest a beverage, if there's no one to drink it?). I'd suggest that from a purely evolutionary perspective, honey bees predate grapes, and wild yeasts would certainly have turned an abandoned bee nest into an ad hoc mini-bar on more than one occasion during pre-modern history, but I feel I'm now veering way off from my challenge to that original claim.
- cjohnson318 4y agoIsn't honey antibiotic though? When I've made mead, I always added yeast to it to get it to ferment. I'm not sure an abandoned bee nest would ferment before it just turned into a papery, waxy, lump.
- dllthomas 4y agoPer my understanding, honey is really good at not spoiling until you dilute it.
- orange8 4y agoThe Merriam Webster defines a beverage as "a drinkable liquid"[1]. If there is no one there to drink it, then it is not drinkable. A beverage requires both a liquid and a drinker to make it drink-able. [1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/beverage https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/beverage
- stockboss 4y agoif you go one step deeper, the definition of drinkable is "suitable or safe for drinking", so technically, a beverage just need to be suitable for drinking but it does not need to be actually drank for it to fit the definition. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/drinkable https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/drinkable
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]