I thought this was a fun little story. You may not like it as much as I did, but I enjoyed the discovery and thinking of this little owl holding onto a secret stash for thousands of years. What a good little guardian!
For more than 3,000 years, China’s oldest-known distilled spirit remained hidden inside a bronze, owl-shaped vessel unearthed within a Shang Dynasty tomb.
Discovered in 2010 in Jinan, China, the vessel contained a mysterious clear liquid. After 15 years of preservation and study, it was, in 2024, identified as distilled liquor - the earliest-known example in China’s history.
This remarkable discovery has pushed the history of liquor production in China back by more than a millennium.
In December 2010, archaeologists from the Jinan Institute of Archaeology found a bronze, owl-shaped vessel at the Daxinzhuang burial site in Jinan, Shandong Province. Located in Tomb M257, the container was in remarkably good condition and stood out as one of only a few owl vessels ever discovered in the province.
Researchers discovered that the vessel dates back more than 3,000 years, to the Shang Dynasty period of 1600 to 1046 B.C.E…
At the time of the vessel’s discovery, archaeologists noted that it contained a small amount of clear liquid but were unable to completely open it due to the corrosion of the lid. At the time of its burial, the vessel was tightly sealed and not fully oxidized. A thick layer of rust glued the two pieces together, making it difficult for researchers to analyze its contents without harming this historic artifact.
After 14 years, researchers carefully separated the lid from the rest of the container, finally revealing its contents in their entirety.
The mysterious liquid was sent to the International Joint Laboratory of Environmental and Social Archaeology Research at Shandong University for examination. Its examination revealed the presence of water, ethanol, ethyl acetate, and other distillation products.
However, it did not contain sugar proteins or organic acids used in fermented fruit and rice wine. Researchers were ecstatic to hear that the liquid was most likely distilled liquor, the oldest ever found in China.
The rest of the article is mainly on the history of brewing in China and it also has a shot of the back of the pit but it’s pretty plain.
That was the point of the article. This differentiation was the real discovery.
Previous discoveries have shown distilling equipment dating back possibly to 200 BC.
The owl pot dates back to much 7longer ago than that previous oldest discovery.
I have done a bit of both, though distillation just once. Beer/wine are very easy and harder to mess up than one would initially think.
As to distilling, this come up on homebrew communities a lot, as many are intimidated to try it due to this fear. I will share their experience, along with my own. The people who do this regularly say the actual danger is low if you are distilling stuff you plan to drink yourself. The low alcohol beverages meant for consumption (fruit/grain derived base alcohol) are very low in compounds that end up producing methanol when distilled. All distilled product will have some degree of these chemicals, but in the amount you would drink and survive the amount of ethanol consumed, the byproduct levels are pretty insignificant in comparison.
Methanol scares are the result of 2 different things. Both are intentional acts. First is distilling a spirit made from a questionable mash. Many things can be fermented into alcohols. I forget the part of plant matter that breaks down into methanol, but using wood to produce the alcohol and other non-fruit/vegetable parts of plants produce much more methanol. Someone cheaping out on supplies could stretch a batch using low grade fermentable material.- The second way people got methanol poisoning was intentional poisoning of ethanol with methanol during Prohibition to discourage bootlegging. Drinkable spirit was intentionally poisoned with methanol.
From my experience distilling with a self described redneck who does it regularly, we tasted drops of the early and late distillate to determine when to start and stop collection of the batch we were making instead of doing it any form of scientific or professional way. The tail end wasn’t bad. That is when the heat starts to rise too much, and it pulls the last bits of ethanol out of the mash and more and more water, so when it starts to taste like watered down spirit, you stop distillation. This was not so bad, as it just tasted like too much ice melting into a drink. The heads, at the beginning of distillation, were something else entirely!
There is no way you will mistake that stuff for ethanol! The early distillate has all the nasties in it. The methanol, acetone, and I’m sure a number of other things you don’t want to consume in quantity. First, the smell alone tells you it is not what you want to drink. It smells awful. As it got closer to the heat level to draw up the ethanol, we would taste a drop from a spoon. Again, immediately you knew if you were getting too much non-ethanol product, and from the few drops I had, my body knew it was not something I wanted more of. A few moments later, it tasted like quality spirit and it was a night and day difference. from what was running out of the end a moment before.
This seems to have been determined by the archaeologists dating the tomb and its contents, not the lab dating the booze. The lab seems to have just ruled out environmental contamination, say of water evaporating from a non-stilled spirit or being removed in another way like ice distilling, where a spirit is frozen, and when the ice is removed, you are left with the non-frozen and now concentrated alcohol.
Residue that would indicate the vessel contained a non-distilled product was not found. This shows it was distilled before being placed into the vessel. The lack of contaminants in the alcohol, the sealed nature of the container when found, and the dating of the tomb all go together to show distillation was being done in China earlier than the Han dynasty, which was the oldest previously discovered distillation material. They knew that it was older, but this is them finding their smoking gun to prove it.
Ok and how have they determined the vessel wasn’t placed in the tomb later? We know it is inaccessible now but that might not have always been true. If the 3000 year date is because the tomb is that old that doesn’t mean the contents are.
Im cautious with these statements because many nations including China like to claim they are the first to do something and oftentimes that’s not entirely the case such as the claim that the oldest wine is Chinese when it is really a beer.
If the concern is potential Chinese propaganda, that I can’t prove or disprove for you. I thought you were having an issue with the things I was pointing out from the articles available. All I can say is that I didn’t see any claims that the Chinese were the first to do it necessarily, just that this was the oldest evidence of distillation in China. The actual contents were secondary to me in sharing the story, I just liked the cute owl jar. There was no greater agenda on my part than that.
Accuracy of the claim more than propaganda. I work in the liquor industry so this is the kind if trivia that is interesting to me.
Gotcha, this is making some more sense to me now with that context.
Any idea what the oldest distillate is thought to be? Google showed me a few things like poitin from 600AD. I’ve never heard of that stuff, but I’ve also never looked before. 😅
Poitin is the oldest grain spirit that we know people were making with the express purpose of drinking. I suspect the Irish claim is like the Chinese claim of making the “first wine” where it’s not really the case.