A Sampling of Historic Spirits, Part 1

Published Aug 24, 2011, 3:32 PM

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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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 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 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, 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. 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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. 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 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.

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