Chinese were making fermented drinks long ago

• Chemical analyses of ancient organics absorbed, and preserved, in pottery jars from the Neolithic village of Jiahu in Northern China have revealed that a mixed fermented beverage of rice, honey and fruit was being produced as early as 9,000 years ago, approximately the same time that barley beer and grape wine were beginning to be made in the Middle East.
• In addition, liquids more than 3,000 years old, remarkably preserved inside tightly lidded bronze vessels, were chemically analyzed.
• The beverages had been flavored with herbs, flowers and/or tree resins.
• The new discoveries, made by an international, multi-disciplinary team of researchers, including the University of Pennsylvania Museum's archaeochemist Patrick McGovern of the Museum Applied Science Center for Archaeology, provide the first direct chemical evidence for early fermented beverages in ancient Chinese culture, thus broadening understanding of the key technological and cultural roles that fermented beverages played in China.
• The prehistoric beverage at Jiahu, McGovern said, paved the way for unique cereal beverages of the proto-historic second millennium B.C., remarkably preserved as liquids inside sealed bronze vessels of the Shang and Western Zhou dynasties.
• Both jiu and chang of proto-historic China were likely made by mold saccharification, a uniquely Chinese contribution to beverage-making in which an assemblage of mold species are used to break down the carbohydrates of rice and other grains into simple, fermentable sugars.
• Yeast for fermentation of the simple sugars enters the process adventitiously, either brought in by insects or settling on to large and small cakes of the mold conglomerate, qu, from the rafters of old buildings.
• That finding was followed up by the earliest chemically confirmed barley beer in 1992, inside another vessel from the same room at Godin Tepe that housed the wine jars.