Stanford Students Brew Beer from 5000-Year-Old Recipe

The beer recipe is one of the oldest known. How does it hold up to modern tastes?

Students at Stanford University used a 5000-year-old beer recipe from China to brew their own beer, recreating one of the world's oldest known alcoholic beverages.

The beer recipe was uncovered by a team of archeologists including Stanford professor Li Liu, who decided it would be a fun exercise for her class to recreate the drink. The recipe calls for millet and barley, as well as yam, lily root, and traces of Job's tears, a type of grass native to Southeast Asia.

The recipe was discovered by analyzing ancient Chinese pottery used for brewing and storing the beer. The researchers found traces of the ingredients, which proved that people were making beer in that region 5000 years ago. However, the exact mixtures of the ingredients are unknown, so Liu's class experimented.

The end result was a wide variety of different beers, some of which tasted better than others. One student developed a thick beer with "a pleasant fruity smell and a citrus taste." Others described their beers as "sour" or musty.

The inclusion of barley in the beer recipe surprised Liu, because barley didn't start appearing in Chinese food until about a thousand years later. Liu suspects that barley was first brought to China for use in alcoholic beverages, and wasn't used for food until much later.

Source: Stanford University via Engadget

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