Around a thousand years ago, a group of people gathered in a Peruvian brewery, drank copious amounts of brew, smashed their drinking vessels to the ground and torched the building as part of a complicated abandonment ritual, according to a new study.

The authors of the study in the latest Proceedings of the Academy of Sciences believe the structure was one of the earliest and largest state-sponsored breweries in the Andes.

They also discovered that a group of elite women served as the brewmasters, unusual both for ancient times and even for today.