Before chocolate, humans brewed alcohol from cacao

Humans began exploiting cacao beans for alcohol before they started using them to make chocolate...

Humans began exploiting cacao beans for alcohol before they started using them to make chocolate, according to new findings that push the earliest known use of cacao about 500 years ago.

Residue scraped from pottery vessels dating to 1400 BC to 1100 BC indicate that residents of Honduras’ remote Ulua Valley fermented the sweet pulp of the chocolate plant to make an alcoholic drink well before they began grinding the bitter seeds and mixing them with honey and chiles to produce the equivalent of modern cocoa.

The consumption of fermented cacao is much more recent than the production of wine and beer, which date to about 5400 BC in Iran and around 7000 BC in China.

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But the chocolate drinks, which had an alcoholic content of about 5 per cent, had a special role in feasting and binding indigenous groups together, said archaeologist John S Henderson of Cornell University, who led the team reporting the find in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Henderson and archaeologist Rosemary A Joyce of the University of California, Berkeley have been excavating at Puerto Escondido in the alluvial valley of the Ulua River for more than a decade. The site has been called the “Cradle of Chocolate” because of its fertile soil and perfect conditions for growing cacao beans.

The highly valued beans were used as currency by the Olmecs and other peoples in the region for hundreds of years.

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