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科学60秒 | 埃及啤酒

 作者：本站编辑  2023-10-01 00:28:42  24

《《语言学习始于听力》》

科学60秒（60-second Science）是《科学美国人》（Scientific American）杂志的一个音频节目，内容以前沿科技的绍介为主，适合中、高级英语学习者学习。

Transcript

Note：This may not be a word-for-word transcript

This is Scientific American's 60-second Science, I'm Susanne Bard.

Some 5,600 years ago, people in the Egyptian city of Hierakonpolis did something that's still a very popular activity today: they brewed and drank beer. We know this because archaeologists examining the area near the ruins of a cemetery (墓地) for the elite discovered a structure containing five ceramic vats (陶瓷缸) that would have been heated from below. Residues (残留物) in the vats confirmed that they had once made beer.

"And it's estimated that if these five vats were operating at the same time, 325 liters would have been produced, which is equal to 650 cans of Budweiser (百威啤酒)."

Texas Tech University microbiologist Moamen Elmassry. He says this ancient beer would have tasted very different from what our modern palates (味觉) are used to. The Egyptian beer makers did use malted (被制成麦芽的) wheat and barley (大麦) in the brewing process. But no one had mastered carbonation yet. So the resulting brew was a flat, unfiltered malt beverage with a low alcohol content.

Elmassry's colleagues recently sampled thick, dark deposits from the Hierakonpolis vats. The chemical analysis confirmed that they were indeed the product of beer making and not some other fermented (发酵) food. The tests also revealed other ingredients ancient Egyptians put in their beer. The researchers found a high concentration of the amino acid proline (氨基酸脯氨酸), which is abundant in dates and some other fruits.

"This result suggests that dates could have been used or incorporated in the beer for flavor."
And maybe to add some sweet notes.

Hops (啤酒花) —which act as both a flavoring and a preservative—weren't added to beer until medieval times.

"The use of hops was unknown to the ancient Egyptians, and we think that they used phosphoric acid (磷酸) to preserve their beer."

The residues were indeed high in phosphoric acid, a product of barley grains added during the fermentation process. Phosphoric acid is often used today to prolong the shelf life of alcoholic beverages.

Phosphoric acid via barley would have made it possible to mass-produce beer, store it for extended periods and even transport it—all consistent with the important role beer played in ancient Egyptian society. It not only provided hydration (水化) and nutrition but was also part of religious rituals (仪式) among the elite. The study is in the journal Scientific Reports.

Studying ancient beer has allowed Elmassry to reflect on the intersection of science and history.

"I teach a microbiology lab, and we brew beer in the lab, and the students see the whole fermentation process. And thinking about how ancient Egyptians were able to do a similar thing thousands of years ago, it's kind of very special feeling."

Thanks for listening for Scientific American's 60-second Science. I'm Susanne Bard.

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