How to brew ancient Wari beer

High-tech spectrometry and traditional knowledge shed light on an ancient industry.

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[SomeRandomGuy]

"Fortunately, a member of Nash's local excavation crew had an aunt in a remote village who still brewed old-school moye chicha, and she evidently didn't mind showing a group of archaeologists how it was done."

It seems like a bit of a stretch to go from "old school - this is how they did it when I was a girl" to "old school - this is how they did it over a thousand years ago."

No, it isn't much of a stretch.

Egyptians, ca. 3000 B.C.E., discovered the basic process for making beer (booze with grains) that we still follow to this day. Take grain > soak it > let it sprout > dry it (collectively known as malting) > soak it in warm water (mashing) > ferment the sugar water. Everything we've done since then basically amounts to process improvements from higher yielding grains with greater diastatic properties (basically, more enzymes for converting starches to sugar), to scaling up the process with steam, electricity, and really big tanks. But the basic process of malt, mash, ferment has been unchanged in at least 5,000 years.

Passing down knowledge of how to ferment something for 1,000 years? That's nothing for humans. We've passed down knowledge of how to make the same style of tools for tens of thousands of years. We've passed down knowledge of how to make cave art, in the same cave system, for thousands of years.

Frankly, we really fucking love getting lit. Really, really love it. The evidence is tilting heavily in favour of us cultivating grains, not for bread or fried rice, but for getting wasted. It is, literally, one of the easiest things in the world of archaeology to imagine we've more or less faithfully passed down knowledge of how to brew over a relatively short timespan like 1,000 years.

I cannot emphasize this enough. We humans love booze. And we are exceptionally clever at making booze out of anything with starch (we can break down starches into sugars with either intensive cooking or enzymes -- see "malting") or sugar.

 

[SomeRandomGuy]

The evidence is tilting heavily in favour of us cultivating grains, not for bread or fried rice, but for getting wasted. ...

Actually it was because water wasnt safe to drink back then untreated so a little wine or other alcoholic beverage mixed with water killed enough pathogens to make the water safe to drink. Even little kids drank this to avoid getting diseases. Some of course loved to drink but there were many people who didnt drink to get drunk. In the Ancient Middle East there were different wines for everyday sanitizing of water then cooking wine and finally the expensive good tasting wines for drinking to merriment.

Ehhhhh, the "booze for clean drinking water" connection is ... a little off until you reach the absolutely repulsive urban living conditions of the industrial revolution. Untreated well / river / standing water has been the standard for us for a very, very long time. And it still is for about a quarter of us. There have been, in recorded history, relatively few people whose sole method of hydration has been booze [edit] because making booze is energy and labour-intensive [edit].

I may have been flippant about my assertion that we were brewing solely to get lit. If you're drinking young, unfiltered booze, you're likely getting a crapton of B vitamins and easier to digest minerals from the yeast and bacteria slurry you're also chugging, but the primary reason to drink booze for the ancients really does appear to have been getting lit. Or, euphemistically, "ceremonial us."

 

[SomeRandomGuy]

The evidence is tilting heavily in favour of us cultivating grains, not for bread or fried rice, but for getting wasted. ...

Actually it was because water wasnt safe to drink back then untreated so a little wine or other alcoholic beverage mixed with water killed enough pathogens to make the water safe to drink. Even little kids drank this to avoid getting diseases. Some of course loved to drink but there were many people who didnt drink to get drunk. In the Ancient Middle East there were different wines for everyday sanitizing of water then cooking wine and finally the expensive good tasting wines for drinking to merriment.

Ehhhhh, the "booze for clean drinking water" connection is ... a little off until you reach the absolutely repulsive urban living conditions of the industrial revolution. Untreated well / river / standing water has been the standard for us for a very, very long time. And it still is for about a quarter of us. There have been, in recorded history, relatively few people whose sole method of hydration has been booze [edit] because making booze is energy and labour-intensive [edit].

I may have been flippant about my assertion that we were brewing solely to get lit. If you're drinking young, unfiltered booze, you're likely getting a crapton of B vitamins and easier to digest minerals from the yeast and bacteria slurry you're also chugging, but the primary reason to drink booze for the ancients really does appear to have been getting lit. Or, euphemistically, "ceremonial us."

Factually incorrect, throughout the European medieval period alcohol was the stranded drink. Small beer was used rather than the stronger ales. The brewing industry was quite literally a cottage industry dominated by women. It's wasn't until the 17th century's urbanisations that much larger breweries run by men as a full time occupation that it changed.

Heh, "relatively few people whose sole method of hydration has been booze." Medieval Europeans are a relatively small number of people. I know the history, that's why I had the weasel sentence in my post.
[edit] And, honestly, we were talking about ancient developments in the boozy arts. My point that we originally developed booze mostly to pursue "ceremonial uses" is, I believe, still standing even with your knockout argument about "medieval Europe."

 

[SomeRandomGuy]

78 million lived in Europe in 1300.

Out of a world population of ~360 million. And it's unclear how many of those medieval Europeans would have used booze as their sole form of hydration. Yeah, about 1/5 of humanity extant at the time is relatively few.

 

[SomeRandomGuy]

Ferment how? Any random yeast or bacteria that falls into it?

That is a very complicated question.

Clearly, "let 'er rip" has been a thing since antiquity, and is still practiced by some lambic breweries and anyone with a wide open coolship.

But ... it's not hard to take the slurry of yeast and bacteria from a good batch of beer and use it to kickstart the next batch. Or even just getting the next batch of wort into the "special vessel" where a nice blend of yeast and bacteria has taken hold. We've likely been doing that since we've been making booze. And repitching yeast (from, usually, a pure culture) is the way we still do things commercially.

 

[SomeRandomGuy]

So beer has been brewed for roughly 5k years... I wonder how long after it was invented there was some variation of

"You think that's hard? Hold my beer..."

5k? Much older than that. Pottery that is around 13k years old has been found with beer residue, and since it was occasionally brewed in stumps and the like it's very probably older than that. Hell, there's rules and procedures about beer in the Code of Hammurabi, as well various other places (up to and including prayers).

As for "Hold my beer", I suspect some variation was grunted out by the very first hominid who discovered inebriation. Wouldn't surprise me if most mammoth hunting parties and the like got ritually buzzed beforehand. (You know, so as to face down a multiton animal using only a burnt stick.)

Absolutely true -- we've been fermenting grains for at least 10,000 years. But the Egyptians appear to have been the first people to systematically malt their grains.* Malting kickstarts the process of enzymatically breaking down proteins and starches (poorly available to yeast and bacteria) into sugars that are good to go for fermentation. If you gelatinize your grain (basically boiling the crap out of it), you can break down many of the starch bonds ... but it's not as efficient as malting and mashing. It's the difference between making oatmeal and making wort (sugar water). It also takes months for yeasts and bacteria to chew through those long chain sugars, but just days to work their way through short chain sugars.

* Big caveat here -- other peoples may have malted their grains earlier. We're really just beginning our deep dive into neolithic booze making.