Fermentation as a reproducible practice: beer, bread, wine

c. 7000 BCE Fire and matter method

Long before any chemistry, people learned to run a process that changes the taste, the keeping qualities and the intoxicating power of food and drink, without knowing that yeasts and bacteria do the work. An early claim, traces of brewing in the stone mortars of Raqefet Cave, belongs to roughly the eleventh millennium BCE and remains contested; a beverage of rice, honey and fruit at Neolithic Jiahu, around 7000 BCE, is securely identified by chemistry.

The practice rested on a recipe: particular vessels, a temperature, a waiting time and a starter from the previous successful batch, that is, reproducibility without explanation. What was actually going on there would still be a matter of dispute in the nineteenth century.

Two lines important for science start here: everything that can later be distilled into spirits begins as a fermented liquid, and the spoilage of wine and beer led in the nineteenth century to the study of microorganisms.

Why this date

Archaeological dating with a wide spread. The axis value follows the earliest chemically secure evidence: at the Neolithic settlement of Jiahu (Henan, China) a beverage of rice, honey and fruit was identified in pottery, the subperiods being dated to roughly 7000-6600, 6600-6200 and 6200-5500 BC (McGovern et al. 2004). An earlier claim: traces of brewing in the stone mortars of Raqefet Cave (Israel), a site dated to 13,700-11,700 cal. BP, that is roughly the eleventh millennium BC (Liu et al. 2018); this evidence was contested by David Eitam (the mortars were for flour, not beer; doubts about spontaneous fermentation and about stone boiling), the authors replied in 2019, and the dispute is not closed. Wine: vessels from the Zagros (Iran) about seven thousand years old, winemaking in Georgia from about 6000 BC. Bread is older than leavening: the charred flatbreads of Shubayqa in Jordan, about 14,400 years old, are unleavened, and leavened bread is securely attested much later.

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