I heard about this years ago. Chocolate was introduced to Europe circa
1500, and they started to sweeten it soon afterwards, but milk was not
added until the 19th century, I think.

MY question is, do any people brew it the ancient way today in Mexico?
Or elsewhere?

Lenona.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/13/sc...ml?ref=science

By HENRY FOUNTAIN
Published: November 13, 2007
The ancient peoples of Mexico and Central America loved to drink
chocolate. But their beverage was nothing like the modern one - it was
a frothy, bitter brew of fermented, roasted and ground cacao seeds,
often spiced with chile peppers, more like mole poblano than Swiss
Miss.

New archaeological findings by John S. Henderson of Cornell and
Rosemary A. Joyce of the University of California, Berkeley, and
colleagues push the date of the first use of cacao back to about 1100
B.C., 500 years earlier than previously known. What's more, the
researchers suggest that this early beverage was something different
again - a fermented beer made from cacao pulp, not seeds.

Dr. Henderson and Dr. Joyce have been digging for years at Puerto
Escondido, a village in the Ulúa Valley in what is now Honduras. They
have found elegant pots, cups and other pieces of pottery and have
developed a theory that the pottery was probably used on ceremonial
occasions to serve cacao beverages. "Cacao was the social grease of
Mesoamerica," Dr. Henderson said.

But this theory was based only on circumstantial evidence, he added.
"We were thinking we didn't have much potential for chemical
confirmation."

Previously it was possible to detect evidence of cacao - the compounds
theobromine and caffeine - only from visible residues in intact pots.
But using just pottery fragments, the researchers were able to detect
the compounds from residues absorbed by the clay. The findings were
reported in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Dr. Henderson said other evidence suggested that the pottery was used
for an alcoholic beverage. Most of the vessels from that time only had
a narrow spout, which would be good for pouring but not for frothing
up a seed-based beverage. For that, a wider mouth would be needed, and
wide-mouthed vessels are not found at Puerto Escondido for several
hundred years.

Dr. Henderson suggested that the Mesoamericans fermented cacao first
to make beer, eventually discovering, likely by accident, that the
fermented seeds made an even better beverage. If so, he said, the rise
of cacao and the eventual birth of the modern chocolate industry - all
of which began with the passion for the frothy drink - "would then be
an unintended consequence of something different," he said.

wrote:
>
> MY question is, do any people brew it the ancient way today in Mexico?
> Or elsewhere?

A. W. Knapp in COCOA AND CHOCOLATE (Chapman and Hall, 1920)
mentions that the liquid which runs off the cacao beans
during fermentation tastes good and suggests that
it could be marketed as a beverage. That sounds like
substantially the same thing as the "beer" the ancient
Mexicans are believed to have brewed.

Fermentation is necessary to develop the flavors we
associate with chocolate. THe inside of an unfermented
cacao bean is almost white like a cashew and not very
flavorful. A fermented cacao bean is the color of dark
chocolate and tastes like chocolate.