Many people think that there are too many things we can drink now, but when it comes to ancient times, they think that the ancients just drank some tea every day and it was over. In fact, the real situation is just the opposite, our beverage industry today is almost monopolized by large enterprises, you drink only a few products that these companies are willing to make, far from the variety.
The ancients did not have a monopoly situation, beverage sales to the store as a unit, in order to be able to attract customers, almost uninterrupted new products, so the ancient types of drinks than now are much more. Today we will take the Song Dynasty a thousand years ago as an example, and compare it with everyone's original cognition.
Walking in the streets of the Song Dynasty, there are many roadside stalls with "drinks" written on them, which are flagship stores selling drinks. At that time, the most popular drink was made of licorice, tangerine peel, monk fruit, etc., called "herbal tea", and the herbal tea you see now is copied from this job.
The Song Dynasty people also used to use jasmine, osmanthus flowers, plum blossoms, oranges, plums, lychees, lotus seeds and other flowers and fruits to make drinks, after drying many kinds of flowers and fruits, with fine grinding into a particularly fine powder, they are called "flower and fruit powder", when you need to drink, you can directly brew it to form, lychee drink, orange drink, wumei soup, crispy soup and so on. Today's copy of this work is instant coffee and orange juice powder.
The Song Dynasty also had many lactic acid bacteria drinks, which they called pulp water. It is to cook the rice, and then soak it in cold water to ferment, and finally according to everyone's preferences, add honey, lychee, osmanthus flowers, papayas and other fruits, and make it a sweet and sour lactic acid bacteria, or pure natural, and do not add flavor.
Every summer, the Song Dynasty will also have a lot of cold drinks, summer is a small stall selling cold drinks, basically are added to the ice of the drinks, such as papaya juice, ice and snow licorice soup, raw pickled water papaya, lactose snow zhen, snow bubble peel, apricot crisp herbal tea, perilla pulp water, plum blossom ice wine, ginger honey herbal tea and so on. This kind of cold drink was called "cold water" by the Song Dynasty.
In the Song Dynasty, there were many concentrated juices, which they called "thirsty water", what does it mean, that is, drinks that need to be added to water. Common ones are bayberry, papaya, grape, apple, pear and so on. The method is to denuclearize the fruit and juice it, then slowly boil it until it finally becomes a concentrated paste, then seal it and rinse it with water when you need to drink it. It seems that the famous one that remains to this day is autumn pear paste.
We like to drink drinks, in fact, the ancient people were the same, and as the first prosperous period of commerce in the Song Dynasty, people's lives are very similar to our current life.