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A drink called sura is the alcoholic drink mentioned in our oldest Indian text, the Rg Veda, and people continued to make a drink called sura for millennia. This article uses the methodology of the comparative study of fermentation methods in order to make sense of the earliest descriptions of sura brewing processes. Sura was brewed in a semi-solid state, using malts for saccharification, perhaps also with a complex microbial ferment starter as one sees elsewhere in Asia today. Sura was not distilled. Understanding this has philological value: if sura was brewed with this process, we can better understand certain words associated with sura in Vedic texts, e.g., the drink called parisrut ("fluid[-grain mixture]"), certain material objects (the karotara filter-structure), and certain processes (sura, etymologically as squeezing or pressing). Although brewing instructions are varied and may reflect several modes of brewing, and although the process in surviving descriptions may have been ritually inflected to highlight resemblances with soma pressing, I argue we can still get a sense of the basic method of brewing. These are some of the earliest detailed descriptions of brewing a grain drink that, considered in the long term, has similarities with both Mesopotamian brewing and East Asian methods.
introduction
An intoxicating drink, apparently alcoholic, called sura (súra) is mentioned in our earliest Indian texts: the Rgveda and other Vedic sources. 1 This literature contains references to the components of this drink, the process of brewing it, and material objects connected to brewing, as well as other related drinks. This body of material is our earliest textual evidence for alcohol production in South Asia, a region often neglected in world histories of drink and drinking. The word sura remained remarkably stable in Sanskrit, and people made a grain drink called sura in Sanskrit texts for millennia in South Asia. Yet ancient sura as described in our sources is quite different from the sura from about the turn of the Common Era, which I explore elsewhere. 2
In this article I re-examine the earliest evidence for surā in order to find out exactly what sort of drink it was. 3 Comparing surā brewing to the production of other drinks in pre-industrial and traditional contexts helps us better understand how ancient surā was...