News form diagnostic world: how did the ancients brew beer up?

The beer is one of the most widespread alcoholic beverage in the world, both today and in the past. Ancient populations used to drink beer during religious rituals and athletic competitions: according to some researchers the need of raw materials to produce a huge amount of beer is the reason why the rudimentary production of cereals began. In some cases, it is possible to find traces of fermentation process (the transformation of the starch into alcohol) in archaeological areas: charred kernels, starch granules, peculiar chemical markers, together with rudimentary tools, were some of the evidences of beer and alcoholic beverages production during prehistoric times.

A research group of the Stanford University, California, decided to develop a scientific method to identify the different techniques of beer brewing, studying those modified starch grain discovered in archaeological fields. In their work titled “Identifying ancient beer brewing through starch analysis: a methodology” (here the link of the original paper http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jasrep.2017.07.016) researchers have experimented on 17 different plants several methods of brewing, following some recipes and ethnographic reports.

The starch modification is caused by two major processes during brewing: enzymatic digestion and gelatinization. The possible presence of an alteration (in dimension, shape, structural characteristic) of the granules allows to distinguish 70°C heated starch, that is the typical temperature of beer making, from those heated at higher temperature, therefore, for example, boiled. Furthermore, such variation in features can be useful to discriminate the seed undergone to germination and fermentation.

Thanks to this experimentation, researchers proposed an identification method for detecting the presence of beer brewing in archaeological contexts starting from the starch granules, besides to distinguish different methods of beer making.

So, the presence of cereals modified by enzymes, heat and fermentation it is a proof that ancients loved beer as we love it now. Think about it in front of your next golden beer!

Melania