Why Chewing Works
Human saliva contains amylase, an enzyme that breaks starch chains into fermentable sugars. Chew a plain cracker long enough and you can taste the transformation — the bland paste turns faintly sweet. Apply that process to maize, cassava, or other starchy grains, spit the chewed mass into a vessel, and you have a saccharification method that predates pottery and almost certainly predates settled agriculture.
This is how chicha — the fermented grain drink of Andean South America — has been made for thousands of years. The chewed version, sometimes distinguished from the malted chicha de jora as chicha masticada (literally, chewed chicha), produces a wort whose conversion efficiency depends entirely on the brewer's saliva. Residue analysis from archaeological sites in Peru, including finds associated with the Wari and Tiwanaku cultures, confirms fermented maize beverages going back well over a millennium. The Inca state subsequently industrialized chicha production to a degree that archaeologists still find striking — dedicated facilities, specialist brewers known as acllas, vast clay vessel arrays — but the underlying biochemistry remained unchanged.
The practice is not exclusively American. Comparable saliva-based saccharification appears in accounts of kuchikamizake, a Japanese rice drink made by chewing, described in early historical sources as a ritual preparation. Similar techniques have been documented ethnographically across parts of Africa and the Amazon basin.
What makes chicha masticada genuinely interesting to brewing history is that it exposes saccharification for what it always was: a chemical problem with multiple biological solutions. Malting works because germination produces amylase within the grain. Koji mold (Aspergillus oryzae), used in sake production, secretes amylase externally. Salivary amylase just happens to be the most immediately available source, carried in every person who ever tried to eat a starchy plant.
The mouth as a mash tun is not primitive technology. It is the same enzyme, found somewhere else — and the fermentation that follows is indistinguishable from any other.
Key concepts
- Salivary amylasethe digestive enzyme in human saliva that breaks starch into fermentable sugars; the functional basis of chicha masticada
- Saccharificationconversion of starches to sugars; the step that must precede fermentation in any grain-based drink
- Chicha masticadachewed chicha; the saliva-saccharified variant of the Andean fermented maize tradition
- Acllasspecialist brewers in the Inca state system, responsible for large-scale chicha production
- KojiAspergillus oryzae mold used in sake brewing; another non-malting route to amylase-driven saccharification
What happened, in order
- Fermented maize residues associated with Wari and Tiwanaku cultureswell over a millennium before European contact
- Inca-period chicha facilitiesarchaeologically documented large-scale state production
- Kuchikamizakesaliva-fermented rice drink recorded in early Japanese historical sources