What Exactly Is The World's Oldest Alcoholic Beverage?
BY Kerry Hayes
Humans have been making and enjoying alcohol for centuries, but per historians, the oldest alcoholic beverage in the world is mead, which has been around since the 7th millennium.
Mead is a fermented beverage made from honey, rice, hawthorn fruit, and grapes. It dates back to 7,000 to 6,600 B.C. in the Jiahu Neolithic Village in China's Henan Province.
It is believed that mead actually made itself naturally. The sun would have melted the beeswax inside an abandoned hive, basically encasing the remaining honey inside.
The yeast and enzymes in the honey interacted with rain water and heat, starting fermentation. The Chinese replicated this process using water and honey, then added rice and fruit.
Some scholars believe mead was discovered even earlier, around 20,000 B.C. in Africa, when locals saw bears drinking water from puddles into which beehives had fallen.
The bears were a little tipsy, so the locals of an African bush tribe got curious about the effect. They allegedly sampled the water, and so mead was discovered.