ABSTRACT
The production of alcoholic beverages is as old as history. Wine may have an archeological record going back more than 7.5 thousand years, with the early suspected wine residues dating from early to mid-fifth millennium B.C. (1). Clear evidence of intentional winemaking first appears in the representations of wine presses that date back to the reign of Udimu in Egypt, some 5000 years ago. The direct fermentation of fruit juices, such as that of grape, had doubtlessly taken place for many thousands of
years before early thinking man developed beer brewing and, probably coincidentally, bread baking (2). The oldest historical evidence of formal brewing dates back to about 6000 B.C. in ancient Babylonia: a piece of pottery found there shows workers either stirring or skimming a brewing vat.
