DRINK
First published in 2013 as School of Booze
Second edition published in 2015
This edition copyright © Jane Peyton, 2015
Cover images © Tetiana Yurchenko/Shutterstock, Gurza/Shutterstock
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced by any means, nor transmitted, nor translated into a machine language, without the written permission of the publishers.
Jane Peyton has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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eISBN: 978-1-78372-632-5
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Disclaimer: The publisher urges care and caution in the pursuit of any of the activities represented in this book. This book is intended for use by adults only. Please drink responsibly.
CONTENTS
Introduction
Prologue: A Universal Language
Chapter One: The Science of Getting Drunk
Chapter Two: Alcohol and Religion, Health and the Pub
Chapter Three: Drunk History
Chapter Four: Method to the Madness
Chapter Five: Spirits, Liquors, Beers and Wine
Chapter Six: The Other Side of the Coin
Chapter Seven: Bottoms Up!
PRAISE FOR DRINK
‘Jane Peyton serves up an intoxicating brew of drinking lore, boozy anecdotes and hop-driven history – this is the sort of school I wish I’d gone to.’
Adrian Tierney-Jones, beer writer and author of Great British Pubs
‘Whether it’s the words for “hangover” in Swedish, the beer-related miracles of Brigit of Kildare, or the three classifications of a drunk in Japan, you’ll find it all in here, as beer sommelier Jane Peyton takes us on an enjoyable tour of all things alcoholic. Covering all types of drink, from absinthe through to whisky, one swiftly realises that Jane is as much a lover of words and history as she is of booze. Where else will you find the origins of the phrases “fill your boots” and “scot free” within a few pages?
Just like those conversations down the pub, this is a mix of fun, fancy and facts, presented with Jane’s refreshing charisma and engaging enthusiasm. You are hereby cordially invited to join the principal of the School of Booze for an entertaining jollification. Cheers!’
Susanna Forbes, www.drinkbritain.com
‘Jane Peyton’s passion for the subject shines through on every page of this riotous, irreverent journey through the world of drink. Chock-full of fascinating drinks trivia too.’
Alice Lascelles, The Times columnist, and founding editor of Imbibe magazine
‘The perfect starter to a great pub conversation. Will launch a thousand sentences that begin with the words, “I bet you didn’t know...”’
Pete Brown, author of Man Walks into a Pub and Hops and Glory
INTRODUCTION
Don’t tell the social services, but when my siblings and I were children, our parents allowed us to drink a tiny glass of low-alcohol cider with Christmas dinner. It was a once-a-year treat that made the day even more special. We lifted our glass and Dad gave a toast to deceased family members. Then we sipped the sweet sparkling juice knowing that we were participating in a ritual. Even back then I preferred the cider with the pork rather than turkey. A nascent sommelier!
My three wonderful maiden great-aunts used to throw jollifications when the extended family would gather for singing, laughter, and maybe a jig fuelled by something stronger than lemonade. An abiding memory is what fun it all was when people congregated and had a drink. They relaxed, laughed, told jokes, sang, acted daft, and everyone felt the warmth of companionship.
I have always been fascinated by the story behind alcohol – how it is made, the effect it has, the cultural history, and its central role in so many societies. This led me to found an events business called School of Booze. I host tutored beer, cider, wine and whisky tasting events for private groups, appear as a public speaker, and recreate libations from historic eras. My passion is beer and I am an accredited beer sommelier, which if you like beer is one of the most enjoyable things a person can do!
When it comes to the urge for a drink, necessity is the mother of invention. In my experience the greatest example of this is the nomads of Mongolia (and other central Asian countries) who roam around the steppes in search of pasture for their animals. These people would not know what to do with a piece of fruit or a vegetable as they do not stay anywhere long enough to grow anything to eat or supply ingredients to make hooch with. So what do they do when the nearest off-licence may be hundreds of miles away? They drink airag (also known as kumis) which is made from fermented horse’s milk.
Horses play a central role in their society and so does airag as an important part of the daily diet. A nineteenth-century book celebrating the nutritional and health qualities of airag referred to it as ‘milk champagne’. In Mongolia airag is also distilled into a clear spirit called shimiin arkhi. At around 12 per cent ABV it has a bigger kick than its low alcohol sibling. Fermentation is easy to achieve when airborne yeast cells land on the milk and ferment the sugars, but milking the mare is a little trickier. A foal suckles its mother’s teat to start the milk flow and then a milkmaid moves in with a bucket, wraps an arm around the mare’s hind leg and starts milking. I can vouch for the fact that airag tastes similar to yoghurt with a sour flavour and slight tingle on the tongue because I spent some time in Mongolia. My hosts offered me a drink and, well, it would be rude not to. They passed a bowl, the size of a heavyweight boxer’s fist, full of a pale thin liquid. With all eyes on me I accepted it and smiled as I tucked in, trying to avoid the horse hairs floating around on the top, and finished the entire serving. Little did I know that in Mongolia if you eat and drink everything served up, it means you want more.
This book is dedicated to the peerless British boozer and is a guide to what’s behind the bar. If you’ve ever wondered how your favourite drink is made, then this is the book for you. It also includes highlights of the history of some of the most popular alcoholic beverages with compelling pieces of trivia to tell your mates, where else, but down the pub.
It’s not the whole story, just an overview because alcohol is such a vast subject it would not all fit into a book that could be lifted without dislocating the back. The content is unapologetically British-centric. When I mention Britain it is sometimes shorthand for England, Wales and Scotland even if it refers to the time before the Act of Union 1707. Sorry, Scots, I do know that Scotland was an independent country before then. I also refer to some historic regions or principalities by their modern geographic locations in Germany or Italy.
The majority of alcohol’s history took place before humans developed writing, so historians rely on archaeology if the evidence exists, or assumptions. And the nature of intoxication means that contemporaneous accounts cannot always be trusted. If repeated enough times ale house legends become their own truth and I found many such examples during my research. This will come as no surprise but there is so much rubbish on the internet! Juicy tales about alcohol are copied from one website to another without any fact checking. This is particularly true of the provenance of a beer style called India Pale Ale. Most sites that mention it contain incorrect information. For the true story, and other beer-related topics, the best source is historian Martyn Cornell, who writes books and a blog called Zythophile and meticulously researches his subject.
Books I really enjoyed reading for research were: Uncorking the Past by Patrick McGovern (University of California Press); Intoxication by Ronald K. Siegel (Park Street Press), and Beer and Britannia by Peter Haydon (Sutton Publishing).
Alcoholic drinks all have their own personalities. They also instil certain attitudes or expectations in their tipplers. These are my collective nouns for the imbibers of some popular libations:
Beer: a conviviality | |
Champagne: a vivaciousness | |
Wine: a civilisation | |
Whisky: a kilter | |
Absinthe: a sorcery | |
Mezcal: a mariachi | |
Brandy: a night-cap |
PROLOGUE
A UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE
WHERE DID ALCOHOL COME FROM?
According to NASA, the Universe is composed of dark energy, dark matter, and atoms which make up bodies such as stars and planets. There is also something unexpected. Deep in interstellar space there is a vast cloud of alcohol composed of ethanol and methanol measuring billions of miles across. It is located at the centre of the Milky Way 26,000 light years or 150 quadrillion miles away from earth. This proximity has raised a fascinating hypothesis about the initial formation of complex carbon molecules on this planet. Did the alcohol build up into carbon polymers and hitch a ride on comet heads that dispersed space dust on to the earth’s surface? If so then could it be that the primordial soup in which simple life developed was really a primordial cocktail?
Those single-celled life forms needed energy and this came from sugars. Once ingested, the sugars fermented and created waste products of alcohol and carbon dioxide. Glycolysis, or sugar fermentation, is believed to be the earliest form of energy production used by life on earth so, 3.6 billion years ago, alcohol was a major factor even in a world of primitive bacteria.
HOW DID ALCOHOL COME TO BE CONSUMED?
Around 100 million years ago the first fruit-bearing trees appeared. For sugar-loving creatures from insects to higher mammals this was the equivalent of an offlicence opening. Sugar oozing from the fruit attracted airborne yeast cells to ferment it so when insects and animals followed their noses to the syrupy prize they gobbled it up and became gently intoxicated on the alcohol that was the by-product of fermentation. Early humans originated in what is now Africa and they lived largely on a diet of fruit. Chemist Steven Benner of the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in Gainesville, Florida, mapped the evolution of DNA sequences that make up the alcohol metabolising enzyme ADH4 and theorised that the ability to metabolise ethanol might have originated in the common ancestor of chimpanzees, gorillas and humans approximately 10 million years ago when higher primates ate fermenting fruit that had fallen off trees giving them an exciting buzz. This was not forbidden fruit, however, and it spurred our ancestors and animals to actively seek it out. Fermentation is highly beneficial because the nutritional value of the food is enhanced with increased amino acid and vitamin levels. Those augmented calories would sustain whoever ate them and help them survive a hostile environment. Fermentation also made the food easier to digest, supplying nutrition and energy that caused the brain to grow larger.
WHEN DID HUMANS START BOOZING?
Archaeologists believe that humans started purposely making alcoholic beverages in the Palaeolithic Era between 2.5 million and 20,000 years ago – a more specific timeframe is not possible. Ingredients varied depending on where they lived – palm sap, figs and other fruits in Africa, wild grapes in the Caucasus. Honey was widely available everywhere and so mead would have been an early beverage, if not the first. Later, when it was discovered that root crops and wild cereals could be fermented, almost everything growing in soil was fair game. No one understood what caused food to turn as if by magic into nourishing alcohol so when religion became a part of the human experience, it was understood that alcohol was a gift from the deities and they were worshipped accordingly with libations offered in sacrifice. Even today alcohol is central in some Christian and Jewish rites and wine is mentioned in the holy books as God-given.
So far the earliest evidence found for alcoholic drink is on pottery shards in a Neolithic village in north central China that date back to 7000 BC. When the residue was analysed by biomolecular archaeologist Patrick McGovern he identified fermented rice, honey, wild grapes and hawthorn fruit. Those Chinese tipplers had consumed a rice beer/wine hybrid. The Neolithic was the pottery era when humans started to store food and drink in clay vessels. These left an archaeological record. Before pottery, food and drink were stored in animal stomachs and skins, baskets, or wooden containers all of which rotted away over millennia leaving nothing behind to signal how long humans had been imbibing. Patrick McGovern has a theory that the desire for alcohol changed the habits of hunter-gatherer nomadic humans and made them settle in one place so they could be near the plants used to make their favourite booze. This was the birth of agriculture and of civilisation as people started living in close proximity in settlements, purposely planting crops and working together to harvest them.
WHY DID HUMANS START BOOZING?
Different cultures throughout the world most likely started drinking independently with no knowledge of the others. But trade and exploration certainly spread the habit and appreciation of this mystic gift of nature. Major routes such as the Silk Road, River Nile, and Great Rift Valley were the equivalent of information
superhighways. Alcohol is a social lubricant and helped to build community bonds, ease negotiations, resolve disagreements, seal contracts, commune with deities, perform rituals and celebrate significant events. In many cultures alcohol was, and in many places still is, central to society and features in all communal activities. In English when someone says ‘Let’s go for a drink’, they do not mean a cup of tea.
Alcohol has been used over millennia as a universal palliative due to medicinal properties such as pain relief, antioxidant, antiseptic, and to fight disease. Ancient societies in Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, Greece and Rome used alcohol internally and externally to treat ailments and also used it as a delivery method in which to dissolve medicinal herbs and spices.
Apart from countries where alcohol is forbidden for religious reasons almost every nation in the world produces some type of booze – most commonly this is pilsener lager (the pale, carbonated style of beer made by brewers such as Heineken and Beck’s). Drinking is a custom that knows no cultural or class boundaries – it is a universal language.
HOW COME IT WAS SUCH A SUCCESS?
Unknown to the drinkers their habits gave them an advantage over the abstemious because fermented food contains beneficial microflora called Lactobacillus acidophilus which aid digestion, maintain healthy intestines and boost immune system functions. Alcohol also kills harmful microorganisms in food and water.
Our early drinking ancestors lived longer, and reproduced more. Alcohol’s psychotropic effects made them cheerful and less inhibited, encouraged singing, dancing, flirting. Even when the party ended with fighting or face down on the savannah, alcohol’s effects were too seductive to resist.
SO WHAT NOW?
In modern society there is no escape from alcohol. It is in countless everyday goods such as perfume, deodorant, mouthwash, and cleaning products. It is even present in the guts of people who consume carbohydrates which is almost everyone on earth. Sugars in food are fermented by intestinal microflora in a process called auto-brewery syndrome. But the amount of alcohol produced is not enough to make a cocktail with, nor is it an excuse to use in court for being over the limit when driving!