Ancient Chinese Featured Different Brewing Techniques
Liu’s own research includes an investigation of a different bronze vessel containing ancient beer from a 2,300-year-old Qin state tomb in China’s Shaanxi province, which her team reported in 2024. In that case, the beer had been brewed from wheat or barley, as well as a type of millet, pulses and the seeds of a grass known in the West as Job’s tears. The investigation suggested that fermentation was probably initiated by a starter culture—known in Chinese as qu—consisting of grains, molds, yeasts and other microorganisms.
Liu says the 2026 ancient beer find did not reveal the same evidence for the use of qu, which she considers a key element of the sophisticated brewing practices employed in ancient China. Nevertheless, “taken together, the two discoveries are highly significant,” she says, because they confirm written accounts of beer-making traditions in northern China during this period.
“These finds provide valuable archaeological support for textual references to increasingly specialized brewing techniques during the late Zhou and Qin periods [between about the 8th and 3rd centuries B.C.],” she says.
The beers from tombs in Ningxia and Shaanxi provinces are ancient and doubly rare because they have survived in a liquid state. But they are far from the oldest. Liquid fermented grain-based beverages dating as far back as 3,000 years have been found in Chinese burials.
Archaeologists have also found organic traces of Neolithic beer, perhaps 9,000 years old, in the remains of clay jars in China’s Henan province. The early Henan brew used rice as its main grain, along with honey and fruit. Researchers suggest the Neolithic recipe was an ancestor of later Chinese fermented grain-based beverages.
Oldest Evidence of Beer
The world’s oldest evidence of beer comes from Raqefet Cave in northern Israel, which was inhabited by people of the Natufian culture roughly 12,000 to 14,000 years ago. Analysis of residues on stone vessels unearthed from graves there indicates that the Natufians made a wheat- or barley-based beer that was likely served at ritual feasts.
Some researchers have suggested that beer was originally a byproduct of breadmaking. But the evidence from Raqefet Cave predates the farming of cereal crops by many thousands of years and suggests that people were gathering wild grains primarily to make beer rather than bake bread. Many researchers now argue that beer might have predated bread, and Liu and her colleagues have suggested that the desire for beer helped motivate the development of agriculture. Some confusion could stem from the ancient Sumerian practice of baking “beer bread”—bappir—which was crumbled into water and then fermented.
University of Haifa archaeologist Dani Nadel, who led the excavations in Israel, says the importance of beer to the prehistoric people at Raqefet Cave is hard to determine, but the vessels that held it are a clue: “A lot of hard work and excellent workmanship were invested in the manufacture of a variety of stone vessels,” he says.
The vessels had also been placed in graves during ancient burials, suggesting that the beer they held might have been consumed at funerals or wakes. The analysis also suggests that this very early beer was quite different from modern, well-filtered brews. Nadel says it “may have been like a heavy soup in texture and not as light as current beer.”
