Archaeologists discover surprisingly modern 5,000-year-old brewery in China

Ancient Chinese beer drinkers weren't so different from you and me, at least according to evidence found on 5,000-year-old pottery fragments in the Shaanxi province. Thanks to a discovery by Stanford University researcher Jiajing Wang and her team, it appears that Chinese beer-makers actually mastered many modern brewing techniques long before they were thought to have been adopted in the region, The Washington Post reports.

By scraping yellowish residue out of pots, Wang concluded that Chinese brewers had been combining Eastern and Western traditions by taking "barley from the West, millet, Job's tears, and tubers from China" to create their sweet-ish suds. And while rice fermentation has been dated back to 9,000 years ago, Wang and her team have reason to believe that the Shaanxi site is the oldest known beer brewery in China; barley beer had originally been considered a newer invention in Chinese culture, but it now appears to have much older roots.

"It is possible that when barley was introduced from western Eurasia into the Central Plain of China, it came with the knowledge that the grain was a good ingredient for beer brewing. So it was not only the introduction of a new crop, but also the knowledge associated with the crop," Wang said.

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Here's the only bummer: You won't be able to drink the ancient beer anytime soon. Despite knowing what went into the beer, Wang and her team aren't able to tell the exact ratio of ingredients.