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Comment by dllthomas | Hacker News Reader

I've heard that there's sufficient yeasts on the skin of a typical grape that you can get fermentation without human intervention. If that's true, then for a sufficiently broad definition of "wine" and "produced" it seems to follow that wine probably predated mead.

Deliberate - and particularly large scale - production by humans is a more interesting question, of course.

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Sure, and at that point you get into the definition of beverage (is a mouldy bunch of grapes in a forest a beverage, if there's no one to drink it?).

I'd suggest that from a purely evolutionary perspective, honey bees predate grapes, and wild yeasts would certainly have turned an abandoned bee nest into an ad hoc mini-bar on more than one occasion during pre-modern history, but I feel I'm now veering way off from my challenge to that original claim.

Isn't honey antibiotic though? When I've made mead, I always added yeast to it to get it to ferment. I'm not sure an abandoned bee nest would ferment before it just turned into a papery, waxy, lump.

Per my understanding, honey is really good at not spoiling until you dilute it.

The Merriam Webster defines a beverage as "a drinkable liquid"[1].

If there is no one there to drink it, then it is not drinkable. A beverage requires both a liquid and a drinker to make it drink-able.

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/beverage

if you go one step deeper, the definition of drinkable is "suitable or safe for drinking", so technically, a beverage just need to be suitable for drinking but it does not need to be actually drank for it to fit the definition.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/drinkable

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