Image copyright DANI NADEL/AFP/Getty Image caption Archaeologists were looking for evidence of plant foods when they discovered the alcohol traces

Researchers say they have found the world's oldest brewery, with residue of 13,000-year-old beer, in a prehistoric cave near Haifa in Israel. To test their hypothesis, the team ran a series of experiments to mimic the way the ancient Natufian people were thought to have brewed beer: turning wheat or barley into malt, mashing and heating the malt, then fermenting it with airborne wild yeast. "If we´re right, this is the earliest testament in the world to alcohol production of any kind," Dani Nadel, an archaeology professor at the University of Haifa and one of the authors of the article published in the "Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports", told AFP. Researchers say they’ve discovered the earliest evidence of man-made alcohol at a bygone brewery in a prehistoric graveyard cave in Israel, where they found residue from what could be 13,000-year-old beer, according to findings published in October’s Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports. 'This discovery indicates that making alcohol was not necessarily a result of agricultural surplus production, but it was developed for ritual purposes and spiritual needs, at least to some extent, prior to agriculture,' said one of the lead researchers Li Liu, a professor of Chinese archaeology at Stanford.
Researchers with Stanford University report the discovery of the oldest known evidence of beer. Dating to approximately 11,000 BCE, the primitive brewery was located near modern Haifa, Israel.