Jim “Beijing” Boyce called my attention to this piece in National Geographic :
A Delaware brewer with a penchant for exotic drinks recently concocted a beer similar to one brewed in China some 9,000 years ago.
Sam Calagione of the Dogfish Head brewery in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, used a recipe that included rice, honey, and grape and hawthorn fruits. He got the formula from archaeologists who derived it from the residues of pottery jars found in the late Stone Age village of Jiahu in northern China.
The residues are the earliest direct evidence of brewed beverages in ancient China.
“We can’t prove that an alcoholic beverage was definitely produced in the jars—the alcohol is gone—but it’s not that difficult to infer,” said Patrick McGovern, an archaeochemist at the University of Pennsylvania’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Philadelphia.
McGovern, an expert in the origins and history of alcoholic beverages, performed the chemical analysis on the pottery. He said fruit juices and liquid honey in a temperate climate would easily ferment, allowing for the production of alcohol.
Further evidence for the alcoholic nature of the brew were several identical nearby sites which anthropologists feel might either indicate a ritualistic precision in the crafting of fermented beverages or possibly that even nine millennia ago the predeliction in China for cloning drinking establishments and then using the business model of clumping them on top of one another may have a longer history than previously thought. This latter theory is given additional credence by the presence of a skeleton of an individual which was discovered in a pecuilar pose that suggests he may have been beckoning neolithic passers-by to “have a look” and “come sit and drink beer!”
The question for historians now is why subsequent generations got rid of ‘honey and fruit juices’ in favor of ‘nailpolish-tasting sorghum.’
Good one, Brendan… Probably it’s a mystery