The prehistoric beverage at Jiahu, Dr. McGovern asserts, paved the way for unique cereal beverages of the proto-historic 2nd millennium BCE, remarkably preserved as liquids inside sealed bronze vessels of the Shang and Western Zhou Dynasties. The vessels had become hermetically sealed when their tightly fitting lids corroded, preventing evaporation. Numerous bronze vessels with these liquids have been excavated at major urban centers along the Yellow River, especially from elite burials of high-ranking individuals.
Besides serving as burial goods to sustain the dead in the afterlife, the vessels and their contents can also be related to funerary ceremonies in which living intermediaries communicated with the deceased ancestor and gods in an altered state of consciousness after imbibing a fermented beverage. McGovern noted. Samples of liquid inside vessels from the important capital of Anyang and the Changzikou Tomb in Luyi county were analyzed.
The combined archaeochemical, archaeobotanical and archaeological evidence for the Changzikou Tomb and Anyang liquids point to their being fermented and filtered rice or millet "wines," either jiu or chang, its herbal equivalent, according to the Shang Dynasty oracle inscriptions.
Specific aromatic herbs e. 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.
As many as special herbs, including wormwood, are used today to make qu, and some have been shown to increase the yeast activity by as much as seven-fold. For Dr. McGovern, who began his role in the Chinese wine studies in , this discovery offers an exciting new chapter in our rapidly growing understanding of the importance of fermented beverages in human culture around the world.
In , he and colleagues Rudolph H. Michel and Virginia R. Through this ten step reaction, a molecule of glucose is split into two molecules of pyruvate.
Glycolysis does not require oxygen, and is found in every living organism on earth, suggesting it was one of the first biochemical pathways to evolve. The fate of pyruvate, however, is dictated by the presence or absence of oxygen. When oxygen, an electron acceptor, is present, the pyruvate will shuttle into aerobic cellular respiration pathways — the Krebs Cycle and Electron Transport Chain — to generate ATP. In the absence of oxygen, however, pyruvate molecules will enter the fermentation cascade.
Some microorganisms have evolved a level of metabolic flexibility, allowing them to switch between aerobic respiration and fermentation. As such, these microorganisms are classified as facultative anaerobes. However, other microorganisms are poisoned by oxygen, and can only undergo anaerobic respiration. In this case, the microorganisms are obligate anaerobes. For both facultative anaerobes and obligate anaerobes, the process of fermentation serves to recycle the products of glycolytic reaction, ensuring that cells can continue producing ATP.
When oxygen is not present, glycolysis is the primary energy producing mechanism, generating 2 net molecules of ATP per molecule of glucose. In addition to having access to a sugar, glycolysis requires the coenzyme nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide NAD. In many organisms, this is accomplished by fermentation. The applications of fermentation chemistry are many and varied, and extend beyond the kitchen.
However, for the purposes of this discussion, we will focus on the fermentation reactions harnessed for culinary functions, namely the production of lactic acid and ethanol. The conversion of pyruvate to lactic acid occurs directly via the enzymatic action of lactate dehydrogenase. The Lactobacillales order, also known as Lactic Acid Bacteria LAB , is a collection of gram positive bacteria that produce lactic acid at the end of carbohydrate fermentation cascades.
As such, lactic acid fermentation has been used by countless cultures for centuries for food preservation. More recently, LAB bacteria have been shown to be a ubiquitous part of a healthy microflora profile in the human intestinal tract, contributing to their notoriety.
Common foods containing LAB are yogurt, kimchi, sauerkraut, and lambic beer. The transformation of pyruvate to ethanol and carbon dioxide occurs over two steps.
First, the carboxyl group is removed from pyruvate by pyruvate decarboxylase to yield acetaldehyde and carbon dioxide this step is why alcoholic beverages can be carbonated.
Furthermore, this process is essential for breadmaking. While the majority of ethanol is cooked out of bread, the release of CO 2 during the ethanol fermentation process is what makes loaves fluffy.
From a culinary standpoint, this creates an opportunity to create a vast array of food products and flavor profiles. Many of us have enjoyed the fruits of microorganism labor, and it is estimated that as much as one third of all food consumed by humans on planet earth is fermented Pickles, olives, bread, beer, wine, chocolate, coffee, vinegar, soy sauce… All of these delicious foods, as well as many, many other types of ferments, are the result of shuttling pyruvate into some fermentation cascade.
Other times, a well-defined and characterized starter culture is used to create specific fermented food products. It should be mentioned that fermentation is useful in industrial settings, too, and many biotechnology companies are pouring incredible resources into the research and development of industrial fermentation i. Regardless of strategy, it is important to remember that microorganisms in nature do not exist in monoculture — meaning, in any given ecological setting, there are a variety of microorganism species living and working together in response to their environmental conditions.
Update your browser to view this website correctly. Update my browser now. The organizers of the feast, they say, were using the barbecue and the booze brewed from wild grains as a reward. The outlines of the deal have changed little in the thousands of years since.
Demand for reliable supplies pushed humans first to plant the wild grasses and then over time to selectively breed them into the high-yielding barley, wheat, and other grains we know today. The coincidence is suggestive. But proof is elusive. Patrick McGovern acknowledges the uncertainty but still says the beer-before-bread theory is solid.
The people there had only recently made the transition to farming. Alcoholic beverages, like agriculture, were invented independently many different times, likely on every continent save Antarctica. Over the millennia nearly every plant with some sugar or starch has been pressed into service for fermentation: agave and apples, birch tree sap and bananas, cocoa and cassavas, corn and cacti, molle berries, rice, sweet potatoes, peach palms, pineapples, pumpkins, persimmons, and wild grapes.
As if to prove that the desire for alcohol knows no bounds, the nomads of Central Asia make up for the lack of fruit and grain on their steppes by fermenting horse milk. The result, koumiss, is a tangy drink with the alcohol content of a weak beer.
People drank the stuff for the same reason primates ate fermented fruit: because it was good for them. That antimicrobial effect benefits the drinker. It explains why beer, wine, and other fermented beverages were, at least until the rise of modern sanitation, often healthier to drink than water. They produce all kinds of nutrients, including such B vitamins as folic acid, niacin, thiamine, and riboflavin. Those nutrients would have been more present in ancient brews than in our modern filtered and pasteurized varieties.
In the ancient Near East at least, beer was a sort of enriched liquid bread, providing calories, hydration, and essential vitamins. At Tall Bazi, a site in northern Syria, a German excavation revealed a clutch of about 70 houses overlooking the Euphrates River that were abandoned during a sudden fire almost 3, years ago. In each house, usually close to the front door, the excavators found a huge, gallon clay jar sunk into the floor.
Chemical analysis—by Zarnkow again—revealed traces of barley and thick crusts of oxalate in the jars. By B. Beer was such a necessity in Egypt that royals were buried with miniature breweries to slake their thirst in the afterlife. In ancient Babylon beer was so important that sources from B.
Adelheid Otto, an archaeologist at Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich who co-directs excavations at Tall Bazi, thinks the nutrients that fermenting added to early grain made Mesopotamian civilization viable, providing basic vitamins missing from what was otherwise a depressingly bad diet. And then, of course, there is the other side of the story. There are the lengths to which people throughout history have gone to go on a bender. Before the Celtic ancestors of the French learned to produce wine themselves, they imported it from the Greeks, Etruscans, and Romans.
In a wheat field at the end of a winding mountain road in central France, at an archaeological site called Corent, I get a taste of this dependency. My guide is Matthieu Poux, a Franco-Swiss archaeologist with a crew cut, blue aviator shades that match his shirt, and a firm handshake.
At Corent, Poux leads some 50 French archaeologists and students who are uncovering the foundations of a major Celtic ceremonial center and regional capital. In the second and first centuries B. The town had a marketplace, a temple, taverns, a theater, and hundreds of houses. Around B. The evidence, in the shape of shattered clay wine jars, or amphorae, is so abundant that it crunches underfoot as Poux leads me across the site. Archaeologists have uncovered at least 50 tons of broken amphorae here; Poux estimates that tons more remain on the hilltop.
Bending down, he plucks a palm-size chunk of fired clay flecked with black volcanic glass from the dirt and hands it to me. Roman vintners, whose elite Roman clients preferred white wines, tended vast plantations of red wine grapes for the Celtic market; traders moved the wine across the Mediterranean, in ships that carried up to 10, amphorae each, and then sent it north on small river barges. By the time it reached Corent months later, its value had multiplied a hundredfold.
One contemporary claimed the thirsty Celts would trade a slave for a single jar. Wine was the focus of elaborate rituals that cemented the status of the tribal leaders. Things often got rowdy. By paving their streets with the broken jars, Poux says, the rulers of Corent flaunted their wealth and power.
By his calculations, the Celts living here went through 50, to , wine jars over the course of a century, the equivalent of 28, bottles a year of expensive, imported Italian red. Worldwide, people age 15 and over average about a drink a day—or more like two if you include only drinkers, because about half of us have never touched a drop. Millions of years ago, when food was harder to come by, the attraction to ethanol and the brain chemistry that lit up to reward the discovery of fermented fruit may have been a critical survival advantage for our primate ancestors.
Today those genetic and neurochemical traits may be at the root of compulsive drinking, says Robert Dudley, whose father was an alcoholic. The ancient Greeks were a good example. A crucial part of their spiritual and intellectual life was the symposium fueled by wine—within limits. Mixing wine with water in a decorated vessel called a krater, Greek hosts served their exclusively male guests a first bowl for health, another for pleasure, and a third for sleep.
The mixture spent the night sitting on a table next to his desk, covered by a paper plate. When Zarnkow flicks on the lights, I can immediately see that the slop has come alive, thanks to yeast from the sourdough.
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