Ninkasi - The Goddess of Beer

Beer, for the most part, is not like wine—it does not improve with age.

The breakdown of trans-iso-alpha acids is temperature-dependent, meaning that beer ages faster in warm storage conditions, but it also appears to depend on the initial acidity of the beer. The researchers collected samples of 10 different pilsner brands to compare how the beer's pH value affected the aging process. Even though the beers were all comparable in acidity, ranging from pH 4.3 to 4.55, the slight differences had a measurable impact on how much the hop-derived compounds degraded into unwanted bitter compounds. The more acidic beers accumulated more tricyclocohumol during storage.

The key to producing a fresh-tasting beer, then, is to control its pH during the brewing process and to store it in a cool place once it has been bottled.

Who brewed—and then enjoyed—the first beer? The civilization responsible for the widely beloved beverage must have been a very old one, but we don't yet know who first brewed up a batch of beer, Christine Hastorf explained in a March 10 lecture at New York University on the archaeology of beer.

One place they certainly were making beer is Mesopotamia, where cuneiform tablets record the trade of beer around 4000 BC. The Sumerians were so enthralled with beer that around 1800 BC, someone inscribed an ode to Ninkasi, the goddess of beer, on a tablet that survives today. The Hymn to Ninkasi features verses such as "Ninkasi, you are the one who pours out the filtered beer of the collector vat / It is [like] the onrush of Tigris and Euphrates," according to Ian S. Hornsey's 2003 A History of Beer and Brewing. pubs.rsc.org/en/Content/eBook/978-0-85404-630-0

A 2004 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences pushes the history of fermented beverages back even further. www.pnas.org/content/101/51/17593

Dogfish Head brewery took a stab at reproducing the stuff, resulting in the award-winning—and potent—Chateau Jiahu. www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm...-the-shel-2009-06-05

The various lines of evidence indicate that beer may well be as old as cooking itself, which began at least 250,000 years ago.

The examination yielded a wealth of detail about the beer, even indications of how it was brewed. The research will continue by examining another bottle.

VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland was commissioned by the Government of Aland to study the composition of the shipwreck beer and identify the type of yeast used to brew it. The aim of this project was to study what early 19th-century beer was like and whether its production process could be reverse-engineered and the beer replicated.

The study involved an analysis of the physico-chemical properties of the beer and microbiological and DNA analyses of the beer, bottle and cork. In particular, the aim was to isolate any living microbes found.