Ancient cultures used an array of ingredients to make their alcoholic beverages, including emmer wheat, wild yeast, chamomile, thyme and oregano.
Excerpt from The Beer Archaeologist by Abigail Tucker, Smithsonian magazine, July-August 2011
“Dr. Pat,” as he’s known at Dogfish Head, is the world’s foremost expert on ancient fermented beverages, and he cracks long-forgotten recipes with chemistry, scouring ancient kegs and bottles for residue samples to scrutinize in the lab. He has identified the world’s oldest known barley beer (from Iran’s Zagros Mountains, dating to 3400 B.C.), the oldest grape wine (also from the Zagros, circa 5400 B.C.) and the earliest known booze of any kind, a Neolithic grog from China’s Yellow River Valley brewed some 9,000 years ago.
Photographs by Landon Nordeman
Link to the full article and the source of the image and text: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/The-Beer-Archaeologist.html#ixzz2SuqH0OQt