Revealing a 5,000-y-old beer recipe in China
- aStanford Archaeology Center, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305;
- bDepartment of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305;
- cDepartment of Ancient Scripture, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT 84602;
- dZhejiang Research Institute of Chemical Industry, 310006 Hangzhou, China;
- eDepartment of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305;
- fShaanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology, 710054 Xi’an, China
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Edited by Dolores R. Piperno, Smithsonian Institution, Fairfax, VA, and approved April 26, 2016 (received for review January 27, 2016)

Significance
This research reveals a 5,000-y-old beer recipe in which broomcorn millet, barley, Job’s tears, and tubers were fermented together. To our knowledge, our data provide the earliest direct evidence of in situ beer production in China, showing that an advanced beer-brewing technique was established around 5,000 y ago. For the first time, to our knowledge, we are able to identify the presence of barley in archaeological materials from China by applying a recently developed method based on phytolith morphometrics, predating macrobotanical remains of barley by 1,000 y. Our method successfully distinguishes the phytoliths of barley from those of its relative species in China.
Abstract
The pottery vessels from the Mijiaya site reveal, to our knowledge, the first direct evidence of in situ beer making in China, based on the analyses of starch, phytolith, and chemical residues. Our data reveal a surprising beer recipe in which broomcorn millet (Panicum miliaceum), barley (Hordeum vulgare), Job’s tears (Coix lacryma-jobi), and tubers were fermented together. The results indicate that people in China established advanced beer-brewing technology by using specialized tools and creating favorable fermentation conditions around 5,000 y ago. Our findings imply that early beer making may have motivated the initial translocation of barley from the Western Eurasia into the Central Plain of China before the crop became a part of agricultural subsistence in the region 3,000 y later.
Footnotes
- ↵1To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: jiajingw{at}stanford.edu.
Author contributions: J.W. and L.L. designed research; J.W., L.L., T.B., and F.X. performed research; J.W., L.L., T.B., L.Y., and Y.L. analyzed data; and J.W., L.L., and T.B. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1601465113/-/DCSupplemental.
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