Fermented beverages have long been a part of social and religious rituals. Now, researchers have identified a beer-making toolkit at an archaeological site in northern China with a 5,000-year-old recipe for beer. Ancient pottery vessels, dating to 3400-2900 BC, contained a fermented mixture of barley, broomcorn millets, and other starchy plants. It is the earliest direct evidence of beer brewing in ancient China, the authors say. Technicians excavated the artifacts in 2004-2006 from two pits at the Mijiaya archaeological site in northern China. The pits also contained stoves, likely used to heat the grains for mashing. Stanford professor Li Liu became aware of the pottery shards while reviewing a report from the excavation, and immediately noticed a vessel shaped like a funnel, which would have been used to pour a newly made beverage into a storage container. Wang and Liu traveled to China and retrieved samples from the artifacts, scraping a yellowish residue from the inside of each vessel. They then worked with Terry Ball at Brigham Young University and two research institutes in China to analyze the samples. They identified three lines of evidence suggesting the vessels were indeed used to make a fermented beverage. http://blog.pnas.org/2016/05/journal-club-ancient-pottery-harbors-5000-year-old-beer-recipe/
