Book: The Drunken Botanist
Tagline: The Plants That Create the World’s Great Drinks
Author: Amy Stewart
Find Online:https://www.amystewart.com/books/drunkenbotanist/
Date Read: August 2018
My friend Claire gave this to me for Christmas 2017 when we still worked together because she knows that I love mixing cocktails! She also gave me another wonderful book about cocktail mixing as part of her present, it was "The 12 Bottle Bar: A Dozen Bottles. Hundreds of Cocktails. A New Way to Drink," not sure if I'll get around to posting that book on here.
Plants make sugar, and when sugar meets yeast, alcohol is born. Plants soak up carbon dioxide and sunlight, convert it to sugar, and exhale oxygen. It’s not much of an exaggeration to claim that the very process that gives us the raw ingredients for brandy and beer is the same one that sustains life on the planet.
::The DNA of apples is more complex than ours.:: A recent gene sequencing of the Golden Delicious genome uncovered fifty-seven thousand genes, more than twice as many as the twenty thousand to twenty-five thousand that humans possess.
John Chapman a.k.a. Johnny Appleseed thought it was wicked to start a tree by grafting it, so his apple trees were always grown from seed, “the way nature intended.”
Joseph Stalin believed that a person’s behavior could change their genetic makeup, so that habits learned in one lifetime could be passed on through their DNA. (Epigenetics?)
::The oldest domesticated living organism in the world is a wild, single-celled, asexual creature called yeast.:: Yeast is capable of:
* preserving food
* making bread rise
* fermenting drinks
Bakers have a lot in common with brewers – carbon dioxide is what forces bread dough to rise.
If we were being honest, we’d admit that what a liquor store sells is, chemically speaking, little more than the litter boxes of millions of domesticated yeast organisms, wrapped up in pretty bottles with fancy price tags.
So (in terms of alcohol production at least) yeast either run out of sugar and die of starvation, or eat so much sugar that the alcohol they produce kills them.
Think of an enzyme as a lock in search of a key.
Corn was domesticated so long ago that its ancestor no longer survives.
Corn beer is called ‘chicha’
In addition to its role in sake production, koji is used to ferment tofu, soy sauce, and vinegar, making it a sort of staple microorganism in Japanese cuisine.
^ maybe that’s why they’re so healthy too?
Sorghum is one of the world’s most imbibed plants – way more Ethan grapes, and grains like barley and rice.
The cane that emerges from the ground is segmented into joints separated by nodes. Each node holds ‘root primordia’ – tissue that could turn into roots under the right circumstances – and a single bud, ready to grow a stem and leaves. These highly charged little bands of tissue explain why it’s so easy to propagate sugarcane.
John Adams, writing to his friend William Tudor in 1818, said, “I know not why we should blush to confess that molasses was an essential ingredient in American independence. Many great events have proceeded from much smaller causes.”
In the US, a bottle of alcohol is 100 proof if it contains 57% alcohol.
A grain of any kind is, of course, a seed; it represents the plant’s next generation, its shot at immortality.
The plants most commonly transformed into alcohol are:
* agave
* apple
* barley
* corn
* grapes
* potato
* rice
* rye
* sorghum
* sugarcane
* wheat
Some of the obscure plants that have been fermented distilled are:
* banana
* cashew apple
* cassava
* Date palm
* jackfruit
* Marlua
* monkey puzzle
* parsnip
* prickly pear cactus
* savanna bamboo
* strawberry tree
* tamarind
The banana tree is not actually a tree, but an enormous perennial herb.
In 2005 an archeologist in Israel had the idea to try germinating a 2000 year old date palm seed that had been sitting in storage. It worked.
Monkey Puzzle is quite likely the oldest plant in the world from which an alcoholic beverage is made.
Herb: the tender, green vegetative or flowering part of a plant used for flavoring.
Spice: The dry, tough woody parts of a plant (such as bark, seeds, stems, roots) and, in some cases, fruit, used for seasoning.
Aloe is more closely related to lilies and asparagus than it is to cactus.
Scientists have recently learned that a particular gene allele makes some people highly sensitive to loin’s bitterness in aloe, whereas people without that allele can’t even taste it except at high concentrations. This may explain why some people love Italian bitters, a.k.a. amaros, and others can’t stand them.
The three most expensive spices in the world are saffron, vanilla, and cardamom.
Linalool and linalyl acetate are fragrant compounds found in cardamom, lavender, citrus, and other flowers and spices. These compounds have been shown to reduce stress as measured by direct testing of subjects’ immune system response.