A History of the World in 6 Glasses

by Tom Standage

  Water was the first drink to steer the course of human history; now, after ten thousand years, it seems to be back in the driving seat. To talk of colonizing other planets seems outlandish, but the idea is surely easier for us to understand than the modern world would be for a person transported through time from a Neolithic village from 5000 BCE. He would not recognize any modern language and would no doubt have difficulty comprehending aspects of modern life such as writing, plastics, airliners, and computers. But while much has changed in the intervening millennia, some things have remained the same. He would surely appreciate a glass of beer and would recognize the communal toast for good luck and the ensuing companionable atmosphere.

  For our Neolithic time traveler, a drink of beer might provide a connection with the future; for us, beer is one of the beverages that can provide a window on the past. When you next raise some beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, or Coca-Cola to your lips, think about how it reached you across space and time, and remember that it contains more than mere alcohol or caffeine. There is history, too, amid its swirling depths.

  Acknowledgments

  The research for this book involved a fair amount of drinking, and it would be disingenuous to pretend that this was anything but enjoyable. For their help with my research into beer, I would like to thank Fritz Maytag at the Anchor Brewery in San Francisco, Mary Voigt at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Stephan Somogyi and Iolande Bloxsom, Michael Jackson, Clint Ballinger, and Merryn Dineley. In the case of wine, I am grateful to Patrick McGovern at the University of Pennsylvania Museum and Herve Durand and his family at the Mas des Tourelles winery in Beaucaire, France. Lance Winters at the St. George Distillery in Alameda explained the process of distillation and provided many practical examples. For assistance with the history of coffee, I am grateful to Jeremy Torz of Union Coffee Roasters and Peter Hingley at the Royal Astronomical Society. Endymion Wilkinson of Harvard University provided invaluable advice on the history of tea.

  Other people helped by providing inspiration, acting as sounding boards, or pointing me in unexpected directions during my research, including George Dyson, Neal Stephenson, my colleagues Ann Wroe, Robert Guest, Anthony Gottlieb, and Geoffrey Carr at The Economist, Philippe Legrain, Paul Abrahams, Phil Millo, Vasa Babic, and Henry Hobhouse. Help of various kinds was also furnished by Virginia Benz and Joe Anderer, Cris-tiana Marti, Oliver Morton and Nancy Hynes, Tom Moultrie and Kathryn Stinson, Daniel Illsley and Jonathan Warren at Theatre of Wine in Greenwich, Carolyn Bosworth-Davies, Roger Highfield, Maureen Stapleton and Tim Coulter, Ward van Damme, Annika McKee, and Lee McKee. George Gibson and Jackie Johnson of Walker & Company were unfailingly supportive throughout, as was Katinka Matson of Brockman, Inc. Finally, I am particularly grateful to my wife, Kirstin, and daughter, Ella, for their encouragement while I wrote this book.

  Appendix

  In Search of Ancient Drinks

  Are you interested in tasting one of these ancient drinks? Many of them survive, in one form or another. But be warned that you may not find some of them very palatable.

  Near Eastern Beer

  The most important difference between ancient and modern beers is the use of hops, which is a relatively modern innovation. Hops add a refreshing bitterness to the taste of beer to balance the sweetness of the malt, and also act a preservative, making beer less liable to spoil. But from the perspective of ancient brewers, they are inauthentic. Hops became a standard ingredient of beer between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, and initially different words were used to distinguish between hopped and unhopped drinks: in English, beer referred to a drink that contained hops, while ale was unhopped. Subsequently, ale came to refer to top-fermented beers, as opposed to bottom-fermented lagers, where the yeast sinks to the bottom of the barrel. I have simply used the generic term beer throughout this book to refer to beverages made from fermented cereal grains.

  Traditional folk beers, which survive in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, are probably the nearest thing to Neolithic beer. They are thick, opaque drinks usually made from a mixture of sorghum and either millet or maize. A typical recipe involves soaking the sorghum in water until it starts to sprout, and then spreading it out to dry in the sun, with frequent turning to ensure it dries thoroughly and does not start to rot. Meanwhile the other, unmalted grain is put into hot water to make a thin gruel. The gruel is left overnight or until it turns sour. The malted sorghum, which has been roughly ground with a stone, is then added to the gruel, which is left to stand in a large pot until it becomes sparkling and alcoholic. Finally, the drink is filtered through a sack or sieve before drinking. (In South Africa I drank some umqomboti, a traditional Xhosa beverage made from a mixture of malted and unmalted sorghum. Thick, creamy, and off-white, it had a sour tang, reminiscent of yogurt. It was rather like drinking liquid bread.)

  The Egyptians and Mesopotamians drank beer that was more like modern beer: It was clear or cloudy rather than opaque, since the wort—the sugary mixture created by cooking the grains in water—was strained before fermentation. During the late 1980s and early 1990s Fritz Maytag, at the Anchor Brewery in San Francisco, painstakingly recreated Mesopotamian beer using an ancient recipe dating from around 1800 BCE, the Hymn to Ninkasi. (Ninkasi was the Mesopotamian goddess of brewing.) Maytag and his team even prepared bappir, the traditional "beer bread" made from malted barley to enable it to be stored for long periods. When I sampled a fifteen-year-old piece of bap-pir, it tasted quite good, though it contained a lot of chaff. Those who drank the resulting beer said it tasted sweet by modern standards, due to the lack of hops.

  There have also been several attempts to recreate Egyptian beer, notably the Tutankhamen Ale produced by the Scottish and Newcastle Breweries based on research by Delwen Samuel of Cambridge University. Her electron-microscope analysis of brewing residues led her to conclude that Egyptian beer was made from a mixture of malted barley and unmalted emmer (a kind of wheat), which makes sense since malting is a labor-intensive process. The barley was malted and ground and then mixed with cold water to liberate enzymes, and the emmer was ground and mixed with hot water to liberate starches. When the two were mixed, the enzymes broke down the starches into sugar. The wort was then sieved to remove the chaff before fermentation; depictions of this step have been wrongly interpreted, says Samuel, as loaves of bread being crumbled into the vat. Following this recipe produced a fruity, sweet beer that was golden in color and slightly cloudy. The one thousand bottles produced were sold at Harrods.

  It is hard to find anything similar to Egyptian or Mesopotamian beer today since very few unhopped beers are made commercially. A rare exception is the King Cnut Ale made by St. Peter's, a British brewery, based on a recipe from the first millennium CE and named for King Canute, the eleventh-century ruler of Denmark, Norway, and England. It is made with barley, juniper, orange and lemon peel, spices, and nettles. It resembles beer, but without the bitterness of the hops it tastes sweet and fruity—and, in fact, rather like wine. Drink this beer, and you will understand why Nabonidus, the last king of the NeoBabylonian Empire, referred to wine as "the excellent 'beer' of the mountains." Another example of an unhopped beer that is still made today is Sahti, a Finnish folk beer. Michael Jackson, a beer expert, calls it "the last primitive beer to survive in Europe." Traditionally a seasonal beer, it is available all year round at Zetor, a pub in the center of Helsinki, where it is kept in plastic kegs in a fridge. It has a bouquet of stewed chicory and the tang of a wheat beer but, of course, no hops. Instead, as with King Cnut Ale, juniper berries are used to balance the taste of the grain.

  Greek and Roman Wine

  The finest ancient wines, as people of the time noted, were those that did not require adulteration or additives to conceal their faults. So they would probably have tasted similar to modern wines (though, of course, the Greeks and Romans almost always drank their wine diluted with water). Overall, though, the practice of adding things to wine, at every stage from fermentation to
serving, was far more widespread. Most wine was probably of far lower quality than even the cheapest modern wine, due to the far lower standards of hygiene and the difficulty of storing wine for long periods. As a result, wines were usually blended and flavored to produce a more palatable or consistent product. Very few of these practices remain in modern wine making; a notable exception is the use of pine resin in the Greek wine, retsina. The use of resin as a flavoring and preservative has ancient origins and was not restricted to Greece in ancient times. It may have arisen from the use of resin to coat the insides of amphorae, to prevent wine from seeping out. Retsina mixed with water, then, gives a fair approximation of one style of ancient wine.

  Other styles, however, involved the addition of herbs, honey, or even seawater at various stages of production. Several Roman wines have been recreated, using recipes, techniques, and equipment from the period, by Herve Durand and his family at the Mas des Tourelles winery in the south of France, on the site of a Roman vineyard. One wine, called Mulsum, is a red wine that contains herbs and honey; it is sweet, but not overly so, with spicy notes. Diluted with water, it tastes rather like Ribena. Another wine, Turriculae, is based on a recipe recorded by the Roman writer Columella. It is a white wine made with a small quantity of seawater and herbs, chiefly fenugreek. It is straw-colored and tastes remarkably like a dry, nutty sherry; the saltiness of the seawater is well integrated and not too conspicuous, so that it tastes like a natural part of the wine, rather than an additive. The third of Durand's Roman wines, Carenum, is a dessert wine made from red wine mixed with defrutum (a boiled-down, spiced wine used as a cooking ingredient by the Romans) and herbs. The addition of defrutum raises the alcohol content and the sweetness; the result tastes quite similar to a late-harvest Zinfandel. All of these wines can be purchased at the winery.

  Several winemakers produce wine using grape varieties that supposedly date back to Greek and Roman times. Particularly noteworthy is the Mastroberardino winery near Naples, which makes wines from the Greco di Tufo, Fiano di Avellino, and Aglianico grapes. The first is a white grape thought to have been introduced to Italy by the Greeks, the second is another white grape favored by the Romans, who called it Vitis Apiana, or "the vine beloved by bees," and the third is a red grape that is used in Mastroberardino's flagship wine, Taurasi. Such is the Mastroberardino family's devotion to ancient grapes that they were recently asked to replant the vineyards of Pompeii. Yet they are equally devoted to modern wine-making technologies, such as refrigerated stainless-steel tanks and rotary fermenters. This ensures that Mas­troberardino wines are clean, vivid, and powerful, but also completely inauthentic; they include no herbs or seawater, for example.

  To serve a modern wine in the Greek or Roman manner, the main thing to remember is to dilute it with water. Do so, and you will notice something surprising, namely, how well a wine's bouquet and taste survive dilution. Andre Tchernia, an expert on ancient wine, tells the story of meeting at a conference in Saint Emilion an eminent winemaker whose mother had always drunk her wine mixed with water—but who could still distinguish between different vintages. Even though the Greeks and Romans diluted their wines, in short, this did not impair their ability to recognize and appreciate various styles and vintages.

  Spirits from the Colonial Era

  The process of making distilled drinks has not changed significantly since colonial times, and some distilleries dating back to that period are still operating today, making brandy, rum, and whiskey. Spirits appealed less for their taste than for their power to intoxicate, which is why they were often consumed in cocktail-like mixtures such as punch or grog, the forerunners of modern cocktails. It is a simple matter to recreate grog by mixing dark rum, water, and brown sugar with some lemon or lime juice, though modern drinkers may then wish to move swiftly on to a mojito, grog's more palatable descendant.

  Coffee from the Seventeenth Century

  The traditional Arab method for preparing coffee involves bringing a mixture of ground coffee beans and water to the boil three times in quick succession. This agitates the coffee grounds and extracts a lot of flavor, resulting in a strong, black drink. When coffee was brought to Europe, however, its preparation was rather more haphazard. In England, coffee was initially taxed liked a form of beer, namely by the gallon, which meant that London coffeehouses had to prepare their coffee in advance in order to pay duty on it. The cold coffee was then reheated for consumption. To ensure a ready supply, a pot was kept near the boil, which would have resulted in a strong, bitter drink best taken with sugar. Perhaps the nearest modern equivalent, suggests Jeremy Torz, a London-based coffee expert, is the coffee in an office percolator that has been left switched on for a day or two. He notes that seventeenth-century coffee would have been quite lightly roasted in a pan or tray; deeper, darker roasts had to await the development of elaborate roasting machines. Being transported in a damp ship, possibly alongside powerful spices, might also have affected the coffee's taste. All of this suggests that there would have been wide variations in the taste of coffee between one coffeehouse and another, and from one week to the next. The presence of caffeine, and the surroundings in which the coffee was served, would appear to have been more important than its taste. (The coffee filter was a twentieth-century invention.)

  Old English Tea

  The first tea to be brought to Europe in the seventeenth century was green tea made from unoxidized leaves, which was consumed without milk or sugar. Green tea from China can be readily purchased today and probably tastes very similar. Black tea became popular in the eighteenth century, partly because it was less likely to contain toxic adulterants, but its greater bitterness promoted the addition of sugar. This tea was made from semioxidized leaves and was known at the time as bohea; this style of tea became known as oolong in the 1850s, by which time even stronger teas, made from fully oxidized leaves, were also becoming popular (and which may also, confusingly, be called oolongs). So a light, semioxidized oolong gives an impression of eighteenth-century tea, but one that is inaccurate in two respects: It is not adulterated with other ingredients or blended with other teas. The nearest equivalent to the dubious blends of the eighteenth century is probably low-cost teabags. Many tea blends and styles survive unchanged from the nineteenth century, such as Earl Grey (flavored with bergamot) and English Breakfast Tea.

  Cola from the Nineteenth Century

  Today's Coca-Cola is still made using the original secret recipe, but that recipe has been tweaked a few times, notably to reduce the level of caffeine and replace the original trace of cocaine with flavorings extracted from coca leaves. For a cola with an entirely legal extra kick, try Jolt Cola, which contains more caffeine than Coca-Cola and was favored by programmers during the dot-com boom. Several firms also make speciality colas using old-fashioned recipes. I am partial to Fentiman's Curiosity Cola, an old-style cola that contains extracts of guarana berries and catuaba bark, both natural stimulants, as well as caffeine.

  Notes

  1. A Stone-Age Brew

  The account of the adoption of cereal grains and the emergence of agriculture in the Near East follows Roaf, Cultural Atlas of Mesopotamia and the Ancient Near East; Bober, Art, Culture and Cuisine; and Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel. The discussion of the probable origins of beer follows Katz and Voigt, "Bread and Beer"; Kavanagh, "Archaeological Parameters for the Beginnings of Beer"; Katz and Maytag, "Brewing an Ancient Beer"; Forbes, Studies in Ancient Technology; Hartman and Oppenheim, "On Beer and Brewing Techniques in Ancient Mesopotamia"; Ballinger, "Beer Production in the Ancient Near East"; and Braidwood et al., "Did Man Once Live by Beer Alone?" The social importance of beer, and its possible role in the emergence of complex societies, are discussed in Katz and Voigt, "Bread and Beer"; Sher-ratt, "Alcohol and Its Alternatives"; Schivelbusch, Tastes of Paradise; and Joffe, "Alcohol and Social Complexity in Ancient Western Asia."

  2. Civilized Beer

  The origins of the first cities in Mesopotamia and Egypt are discussed i
n Trigger, Understanding Early Civilizations; Hawkes, The First Great Civilizations; Leick, Mesopotamia; and Kramer, History Begins at Sumer. The account of the use and significance of beer within Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations follows Darby, Ghalioungui, and Grivetti, Food: Gift of Osiris; Heath, Drinking Occasions; Michalow-ski, "The Drinking Gods"; Samuel, "Brewing and Baking"; Bober, Art, Culture and Cuisine; and Ellison, "Diet in Mesopotamia." The account of the origins of writing follows Schmandt-Besserat, Before Writing.

  3. The Delight of Wine

  The rise of wine at the expense of beer is covered by McGovern, Fleming, and Katz, eds., The Origins and Ancient History of Wine; Sherratt, "Alcohol and Its Alternatives"; McGovern, Ancient Wine; and Younger, Gods, Men and Wine. For Greek attitudes toward wine and drinking practices, including details of the symposion, see Murray, Sympotica; Dalby, Siren Feasts; and Unwin, Wine and the Vine. For Greek wine styles, see Younger, Gods, Men and Wine.

  4. The Imperial Vine

  For the displacement of Greek wine by Roman wine, see Fleming, Vinum; Unwin, Wine and the Vine; and Dalby, Siren Feasts. Roman attitudes toward wine, and the story of Marcus Antonius, are from Tchernia and Brun, Le vin romain antique, and Tchernia, Le vin de Vltalie romaine. The account of the hierarchy of Roman wines follows Fleming, Vinum; Allen, A History of Wine; and Younger, Gods, Men and Wine. Galenic medicine and Galen's use of wine are discussed in Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, and Allen, A History of Wine. For the rejection of wine by Muslims and its significance to Christians, see Sherratt, "Alcohol and Its Alternatives," and Unwin, Wine and the Vine. Alcuin's lament is quoted from Younger, Gods, Men and Wine. For the ancient origins of European drinking customs, see Engs, "Do Traditional Western European Practices Have Origins in Antiquity?"