The invention of booze is an unrecorded part of prehistory, so the “first” alcohol is simply the first one we definitively know about. To purposely create alcohol, people required containers, so the first alcohol seems to have come with the invention of pottery in China 15,000 years ago.

As far as we know, alcohol was first purposely made in the Yellow River Valley of ancient China. Inside ancient pottery in this area, researchers found fermented residue of rice and honey as well as hawthorn fruit and wild grapes, and the concoction was probably brewed via a traditional Chinese method using mold.

Dogfish Head Brewery has made a recreation of the 9,000-year-old beverage, which it calls "Chateau Jiahu." Barley malt, hawthorn fruit, muscat grape juice, and orange blossom honey are all fermented with sake yeast— not with mold like the original, as it would likely taste spoiled to modern palettes.