August 24, 2011 • 21 mins
Ancient alcohol can tell us a lot about a society. In this episode, Sarah and Deblina cover millennia-old residues left behind in Chinese pottery, Egyptian jars and more. They also explore the science behind identifying the ingredients of these brews.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm develin a truck recording, and
today we have a fun kind of summary episode. We're
gonna enjoy ourselves a little bit. And the idea for
(00:23):
this episode has been brewing not to make a terrible pun,
for quite some time, actually, since Katie and I did
an episode on chocolate way back in the fall and
a few years ago, just in case you missed that
episode or you want a little context on it, a
few years ago, researchers at Hershey Chocolate and the University
of Pennsylvania Museum did some chemical analysis on these Honduran
(00:46):
pottery shirts dating from about four BC, and they were
these long neck jars from Puerto Escondido, and they showed
they ended up showing traces of THEO broh mean, which
is the fingerprint compound of coco, which is of course
why it came up in the chocolate episode in the
first place. Yeah, so later myans and Aztecs used that cacao,
(01:10):
the cocaw beans to make a frothy chocolate e drink,
adding tasty mixers like honey, chilies, flowers, and a nato,
but the Puerto Escondido didn't show residues from any of
those common additives, just that theobromine, suggesting that this wasn't
an early chocolate drink made from cacao beans. It was
actually an early fermented beverage made from the cocaw pulp.
(01:32):
That cocow pulp from us naturally as well, producing a
five to seven percent alcohol drink. So animals have been
indulging in that for time immemorial. But we're gonna be
talking a little bit about the human side of it.
So drinks that people made on purpose. That Honduran discovery
actually pushed back human cocaw consumption five hundred years and
(01:54):
interestingly also created this offshoot modern beer, which we have
of a cup of today. We're going to be sampling
that while we podcast. We'll we'll sort of rate it
at the end, or maybe just talk about it a
little bit and talk about some other historical drinks. So here,
let's give it acceptively. Now, Oh, it's pretty good, not bad,
(02:15):
all right, So we do have a method to this madness,
though we haven't just gone after every historical find of
alcohol in the past century or whatever. And it's not
just an excuse to drink beer. We we have we
have an order behind all of this. Yeah, we're going
to kind of split up this podcast a little bit
into ancient alcohols or those truly ancient finds that were
(02:38):
found as residues and identified through fingerprint compounds. Like Sarah mentions,
the liquid is all gone exactly, there's no liquid to
work with. But by performing a series of chemical tests,
including mass spectrometry tests UM and other things like that,
research is can i D based components of beer, wine
and other spirits. Yeah, so they're testing the gunk that's
(03:01):
on the bottom of the pottery bowl or the bronze vessel,
and we're going to talk more about that in this episode.
And then gunk is a scientific term. Yes, that's what
we're gonna be using. And then in a later episode
we're going to talk about old alcohol and aged alcohol,
so basically things where there's still some liquid, where it's
still drinkable or I mean, you can define that how
(03:24):
you want. It may not be that tasty anymore, but
alcohol that can be identified by what's still in the bottle.
So these are hundreds of years old or even less
than that, rather than thousands of years old, so researchers
can pop them open still study them chemically, but also
sample them. But for now we're going to stick to
those older, gunkier alcohol varieties. And before we get to
(03:46):
talk about some of those specific fines, how did humans
start brewing alcohol in the first place? Well, fruit actually
from us naturally, right, so many animals were partaking of
that even before where we were creating alcohol on purpose monkeys, birds, elephants,
you name it. But there's a big jump between that
(04:07):
eating a fermented fruit for a buzz and as I mentioned,
purposely creating fermenting beverages. So unfortunately, though, since those early
beverages would have been brewed and consumed and bio degradable
vessels like gourds, we don't really have evidence of them.
We do know this though. The oldest barley beer came
from Iran's Sza Gross Mountains and it's from around thirty
(04:29):
four hundred b C. The oldest grape wine is also
from Zo Gross and it originated around fifty four hundred BC.
And the earliest of any known alcohol came from China
and it dates from around seven thousand b C. And
so we're going to tell you a little bit more
on that to start out with exactly So, until fairly recently,
the oldest known alcohol came from Iran again, and it
(04:52):
was about seven thousand, four hundred years old. But China
was a really good place to go looking for earlier
evidence of alcohol, in part because people started making pottery
there thousands of years before they did in the Near East.
It's quite a startling different difference, in fact, probably about
thirteen thousand BC in China versus six thousand BC in
(05:15):
the Near East. And pottery, I think we mentioned this before,
is great for for testing for traces of alcohol. It
absorbs liquid into its pores, and it's also just really
pretty much indestructible, so it's great for searching for those
fingerprint compounds. And that's exactly what Patrick McGovern of the
University of Pennsylvania Museum did. He took a look at
(05:36):
high necked pottery jars, which were excavated from the Neolithic
village of jia Who in northern China and now gia
Who had already proven to be a treasure trove of
ancient materials containing some of China's oldest pottery evidence of
early rice domestication and the oldest known playable musical instrument
made from a bird's wingbone. But when McGovern found traces
(05:57):
of alcohol in the pottery, shards Gia who also the
came the home of the world's oldest brew, a triple
combo of beer, wine and mead that's about nine thousand
years old, which sounds kind of strange, doesn't it, Beer
wine and meade. McGovern calls it a neolithic grog. Specifically,
it is honey mead, rice grapes, and hawthorn fruit, So
(06:21):
quite a combination. And we're gonna be talking about another
combination right now. The cool thing about studying ancient alcohol
is that many of the samples that you can test
for are already in museums, And it wasn't until about
the nineteen seventies, really the late nineteen eighties that scientists
started seriously trying to identify the contents of ancient vessels,
(06:43):
not just by their shape and size, I know we've
talked about in foura before, but by the chemical makeup
of what's inside. And they actually have the technology to
be able to do so. So case and point, the
tomb of King Midas or potentially his father. I was
suppressed learned King Midus was a real guy. Yeah, I
was too, who was not aware anyway? King Midas or
(07:04):
his father's tomb was excavated in central Turkey way back
in nineteen fifty seven, and it was a very impressive
fine excavators opened the tomb. It was kind of a
king tut situation almost. There was a body laid out
among these beautiful blue and purple claws, and the whole
scene was surrounded by bronze vessels, specifically a hundred and
(07:27):
fifty seven bronze bats and jugs and bowls, and all
of them two thousand, seven hundred years old. An interesting
note on the gold though, there wasn't any gold there. No,
they were bronze but filled with a golden residue, which
is what we're interested in. So forty years later, McGovern
is testing the samples for specific fingerprint compounds such as
(07:49):
tartaric acid, which would come from Middle Eastern grapes or
be indicative of Middle Eastern grapes, bees, wax um which
would be indicative of honey mead, and calcium, a slate
or beer stone, which would indicate the presence of barley beer.
So again, like the Chinese find, Midas's brew must have
been a combo of grape wine, honey, meat, and barley beer.
(08:10):
And it was at this point that McGovern started to
get curious about the taste of a beverage like that,
because it doesn't sound very good, does it. I thought
it sounded okay. I don't know if that's some fruity essence.
Honey always sounds good to me. I'm I'm not exactly
sure what mead tastes like anyway, but I'm just imagining
if you mixed your glass of wine and your bottle
of beer together. Oh yeah, not very good. Not very
(08:32):
McGovern was curious, though, He wanted to know if there
was something better sounding than just nixing your store bought
bruised together, so he announced a competition among microbrewers who
were attending a dinner at the museum and challenged them
with recreating the brew. Dog fish Head Brewery one out
and McGovern helped them create a recreation of Midas's drink.
(08:54):
So just a cool note on this, The bittering agent
used in this drink wasn't hops, which was only introduced
to Europe around seven a D but saffron and I
just made some Moroccan food recently that required having to
buy some saffron, and it is literally the world's most
expensive spice. So this would have been some pretty high
end beer for sure. And it's interesting, much like the
(09:16):
beer we're tasting now. Dog fish Head did a recreation
of this Mida spear called what is it called Midas
Touch Midas Touch. Yeah, And there was this article in
the Smithsonian, the August two thousand eleven issue, so the
most recent issue about this whole process of dog fish
Head recreating these brews. And there's a lot on the
government in his career. And my favorite quote from this
(09:38):
article was a quote from a colleague of McGovern's named
Alexei vron Rich, who is an expert on pre Columbian Peru,
and he said, quote, I keep telling people that beer
is more important than armies when it comes to understanding people,
and that's true. It really does teach us not just
about the society, but their agricultural abilities, their trade, their
(09:59):
religio and what sort of traditions they had. And it
even teaches us a little bit about what kind of
medical knowledge they had, which I found to be a
really interesting discovery in this podcast that beer or alcohol
was even known to very ancient people as having some
sort of beneficial properties to it. And it brings us
(10:20):
to the next entry on this list, which is an
ancient beer. And just to give you a little background
on this, for more than twenty years, every University anthropologist
George arm Lagos and his team had been studying bones
dated to between a d. Three fifty and five fifty
from Nubia, an ancient kingdom south of ancient Egypt along
(10:41):
the Nile River. And this was long ago, maybe the
early eighties, when they found traces of the antibiotic tetracycline
in the bones. Now today, tetracycline is actually used from
everything from acne flare ups to urinary tract infections, and
it only came into commercial use about half a entry ago,
because after all, Alexander Fleming only discovered penicillin back in right. So,
(11:06):
of course this could have an impact on the study
of the relationship between microbes and antibiotics, but it also
makes you wonder how did the tetracycline get into these
bones in the first place. It was in more than
of the bones. They were looking at including those of
a toddler. So Armlogus, who specializes in reconstructing ancient diets,
proposed that the Nubians made the tetracycline in their beer.
(11:31):
But the way he reached that conclusion is pretty interesting.
So tetracycline is produced by a soil bacteria that's called streptomiases,
and that bacteria really thrives in warm, arid climates like
that of ancient Nubia. So according to arm Lagos, the
ancient Nubians store their grain in mud ben so there
(11:52):
was a pretty high chance that the grain could have
been contaminated by this bacteria. And in looking at how
the grain was used, they came across a recipe for beer,
because back then beer was probably a tastier way of
consuming the grain rather than eating it. So it's pretty
likely that the contaminated grain in turn contaminated a batch
(12:12):
of beer. And there you go. So once the Nubians
noticed that that beer made them feel better and cured
maybe some bacterial infections they might have had, they started
to propagate it. Now you may wonder could they have
actually had the skills to propagate that, And researchers have
kind of answered this. They said that they probably did
know how to propagate beer because they were doing the
same thing with wine and streptomyces produces a golden colored
(12:34):
bacterial colony that would have floated on top of the beer,
and since ancient cultures revered gold, this was probably another
reason that they encouraged propagation of it too. Yeah, definitely,
and arm Lagos co authored a study about this with
chemist Mark Nelson, which was published in the American Journal
of Physical Anthropology in June two thousand tents, so just
last year. And to prove that that antibiotic beer was possible,
(12:56):
Armilagos actually had as grad students try to make it,
which I think sounds really fun. But it wasn't beer
as we think of it today. This this beer from
the past. It was more like a serial gruel our,
Malagas explains, and a quote of his and wired describes
the taste. Thus he says, my students said that it
was quote not bad, but it is like a sour
(13:17):
porridge substance. The ancient people would have drained the liquid
off and also eaten the gruel, and so children would
have probably been allowed to eat the stuff left over
the bottom of the vat too. I think that not
bad quote requires like a certain kind of intonation depending
on how you're gonna are gonna see. It doesn't sound
good to me. Maybe depends on your taste level, I
guess though. It reminded me though, if the dog fish
(13:38):
had founder. He actually described that to modern palettes, a
lot of these ancient brews wouldn't be good at all.
They would have these thick lumps in them, and people
actually drank them with straws to filter all of that out.
And I don't know if I found a lump in
my drink unless it's bubble tea, I don't know. I'm
just imagining, like if you pour a beer in oatmeal.
(14:02):
Oh no, that's what it sounds to me when he
says a serial gruel. But maybe not. Maybe I'm off
on that. So we're not sure why the antibiotic beer
secret was lost to us. But our melogus is looking
for the tetracycling and bones of different cultures and he's
found evidences Latest fourteen hundred a D. So this is
still kind of a developing story, alright. So moving on,
(14:24):
we have another medicinal sort of alcohol, although this time
it is wine rather than beer, or rather than beer
poured in oatmeal is descraged it. So in nineteen German
archaeologists found a flakey yellow residue in a jar found
in the tomb belonging to King Scorpion, the first in Egypt,
(14:45):
and that tomb was built at about thirty one fifty BC,
so pretty ancient as far as the fines we've talked
about so far go. Working with a German group in
two thousand one, McGovern, who we keep on bringing up here,
determined that a residue had contained salt crystals that were
left behind when tartaric acid in grapes breaks down, and
(15:07):
that was evident that the wine, which is Egypt's oldest wine,
had been kept in the jar. But he didn't stop there.
McGovern and his colleagues used several chemical techniques to tease
out the other biological additives and match them two known plants.
The tests that they performed indicated the presence of tree
resin and also several herbs. The test they did, though
(15:27):
weren't precise enough to figure out the exact herbs that
were used, but probably things like bombs, senna, coriander, mint, sage,
and time, all of which show up in ancient Egyptian
medical writings as treatments for a number of ailments. So
McGovern says, while these ingredients would have added flavor, they
were most likely chosen for their medicinal benefits. The jar
(15:49):
apparently also had an ancient label of sorts, maybe a
wine label we could call it, that identified it as
an herbal wine. Alright, So going back though, papyrus records
from is far back as eighteen fifty BC do make
reference to medicinal lines being used to treat various ailments,
and somehow the ancient Egyptians figured out that the alcohol
(16:10):
would preserve those herbal remedies and make them more potent.
It was a good delivery system essentially. But this new
discovery pushes back the use of medicinal lines fifteen hundred years, which,
according to National Geographic predates the advent of Egyptian vineyards.
Even so, that date means that these lines were obviously
(16:30):
not made in Egypt or grown in Egypt. At least,
they were instead imports from the Jordan River valley, which
obviously influenced the Egyptian farm a copia. These findings were
published in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
in April two thousand nine, and again with like the beer.
Researchers are still testing these wine medicine recipes and trying
(16:52):
to figure out why Egyptians found them useful and if
they could still be useful today if you hit on
the right recipe, could they help med some modern day elements? Well,
I think that about the antibiotic one too. That an
antibiotic could be delivered through a beer is kind of
an interesting twist on the pharmaceutical industry. Would probably make
(17:13):
a lot of people want to take their medicine probably, Yeah,
but well that's a major problem people not finishing your
course of antibiotics. But yeah, I'm probably getting ahead of myself.
We promised though that we would discuss this drink a
little bit, which is a dog fish head and it
is uh the same company that made the Midas Touch
as we mentioned, and works a lot with McGovern, the
archaeologist who keeps popping up. And it's called Via Broma
(17:37):
and it is the recreated version of the ancient Honduran
drink we started out with. And they couldn't use fresh
cacao fruit though from Honduras because it would go bad.
They've got to be able to make large enough batches
to sell this stuff. They're based in Delaware. I managed
to find it in Atlanta, so they can't have this
(17:57):
um spoiling fruit as the base of it. Instead, they
used Aztec chocolate, nibs and powder, and the bitterness is
offset by honey and corn. I was expecting it to
be pretty bitter because of the chocolate, but it's not.
It's not at all. I don't taste the chili after
taste though I don't either, but I'm not I'm not
(18:18):
very good at identifying specific flavors. I don't think I
am either. Maybe we're a bad pair to be doing this,
and very refined palate. But I do like it, I
can say I. Usually I was telling Sarah, I don't
like things that are fruity or spicy or otherwise flavors.
Really like things that are chocolate, at least if they're
alcohol based. But this doesn't seem that way. It's not
(18:38):
overpowering at all. And conveniently, it's called the drink of
the God. That's what the abroma means. So yeah, not
too bad, and I mean that not in a rule
the air kind of way. Yes, this is nothing like
beer and oatmeal, and I'm really sorry if we created
a bad visual for anyone, but we are going to
leave you on that note. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately if
(19:00):
you're interested in trying this beer. We're gonna now move
on to a listener mail. So, in keeping with the
idea of the Ancient America's since we just talked about
a Honduran influenced beer, we have a three part listener
mail from listeners Debbie and John and they actually sent
us three postcards from the Cookey Amounts because we did
a podcast on that recently and inspired them to visit.
(19:23):
And so I'm not gonna be able to read the
whole thing because it's kind of long, but I'm going
to read a couple parts of it. I'm going to
read what they just the introduction and then what they saw.
So she says, Hi, ladies, I'm sending three postcards of
our trip to Kahkia, so you can see the photo
view of the largest mound as it looks today, as
well as an artist rendering of how the area looked
when it was an ancient city. We were inspired to
(19:44):
take a road trip there by your podcast on the
city as well as a co worker who mentioned that
his uncle was an archaeologist at the University of Illinois.
The site was very interesting, with many displays of items
that were unearthed during the construction in the area and digs.
Although I always thought I would need to go outside
the US to see the history of a couple hundred
years old, I never knew I lived just a few
hundred miles from such a large ancient city. So thanks
(20:07):
for making us aware. We've really heard from a lot
of people who have gone ahead and made a trip
to Kahokia because they don't live too far and they
some of have even driven by before but have finally
decided to pull over and see it. Yeah, and it
looks like it's worth it. That photo on the first postcard,
which shows the mounts today is amazing. I really like
(20:27):
the artist rendition too, with the all the people and
buildings surrounding it too. Yeah. We may have to take
some photos of these to put on Facebook for everyone
to check out. But thank you Debbie and John for
sending these to us. I'm letting us know about your trip.
We appreciate that if you have any exciting travels that
you want to share with us maybe based on podcasts,
but they don't necessarily have to be based on previous podcasts.
(20:48):
Please go ahead and email us at History podcast at
house to works dot com, or you can look us
up on Twitter at Miston History or on Facebook. And
in the meantime, if you want to learn a little
bit more about how beer works, we've you have an
article on that topic. You can find it by searching
for how beer Works on the homepage at www dot
how stuff works dot com. Be sure to check out
(21:13):
our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how
Stuff Work staff as we explore the most promising and
perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The House Stuff Works iPhone app
has arrived. Download it today on iTunes.
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm develin a truck recording, and
today we have a fun kind of summary episode. We're
gonna enjoy ourselves a little bit. And the idea for
(00:23):
this episode has been brewing not to make a terrible pun,
for quite some time, actually, since Katie and I did
an episode on chocolate way back in the fall and
a few years ago, just in case you missed that
episode or you want a little context on it, a
few years ago, researchers at Hershey Chocolate and the University
of Pennsylvania Museum did some chemical analysis on these Honduran
(00:46):
pottery shirts dating from about four BC, and they were
these long neck jars from Puerto Escondido, and they showed
they ended up showing traces of THEO broh mean, which
is the fingerprint compound of coco, which is of course
why it came up in the chocolate episode in the
first place. Yeah, so later myans and Aztecs used that cacao,
(01:10):
the cocaw beans to make a frothy chocolate e drink,
adding tasty mixers like honey, chilies, flowers, and a nato,
but the Puerto Escondido didn't show residues from any of
those common additives, just that theobromine, suggesting that this wasn't
an early chocolate drink made from cacao beans. It was
actually an early fermented beverage made from the cocaw pulp.
(01:32):
That cocow pulp from us naturally as well, producing a
five to seven percent alcohol drink. So animals have been
indulging in that for time immemorial. But we're gonna be
talking a little bit about the human side of it.
So drinks that people made on purpose. That Honduran discovery
actually pushed back human cocaw consumption five hundred years and
(01:54):
interestingly also created this offshoot modern beer, which we have
of a cup of today. We're going to be sampling
that while we podcast. We'll we'll sort of rate it
at the end, or maybe just talk about it a
little bit and talk about some other historical drinks. So here,
let's give it acceptively. Now, Oh, it's pretty good, not bad,
(02:15):
all right, So we do have a method to this madness,
though we haven't just gone after every historical find of
alcohol in the past century or whatever. And it's not
just an excuse to drink beer. We we have we
have an order behind all of this. Yeah, we're going
to kind of split up this podcast a little bit
into ancient alcohols or those truly ancient finds that were
(02:38):
found as residues and identified through fingerprint compounds. Like Sarah mentions,
the liquid is all gone exactly, there's no liquid to
work with. But by performing a series of chemical tests,
including mass spectrometry tests UM and other things like that,
research is can i D based components of beer, wine
and other spirits. Yeah, so they're testing the gunk that's
(03:01):
on the bottom of the pottery bowl or the bronze vessel,
and we're going to talk more about that in this episode.
And then gunk is a scientific term. Yes, that's what
we're gonna be using. And then in a later episode
we're going to talk about old alcohol and aged alcohol,
so basically things where there's still some liquid, where it's
still drinkable or I mean, you can define that how
(03:24):
you want. It may not be that tasty anymore, but
alcohol that can be identified by what's still in the bottle.
So these are hundreds of years old or even less
than that, rather than thousands of years old, so researchers
can pop them open still study them chemically, but also
sample them. But for now we're going to stick to
those older, gunkier alcohol varieties. And before we get to
(03:46):
talk about some of those specific fines, how did humans
start brewing alcohol in the first place? Well, fruit actually
from us naturally, right, so many animals were partaking of
that even before where we were creating alcohol on purpose monkeys, birds, elephants,
you name it. But there's a big jump between that
(04:07):
eating a fermented fruit for a buzz and as I mentioned,
purposely creating fermenting beverages. So unfortunately, though, since those early
beverages would have been brewed and consumed and bio degradable
vessels like gourds, we don't really have evidence of them.
We do know this though. The oldest barley beer came
from Iran's Sza Gross Mountains and it's from around thirty
(04:29):
four hundred b C. The oldest grape wine is also
from Zo Gross and it originated around fifty four hundred BC.
And the earliest of any known alcohol came from China
and it dates from around seven thousand b C. And
so we're going to tell you a little bit more
on that to start out with exactly So, until fairly recently,
the oldest known alcohol came from Iran again, and it
(04:52):
was about seven thousand, four hundred years old. But China
was a really good place to go looking for earlier
evidence of alcohol, in part because people started making pottery
there thousands of years before they did in the Near East.
It's quite a startling different difference, in fact, probably about
thirteen thousand BC in China versus six thousand BC in
(05:15):
the Near East. And pottery, I think we mentioned this before,
is great for for testing for traces of alcohol. It
absorbs liquid into its pores, and it's also just really
pretty much indestructible, so it's great for searching for those
fingerprint compounds. And that's exactly what Patrick McGovern of the
University of Pennsylvania Museum did. He took a look at
(05:36):
high necked pottery jars, which were excavated from the Neolithic
village of jia Who in northern China and now gia
Who had already proven to be a treasure trove of
ancient materials containing some of China's oldest pottery evidence of
early rice domestication and the oldest known playable musical instrument
made from a bird's wingbone. But when McGovern found traces
(05:57):
of alcohol in the pottery, shards Gia who also the
came the home of the world's oldest brew, a triple
combo of beer, wine and mead that's about nine thousand
years old, which sounds kind of strange, doesn't it, Beer
wine and meade. McGovern calls it a neolithic grog. Specifically,
it is honey mead, rice grapes, and hawthorn fruit, So
(06:21):
quite a combination. And we're gonna be talking about another
combination right now. The cool thing about studying ancient alcohol
is that many of the samples that you can test
for are already in museums, And it wasn't until about
the nineteen seventies, really the late nineteen eighties that scientists
started seriously trying to identify the contents of ancient vessels,
(06:43):
not just by their shape and size, I know we've
talked about in foura before, but by the chemical makeup
of what's inside. And they actually have the technology to
be able to do so. So case and point, the
tomb of King Midas or potentially his father. I was
suppressed learned King Midus was a real guy. Yeah, I
was too, who was not aware anyway? King Midas or
(07:04):
his father's tomb was excavated in central Turkey way back
in nineteen fifty seven, and it was a very impressive
fine excavators opened the tomb. It was kind of a
king tut situation almost. There was a body laid out
among these beautiful blue and purple claws, and the whole
scene was surrounded by bronze vessels, specifically a hundred and
(07:27):
fifty seven bronze bats and jugs and bowls, and all
of them two thousand, seven hundred years old. An interesting
note on the gold though, there wasn't any gold there. No,
they were bronze but filled with a golden residue, which
is what we're interested in. So forty years later, McGovern
is testing the samples for specific fingerprint compounds such as
(07:49):
tartaric acid, which would come from Middle Eastern grapes or
be indicative of Middle Eastern grapes, bees, wax um which
would be indicative of honey mead, and calcium, a slate
or beer stone, which would indicate the presence of barley beer.
So again, like the Chinese find, Midas's brew must have
been a combo of grape wine, honey, meat, and barley beer.
(08:10):
And it was at this point that McGovern started to
get curious about the taste of a beverage like that,
because it doesn't sound very good, does it. I thought
it sounded okay. I don't know if that's some fruity essence.
Honey always sounds good to me. I'm I'm not exactly
sure what mead tastes like anyway, but I'm just imagining
if you mixed your glass of wine and your bottle
of beer together. Oh yeah, not very good. Not very
(08:32):
McGovern was curious, though, He wanted to know if there
was something better sounding than just nixing your store bought
bruised together, so he announced a competition among microbrewers who
were attending a dinner at the museum and challenged them
with recreating the brew. Dog fish Head Brewery one out
and McGovern helped them create a recreation of Midas's drink.
(08:54):
So just a cool note on this, The bittering agent
used in this drink wasn't hops, which was only introduced
to Europe around seven a D but saffron and I
just made some Moroccan food recently that required having to
buy some saffron, and it is literally the world's most
expensive spice. So this would have been some pretty high
end beer for sure. And it's interesting, much like the
(09:16):
beer we're tasting now. Dog fish Head did a recreation
of this Mida spear called what is it called Midas
Touch Midas Touch. Yeah, And there was this article in
the Smithsonian, the August two thousand eleven issue, so the
most recent issue about this whole process of dog fish
Head recreating these brews. And there's a lot on the
government in his career. And my favorite quote from this
(09:38):
article was a quote from a colleague of McGovern's named
Alexei vron Rich, who is an expert on pre Columbian Peru,
and he said, quote, I keep telling people that beer
is more important than armies when it comes to understanding people,
and that's true. It really does teach us not just
about the society, but their agricultural abilities, their trade, their
(09:59):
religio and what sort of traditions they had. And it
even teaches us a little bit about what kind of
medical knowledge they had, which I found to be a
really interesting discovery in this podcast that beer or alcohol
was even known to very ancient people as having some
sort of beneficial properties to it. And it brings us
(10:20):
to the next entry on this list, which is an
ancient beer. And just to give you a little background
on this, for more than twenty years, every University anthropologist
George arm Lagos and his team had been studying bones
dated to between a d. Three fifty and five fifty
from Nubia, an ancient kingdom south of ancient Egypt along
(10:41):
the Nile River. And this was long ago, maybe the
early eighties, when they found traces of the antibiotic tetracycline
in the bones. Now today, tetracycline is actually used from
everything from acne flare ups to urinary tract infections, and
it only came into commercial use about half a entry ago,
because after all, Alexander Fleming only discovered penicillin back in right. So,
(11:06):
of course this could have an impact on the study
of the relationship between microbes and antibiotics, but it also
makes you wonder how did the tetracycline get into these
bones in the first place. It was in more than
of the bones. They were looking at including those of
a toddler. So Armlogus, who specializes in reconstructing ancient diets,
proposed that the Nubians made the tetracycline in their beer.
(11:31):
But the way he reached that conclusion is pretty interesting.
So tetracycline is produced by a soil bacteria that's called streptomiases,
and that bacteria really thrives in warm, arid climates like
that of ancient Nubia. So according to arm Lagos, the
ancient Nubians store their grain in mud ben so there
(11:52):
was a pretty high chance that the grain could have
been contaminated by this bacteria. And in looking at how
the grain was used, they came across a recipe for beer,
because back then beer was probably a tastier way of
consuming the grain rather than eating it. So it's pretty
likely that the contaminated grain in turn contaminated a batch
(12:12):
of beer. And there you go. So once the Nubians
noticed that that beer made them feel better and cured
maybe some bacterial infections they might have had, they started
to propagate it. Now you may wonder could they have
actually had the skills to propagate that, And researchers have
kind of answered this. They said that they probably did
know how to propagate beer because they were doing the
same thing with wine and streptomyces produces a golden colored
(12:34):
bacterial colony that would have floated on top of the beer,
and since ancient cultures revered gold, this was probably another
reason that they encouraged propagation of it too. Yeah, definitely,
and arm Lagos co authored a study about this with
chemist Mark Nelson, which was published in the American Journal
of Physical Anthropology in June two thousand tents, so just
last year. And to prove that that antibiotic beer was possible,
(12:56):
Armilagos actually had as grad students try to make it,
which I think sounds really fun. But it wasn't beer
as we think of it today. This this beer from
the past. It was more like a serial gruel our,
Malagas explains, and a quote of his and wired describes
the taste. Thus he says, my students said that it
was quote not bad, but it is like a sour
(13:17):
porridge substance. The ancient people would have drained the liquid
off and also eaten the gruel, and so children would
have probably been allowed to eat the stuff left over
the bottom of the vat too. I think that not
bad quote requires like a certain kind of intonation depending
on how you're gonna are gonna see. It doesn't sound
good to me. Maybe depends on your taste level, I
guess though. It reminded me though, if the dog fish
(13:38):
had founder. He actually described that to modern palettes, a
lot of these ancient brews wouldn't be good at all.
They would have these thick lumps in them, and people
actually drank them with straws to filter all of that out.
And I don't know if I found a lump in
my drink unless it's bubble tea, I don't know. I'm
just imagining, like if you pour a beer in oatmeal.
(14:02):
Oh no, that's what it sounds to me when he
says a serial gruel. But maybe not. Maybe I'm off
on that. So we're not sure why the antibiotic beer
secret was lost to us. But our melogus is looking
for the tetracycling and bones of different cultures and he's
found evidences Latest fourteen hundred a D. So this is
still kind of a developing story, alright. So moving on,
(14:24):
we have another medicinal sort of alcohol, although this time
it is wine rather than beer, or rather than beer
poured in oatmeal is descraged it. So in nineteen German
archaeologists found a flakey yellow residue in a jar found
in the tomb belonging to King Scorpion, the first in Egypt,
(14:45):
and that tomb was built at about thirty one fifty BC,
so pretty ancient as far as the fines we've talked
about so far go. Working with a German group in
two thousand one, McGovern, who we keep on bringing up here,
determined that a residue had contained salt crystals that were
left behind when tartaric acid in grapes breaks down, and
(15:07):
that was evident that the wine, which is Egypt's oldest wine,
had been kept in the jar. But he didn't stop there.
McGovern and his colleagues used several chemical techniques to tease
out the other biological additives and match them two known plants.
The tests that they performed indicated the presence of tree
resin and also several herbs. The test they did, though
(15:27):
weren't precise enough to figure out the exact herbs that
were used, but probably things like bombs, senna, coriander, mint, sage,
and time, all of which show up in ancient Egyptian
medical writings as treatments for a number of ailments. So
McGovern says, while these ingredients would have added flavor, they
were most likely chosen for their medicinal benefits. The jar
(15:49):
apparently also had an ancient label of sorts, maybe a
wine label we could call it, that identified it as
an herbal wine. Alright, So going back though, papyrus records
from is far back as eighteen fifty BC do make
reference to medicinal lines being used to treat various ailments,
and somehow the ancient Egyptians figured out that the alcohol
(16:10):
would preserve those herbal remedies and make them more potent.
It was a good delivery system essentially. But this new
discovery pushes back the use of medicinal lines fifteen hundred years, which,
according to National Geographic predates the advent of Egyptian vineyards.
Even so, that date means that these lines were obviously
(16:30):
not made in Egypt or grown in Egypt. At least,
they were instead imports from the Jordan River valley, which
obviously influenced the Egyptian farm a copia. These findings were
published in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
in April two thousand nine, and again with like the beer.
Researchers are still testing these wine medicine recipes and trying
(16:52):
to figure out why Egyptians found them useful and if
they could still be useful today if you hit on
the right recipe, could they help med some modern day elements? Well,
I think that about the antibiotic one too. That an
antibiotic could be delivered through a beer is kind of
an interesting twist on the pharmaceutical industry. Would probably make
(17:13):
a lot of people want to take their medicine probably, Yeah,
but well that's a major problem people not finishing your
course of antibiotics. But yeah, I'm probably getting ahead of myself.
We promised though that we would discuss this drink a
little bit, which is a dog fish head and it
is uh the same company that made the Midas Touch
as we mentioned, and works a lot with McGovern, the
archaeologist who keeps popping up. And it's called Via Broma
(17:37):
and it is the recreated version of the ancient Honduran
drink we started out with. And they couldn't use fresh
cacao fruit though from Honduras because it would go bad.
They've got to be able to make large enough batches
to sell this stuff. They're based in Delaware. I managed
to find it in Atlanta, so they can't have this
(17:57):
um spoiling fruit as the base of it. Instead, they
used Aztec chocolate, nibs and powder, and the bitterness is
offset by honey and corn. I was expecting it to
be pretty bitter because of the chocolate, but it's not.
It's not at all. I don't taste the chili after
taste though I don't either, but I'm not I'm not
(18:18):
very good at identifying specific flavors. I don't think I
am either. Maybe we're a bad pair to be doing this,
and very refined palate. But I do like it, I
can say I. Usually I was telling Sarah, I don't
like things that are fruity or spicy or otherwise flavors.
Really like things that are chocolate, at least if they're
alcohol based. But this doesn't seem that way. It's not
(18:38):
overpowering at all. And conveniently, it's called the drink of
the God. That's what the abroma means. So yeah, not
too bad, and I mean that not in a rule
the air kind of way. Yes, this is nothing like
beer and oatmeal, and I'm really sorry if we created
a bad visual for anyone, but we are going to
leave you on that note. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately if
(19:00):
you're interested in trying this beer. We're gonna now move
on to a listener mail. So, in keeping with the
idea of the Ancient America's since we just talked about
a Honduran influenced beer, we have a three part listener
mail from listeners Debbie and John and they actually sent
us three postcards from the Cookey Amounts because we did
a podcast on that recently and inspired them to visit.
(19:23):
And so I'm not gonna be able to read the
whole thing because it's kind of long, but I'm going
to read a couple parts of it. I'm going to
read what they just the introduction and then what they saw.
So she says, Hi, ladies, I'm sending three postcards of
our trip to Kahkia, so you can see the photo
view of the largest mound as it looks today, as
well as an artist rendering of how the area looked
when it was an ancient city. We were inspired to
(19:44):
take a road trip there by your podcast on the
city as well as a co worker who mentioned that
his uncle was an archaeologist at the University of Illinois.
The site was very interesting, with many displays of items
that were unearthed during the construction in the area and digs.
Although I always thought I would need to go outside
the US to see the history of a couple hundred
years old, I never knew I lived just a few
hundred miles from such a large ancient city. So thanks
(20:07):
for making us aware. We've really heard from a lot
of people who have gone ahead and made a trip
to Kahokia because they don't live too far and they
some of have even driven by before but have finally
decided to pull over and see it. Yeah, and it
looks like it's worth it. That photo on the first postcard,
which shows the mounts today is amazing. I really like
(20:27):
the artist rendition too, with the all the people and
buildings surrounding it too. Yeah. We may have to take
some photos of these to put on Facebook for everyone
to check out. But thank you Debbie and John for
sending these to us. I'm letting us know about your trip.
We appreciate that if you have any exciting travels that
you want to share with us maybe based on podcasts,
but they don't necessarily have to be based on previous podcasts.
(20:48):
Please go ahead and email us at History podcast at
house to works dot com, or you can look us
up on Twitter at Miston History or on Facebook. And
in the meantime, if you want to learn a little
bit more about how beer works, we've you have an
article on that topic. You can find it by searching
for how beer Works on the homepage at www dot
how stuff works dot com. Be sure to check out
(21:13):
our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how
Stuff Work staff as we explore the most promising and
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