Would YOU drink ‘spit beer’ that you chew yourself (and stinks of cheese) or a Chinese brew that looks like porridge? Stanford students recreate 5,000 year old alcohol recipes (Excerpt)
Stanford students recreated an ancient 5000-year old Chinese beer brew
The beer looked like porridge and tasted sweeter than the clear beers of today
They also tried to replicate making beer with a vegetable root called manioc
That involved chewing and spitting manioc, then boiling and fermenting the mix
Source: Daily Mail
By Cecile Borkhataria
8 February 2017
Stanford students have recreated an ancient 5000-year old Chinese beer brew.
The ancient Chinese beer looked like porridge and tasted sweeter and fruitier than the clear, bitter beers of today.
The students made more than one type of ancient brew, which they made using ancient brewing techniques from early human civilizations.
HOW TO MAKE THE 5,000 YEAR OLD BEER
Use either wheat, millet or barley seeds as your grain.
Cover the chosen grain with water and let it sprout – a process called malting.
After the grains have sprouted, crush the seeds and put them in water again.
Place this container with the mixture in the oven and heat it to 65 degrees Celsius (149 F) for an hour – this process is called mashing.
Seal the container with plastic and let it stand at room temperature for a week to ferment.
Professor Li Liu, a professor of Chinese archaeology at Stanford University, taught the class that brewed the beers.
She said: ‘We include two different kinds of beer making – one is by chewing, and the other one is by sprouting the cereals.
‘We want students to understand how things were made and really have their hand on.
‘Archaeology is not just about reading books and analyzing artifacts.’
The students brewed the ancient beers as part of a course called Archaeology of Food: Production, Consumption and Ritual.
Professor Liu and other researchers discovered the ancient recipe by analyzing the residue on inner walls of pottery vessels found in a site in northeast China.
The ancient Chinese made beer mainly with cereal grains, including millet and barley, as well as with Job’s tears, a type of grass in Asia, according to the research.