Alcohol who invented it

This chimpanzee stumbles across a windfall of overripe plums. Many of them have split open, drawing him to their intoxicating fruity odor.

He gorges himself and begins to experience some… strange effects. This unwitting ape has stumbled on a process that humans will eventually harness to create beer, wine, and other alcoholic drinks.

The sugars in overripe fruit attract microscopic organisms known as yeasts. As the yeasts feed on the fruit sugars they produce a compound called ethanol— the type of alcohol in alcoholic beverages. This process is called fermentation.

Nobody knows exactly when humans began to create fermented beverages. The earliest known evidence comes from 7, BCE in China, where residue in clay pots has revealed that people were making an alcoholic beverage from fermented rice, millet, grapes, and honey. 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. Evidence has been found by archaeologists in late Stone Age jugs that they intentionally created fermented drinks.

Similar archaeological findings in China dating back to about 7, BC indicate that they had worked out how to ferment a combination of honey, rice and fruit. Interestingly, China has stuck with the evolvement of rice based fermentation through to the modern day. Egyptian history has records of beer being produced and consumed around 3, BC. The Ancient Egyptians made 17 types of beer and 24 varieties of wine. It was so important in society that it was offered in worship to their Gods.

Alcohol in varying forms was being developed at different sites around the world during a similar time period. A forefather of modern chemistry, Jabir was driven by science.

Even when fellow alchemist Muhammed ibn Zakaryia Razi began refining the practice of distilling alcohol specifically in the 9 th century, the goals still had little to do with recreation—distilled alcohol was used primarily for ritual or medicine. In fact, the first documented use of distilled alcohol comes from a 12 th century Italian medical school—not a bar.

It just took a while. Distilling had finally found its audience. And it kept finding its audience, spreading in the 17 th and well into the 18 th century with trade, exploration, and colonization.