Other drinks: mead, cider, rice wine, palm wine, cacao and spa water

Grape wine and barley beer have their own pages in this atlas. One of the earliest fermented drinks that chemistry has identified mixed several sugars at once. At Jiahu, an early Neolithic village in Henan province, China, McGovern and colleagues analysed residues absorbed into pottery jars. They found a fermented drink of rice, honey and fruit (hawthorn, grape or both) made as early as the seventh millennium BC. Honey is the defining sugar of mead, and the Jiahu drink shows honey being fermented alongside grain and fruit at a very early date. Later Chinese cereal drinks survived as liquids inside sealed bronze vessels of the Shang and Western Zhou dynasties.

These finds matter because fermentation needs no special crop. Any sugar will do, from honey and fruit to plant sap and grain whose starch has been turned into sugar. The rest of this page follows that idea around the world.

Cider is fermented apple juice and perry is fermented pear juice. Both depend on fruit grown for juice rather than for eating. Geneticists studying the apple's history examined whether cider apples and dessert apples form separate groups. In Normandy, perry pears are astringent and are generally not eaten raw.

France protects one perry by name: Domfront, from the Domfrontais in Normandy. Its official specification, last approved in October 2025, describes a sparkling, unpasteurised perry that gets its bubbles from a second fermentation in the bottle, made from local perry pears led by the variety plant de blanc. The trees grow 10 to 15 m tall, can take more than fifteen years to bear fruit and often live for over a century.

The specification also tells a history. It states that the perry pear is older in Normandy than the cider-apple varieties that arrived from north-west Spain in the eleventh century, and that the tree has been part of the Domfront landscape for at least four centuries. Until the end of the nineteenth century, perry there was mostly still and drunk on the farm. In the first half of the twentieth century more of it went to the still to make brandy.

Rice holds its sugar as starch, which yeast cannot ferment directly. East Asia solved this with mould starters. FAO lists them as chu in China, nuruk in Korea, koji in Japan and ragi in South-East Asia. Chu is first documented in the Shu-Ching, a text of the Chou dynasty, which says it is essential for making alcoholic drinks. FAO describes rice-wine brewing in China between the seventh and third centuries BC, and in Korea at the start of the Three Kingdoms period.

The two main starters differ in kind. Korean nuruk is a cake of raw cereal left to ferment naturally with whatever moulds, yeasts and bacteria settle on it. Japanese koji is grown under control from one mould, Aspergillus oryzae, on loose grains. Brewers in each country then made two kinds of drink. Clear, filtered rice wines such as Chinese shaoxing, Korean yakju and Japanese sake reach at least 15 % alcohol. Cloudy rice beers such as Korean takju keep their solids and live yeast and contain about 7 to 8 %. Nuruk is still the starter for Korea's makgeolli.

How brewing reached Japan is told as tradition. FAO's account says that, according to the Kojiki, the method came from Korea in the third century. That is a chronicle's story, not a dated record.

Plant sap ferments by itself. FAO estimates that more than 10 million people in West Africa drink palm wine, known as emu or ogogoro in Nigeria and nsafufuo in Ghana. Tappers cut the raphia palm or the oil palm and hang a gourd to catch the sap, which is sweet and contains 10 to 12 % sugar. It starts fermenting as soon as it is collected. People drink it at every stage, from sweet and unfermented to sour, and after about a day it turns to vinegar. In Asia the coconut palm gives toddy. In Mexico the sap of agave, called aguamiel, ferments into pulque, a milky drink of 6 to 7 % alcohol that is claimed to go back to the early Aztecs.

Kombucha is sweetened tea fermented by a mat of yeasts and bacteria. A 2025 review calls its origins "somewhat unclear". Chinese folklore places it in north-eastern China around 220 BC, which is a tradition, not a documented date. The review says kombucha was little known outside Asia until the end of the nineteenth century. In the early twentieth century it spread to Russia, where it was called "tea kvass".

Chocolate was drunk for thousands of years before anyone ate it as a bar. Residues in pottery from Puerto Escondido in Honduras show cacao drinks being made before 1000 BC. The first of these were probably made by fermenting the sweet pulp around the seeds. The later chocolate drink of Mesoamerican elites was made from the seeds themselves. At San Lorenzo, the main Olmec capital, theobromine residues show cacao in use between 1800 and 1000 BCE, including in a mortuary ritual.

The tree itself may have been domesticated much further south. Cacao has long been thought a Mesoamerican crop, but its greatest genetic diversity is in the upper Amazon. In 2018 Zarrillo and colleagues reported starch grains, theobromine and ancient DNA of cacao from Santa Ana-La Florida in south-east Ecuador, dated to about 5,300 years ago. It is the earliest known cacao use in the Americas. The other great stimulant drinks have their own stories in this atlas: tea and coffee.

Not every drink needs fermenting. Natural mineral springs drew visitors from antiquity, and in Europe they built towns around them. In 2021 UNESCO inscribed the Great Spa Towns of Europe on the World Heritage List: eleven towns in seven countries, among them Spa in Belgium, Vichy, Baden-Baden, Karlovy Vary and Bath. All of them grew up around natural mineral water springs.

UNESCO dates the spa's golden age from about 1700 to the 1930s. "Taking the cure" meant a strict daily routine of bathing in the water or drinking it, mixed with walks, music, theatre and gambling. The towns built pump rooms, drinking halls and colonnades around the springs. Their water was drunk at the source as a medicine, and Spa was among the most fashionable places to drink it.