Jottings from the Granite Studio

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