Medicinal Beer? How’s That?

February 28, 2011

If settling down with a beer is your typical method for unwinding, you may not be far wrong. A recent finding by anthropologists has suggested that the ancient Nubians were using beer as an antibiotic that could help redress ailments as diverse as infected wounds and gum disease.

medicinal-beer

So perhaps it wasn’t just a stress beater, beer in ancient times may have been used in a manner akin to penicillin today, it has been suggested.

Ancient Nubians that lived in the area that we know as the Sudan today, may have added some extra ingredients into their beer as well; so it may not be just the alcohol at work there.

In a startling discovery, traces of the antibiotic tetracycline were found in two thousand year old Nubian bones, leading scientists to offer the theory that perhaps the antibiotic could have developed naturally in vats of beer.

The consistently high content of the antibiotic in ancient Nubian remains has led researchers to conclude this ancient population was skilled at brewing antibiotic beer and part of the reason for this could have been the ingredients and methods used for brewing the beer.

So perhaps antibiotics are not as much of a modern day invention as we like to believe; they have possibly been around in one or the other form since ancient times!