Beer: NOT the oldest drink in the world

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Finding factual errors in Wikipedia is, of course, easier than machine-gunning a cask full of cod, and I’ve done it here before. I can’t stand reading Wikipedia’s pages on beer, since I constantly think: “No, that’s wrong … no, that’s not quite right … no, that’s a misinterpretation …”. What particularly gets me shouting at the computer screen is statements that two seconds’ critical thought would show can’t possibly be true: like the assertion in the opening words in Wikipedia’s main article on beer that “Beer is the world’s oldest … alcoholic beverage”, a claim that is repeated in the “alcoholic beverage” article.

The “beer” article justifies this claim by citing in a footnote the book by the German-American author John Arnold with the lengthy title Origin and History of Beer and Brewing: From Prehistoric Times to the Beginning of Brewing Science and Technology, written in 1911. Arnold wrote one of my favourite beer quotations, about the study of the history of beer, “the people’s beverage”, being the study of the history of the people. My copy of the reprint of his book by the guys at Beerbooks.com is a long way from where I’m writing this, so I can’t currently check exactly what he said. But if Arnold did say beer is the world’s oldest alcoholic drink, he was writing (excuse the Britishism) bollocks.

Think. Beer is not a simple drink to make. To get the sugars that the yeast will turn into alcohol, the starches in grain must be converted by enzymic reactions to sugar. If this is done by malting, that is, soaking grains and then letting them begin to grow, the malting process must be controlled and growth halted before the sprouting grains consume all the sugars they are making from their starch. Human intervention and control is effectively essential. Beer – alcohol derived from grains – does not happen in the wild, because the conditions to make beer do not occur in the wild.

However, alcohol is most certainly produced in the wild using other sources of natural sugar: this is what yeast, opportunistic scavengers of sources of energy, evolved to do. Ripe fruit can, and will, ferment spontaneously as yeast arrive to grab the sugar in the fruit and flood the surroundings with alcohol to keep their rivals away. The story of elephants getting drunk on over-ripe and fermenting fruit may be a jungle myth. But if you walk through an untended apple orchard in the autumn, after the apples have fallen from the trees and been lying on the ground, the scent of cider will envelop you, as yeasts attack the rotting fruit. Right now, I’m in a Middle Eastern city where thousands of date palms line every road, and in the evening the strong smell of vinegar is on the warm air: this is because dates that have fallen to the ground have fermented, and then gone on to the next stage, where alcohol is converted by specialist bacteria into acetic acid.

We can thus trump Arnold’s claim about the antiquity of beer with a quotation from a book called Fermented food beverages in nutrition, by Gastineau, Darby and Turner, written in 1979, that “Fruit wines were probably discovered as soon as man tried to collect and store sweet fruits and berries.” Fermentation of the juice that runs free from grapes simply piled on top of each other is the basis of the Hungarian wine Tokay Eszencia. Ripe dates soaked in water were used to make a sweet drink in Arabia, and if left for even a day the sugary date water would ferment to make a drink called fadikh, which an Arabian traveller called Yūsuf ibn Ya’qūb Ibn al Mujāwir found still being made in the 13th century.

I’d suggest humanity, which has been gathering and eating fruit since before it was humanity, and making baskets and preparing gourds and baskets to store things in for, at the least, tens of thousands of years, discovered fruit wine a very long time before it found out how to make beer. The kit needed to make fermented fruit drinks is very simple, and certainly within the capabilities of palaeolithic (that is, pre-agriculture) people. To make jackfruit wine in India, “earthen pots, wooden vessels, bamboo baskets and sieves, stone slabs and flat stones are the only equipment used in traditional procedures” (Handbook of indigenous fermented foods by Keith Steinkraus). Substitute gourds for earthenware pots, and Bob’s your jackfruit.

'This watery hunny is making me *hic* feel funny'

Fruit is not the only source of natural sugar that will turn into alcohol without any help from anything except wild yeasts. Honey will ferment naturally, under the right conditions, particularly when diluted. Don and Patricia Brothwell, who wrote Food in Antiquity in 1969, said rather censoriously: “It is sobering to consider that the neglected jar of fruit juice or pulp, or the half-empty honey-pot left out in the rain, set man along the road to alcoholism and the illicit still.” (Lighten up, guys – it didn’t happen to Winnie-the-Pooh …)

Palm sap contains 12 to 15 per cent sucrose, is very easily tapped by cutting off the palm flower and putting a container such as a gourd underneath the resultant stump, and will ferment in 24 hours to give an alcohol content of around five per cent or more. This is the drink known as palm wine or toddy, and it is consumed wherever palm trees grow, from South America through Africa and the Indian sub-continent to Indonesia. Again, the technology for making palm wine was available to palaeolithic peoples. Similar sorts of drink are pulque, from Mexico, made from sugary cactus juice, and spruce beer, made from the sap of spruce trees.

Milk – horse’s milk, camel milk, yak milk, even cow’s and sheep milk – will also ferment under the right conditions, resulting in drinks such as koumiss and shabat in Central Asia and khoormog in Mongolia. However, these drinks (which don’t get much above around two per cent alcohol) must have had to wait until after the domestication of animals to be discovered, and thus are going to be younger than beer, since it is generally agreed that agriculture came before animal husbandry. I tried some koumiss at a party a couple of weeks ago, which one of the IT guys at the place where I am working had brought back from Kyrgyzstan (they’re like that, IT guys), where it is sold in plastic bottles in supermarkets, apparently. The mare’s koumiss was white and fizzy, the camel’s brown as chocolate milk shake, if I remember correctly (I’d had several beers by the time it was revealed that there was koumiss in the fridge, and I wasn’t taking notes), and both were tart and sour: an interesting experience, but one I won’t be catching the next flight to Kyrgyzstan to repeat.

There is also a method of making alcohol from starchy foods without malting, available to every human being, and which is the basis of drinks such as chicha in the Andes regions of South America. Human saliva contains amylases that will hydrolyse starch into sugar, something we evolved early in our history to help us eat starchy foods. You can test this yourself by chewing some bread, or a cracker: do it long enough, and as the starch is broken down, you can taste what is in your mouth getting sweeter. Traditionally, chicha is made by grinding dried maize kernels, then slightly moistening the flour and making it into balls which are popped into the mouth and thoroughly mixed with saliva, using the tongue. The ball of salivated maize flour, called muko, is then flattened against the roof of the mouth, popped out, and left in the sun to dry. According to Keith Steinkraus, “Muko production is generally carried out as a social event by groups of older women, sometimes with the help of young girls, who all sit in a circle.”

The wonder of enzymes means that when you’re ready to make chicha, the muko can be added to more ground corn mixed with water, and the saliva amylases will now work on the new starches. Heat this mixture for 20 minutes to give the enzymes the maximum chance to convert starches to sugars, strain it, boil it to kill any unwanted bugs, let it cool and then either let wild yeasts in the air ferment it, or add a source of yeast: berries will do, since these will almost certainly have yeasts on their skins. Eventually the vessel you use to ferment the chicha in will build up its own colony of yeasts that will do the job every time. Similar drinks can be made from other sources of starch, such as cassava, and even (in Mozambique) yucca plants. (Don’t try that one at home …)

One important point about chicha: I’ve never seen the possibility discussed that something like it was one of the roads that led to barley beer brewing in the ancient Middle East, but it seems to me entirely plausible that before they discovered malting, Neolithic brewers in the “Fertile Crescent” first made beer by utilising the power of saliva amylase, chewing barley flour to make barley muko. Mothers would have chewed starchy food to give to their babies as they weaned them, food which would have become sweet and more palateable to the baby as the enzymes in the mother’s saliva worked on the barley starches. Doubtless the busy mothers would have prepared some pre-chewed food in advance, which they would have dried to store, and then soaked before giving it to their young child. Yeasts falling on soaking sweet muko would have fermented the sugars quickly in the Middle Eastern heat, and beer is born …

But if beer was born that way, then it came when humanity already knew about alcohol. Beer isn’t the oldest alcoholic drink in the world, not even the second or third oldest. Instead, I’d suggest*, in order of age, the first fermented drinks were fruit-based, followed by honey-based drinks – mead and its variants – next fermented sweet tree-sap drinks such as palm wine, and only fourth, beer.

*Although I’d probably be wrong, it appears, about the order of the first two – see the comment below from Dr Garth Cambray of the Makana Meadery.

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Filed under Beer, History of beer

Tags: chicha, mead, palm wine, toddy, Wikipedia