The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks

by Amy Stewart

  In 1806, Napoleon Bonaparte found himself in a bit of a bind. He’d issued an order, known as the Berlin Decree, banning the importation of any British goods. That meant no tea, no warm British wool, no indigo dye, and no sugar for the people of France. At that time, most sugarcane production in the Caribbean was under British control. Knowing that this would be a disaster for Parisian pastry chefs, Napoleon hatched a plan to refine sugar from beets.

  He turned to botanist Benjamin Delessert to develop a method. Soon there were six experimental stations operating around France, with a hundred students learning the process. Farmers were required to plant thousands of acres in beets. Forty factories were pumping out over three million pounds of sugar. In 1811, Napoleon wrote that the British could throw their sugarcane into the Thames, because Europe would have no further use for it. But after his exile, the political winds shifted again, and sugarcane came back to France.

  The modern sugar beet is a hefty, white variety grown for its high sucrose content—18 percent, which is higher than most sugarcane. It can grow to a foot long and weigh five pounds. A close relative of chard and amaranth, the beet is probably native to the Mediterranean, where it emerged as a more domesticated form of the wild sea beet, Beta vulgaris subsp. maritima, also called wild spinach. Although botanists developed a method for boiling it to make a sweet syrup in the late sixteenth century, it wasn’t used as a sweetener until varieties had been bred that contained higher sugar levels. That breakthrough, along with technological advances and sheer necessity, finally made it possible to extract a reasonable amount of sugar from a beet.

  Today a quarter of the world’s sugar supply comes from beets, with the United States, Poland, Russia, Germany, France, and Turkey leading the way. Fifty-five percent of the sugar produced in the United States comes from sugar beets, mostly grown in the upper Midwest and western states. America consumes all the sugar it grows and imports more, mostly from Latin America and the Caribbean, to satisfy its sweet tooth.

  The process is similar to that of sugarcane. The juice is extracted with hot water rather than a mill, but after that, it is filtered, heated, and the sugar crystals are separated from the molasses. The sugar extracted from beets is identical to that of sugarcane, but the molasses is different: beet molasses is bitter and unpalatable because of the non-sugar residues left behind. It can be fed to livestock and has even been sprayed on icy roads to help the salt stick.

  Of interest to drinkers, however, is the fact that beet molasses is sold to commercial producers of yeast, who mix it with cane molasses to provide a sugary medium for large-scale yeast cultivation. After being raised on molasses, the yeast is filtered, compressed, and sent out to breweries, distilleries, and bakeries. So in a way, all alcohol begins with beet sugar.

  Some spirits are produced from beet sugar, although it may not be obvious: so-called rectified spirits or neutral spirits can be made from beet sugar and used as a base in liqueurs or to adjust the proof of a spirit. Orange liqueurs like triple sec, and many brands of absinthe and pastis, are made with a beet sugar alcohol base. And around the world, a few rums are made from beet sugar, including the Swedish Altissima and the Austrian Stroh 80. Craft distilleries in the United States have attempted it as well. Michigan’s Northern United Brewing Company makes a version of rum based on beet sugar, and Wisconsin’s Old Sugar Distillery distills an anise-flavored ouzo and a honey liqueur from beet sugar.

  WHEAT

  Triticum aestivum

  poaceae (grass family)

  As one of the oldest cereal grains, wheat would seem like the logical candidate for the title of most ancient and primary beer ingredient. It was domesticated over ten thousand years ago in the Middle East and arrived in China by 3000 BC. As a food source, it has everything going for it: protein, flavor, durability, and a wonderful elasticity that allows bread to rise. But some of the very qualities that make it good to eat also make it difficult to ferment. In fact, brewers and distillers consider it one of the trickier ingredients to work with.

  To understand this problem, think about it from the plant’s perspective. A grain of any kind is, of course, a seed; it represents the plant’s next generation, its shot at immortality. To ensure the seed’s success, the plant stores sugar next to the embryo in the form of starch. But sugar alone is not enough: a seedling needs protein, too. So embedded within the starch is a matrix of protein. When the seed drops to the ground and gets a little damp, enzymes go to work busting apart that starch so that the seedling will have some sugar to eat. But first, they have to get past the protein.

  Wheat is particularly good at taking up nitrogen, one of the building blocks of protein. Those wheat proteins are fairly flexible in the sense that they’ll take extra nitrogen when they can get it. That makes for a strong matrix wrapped around the starch. This is good news for bakers: a healthy amount of protein makes a great loaf of bread. Those wheat proteins come together in the presence of water to form gluten—that sticky, stretchy stuff so important in dough.

  That’s why farmers, for thousands of years, have selected strains of wheat that are high in protein and eager to take up nitrogen. Their selection process, however, is not as beneficial for brewers. In a brewer’s mash, the starch is so tightly bound up in the protein matrix that some of it is inaccessible. The equation is simple: more nitrogen means more protein, which means less sugar and therefore less alcohol. Complicating matters is the fact that wheat can get gummy in a mash tub, and the stray bits of protein left behind after fermentation make the brew cloudy.

  BUCKWHEAT

  Buckwheat (Fagopyrum esculentum) is not wheat at all, but a flowering plant in the knotweed family. It is closely related to dock and sorrel, two wild European herbs. The dark, triangular seeds are enclosed in a hull that makes up about a fourth of the seed’s bulk. When the hull is removed, what’s left is called a buckwheat groat.

  In addition to its use as flour in pancakes and noodles, and in cereal (such as European kasha), buckwheat is used in Japan to make the spirit shochu, and it’s turning up in vodkas and in beers as a gluten-free alternative. The French Distillerie des Menhirs makes what it claims is the world’s only buckwheat whiskey, called Eddu Silver.

  a touch of wheat

  So even though wheat went into ancient brews, it was never used alone. Egyptians mixed their wheat with barley, sorghum, and millet to come up with a more workable recipe. A fine wheat beer tradition developed in Germany, starting in the Middle Ages, but even those beers consisted of only about 55 percent wheat, with barley making up the rest of the grain. Russian distillers made early vodkas from a mixture of wheat, barley, and rye, and Scotch and Irish whiskey makers perfected the art of making whiskey from a similar blend, with a little corn added. Without the help of those other grains, wheat would not make much of a drink.

  Why bother with wheat at all, if it is so difficult to work with? Try a German Hefeweizen and you’ll have your answer. There’s a definite bread and biscuit aroma that is impossible not to love. Wheat is also smooth and round and easygoing. It settles in happily with the other flavors around it. German wheat beers are known for their spicy, citrusy character; this comes not so much from the hops but from special strains of yeast that go to work on those wheat sugars and produce their own unique flavors. Those beers are also known for their thick, foamy head, which is mostly dissolved wheat protein. Many brewers add a touch of wheat to their grain mixture just for the foam.

  In vodka and whiskey, wheat makes for a light, smooth spirit, and this can be a wonderful thing. Any number of bourbon drinkers will say that they’ve tasted all kinds of fancy bourbons but keep returning to Maker’s Mark. Why? It’s the wheat. Most bourbon contains a little rye in addition to corn and barley, but Maker’s uses wheat instead of rye. That smooth, sweet flavor, quite different from the spicy bite of rye, explains why Maker’s is such a crowd-pleaser. The influence of wheat is even more obvious in some of the new American “straight wheat” whiskies, in which wheat makes up at l
east 51 percent of the blend. And the sheer palatability of wheat is still more evident in three of the world’s most popular vodkas: Grey Goose, Ketel One, and Absolut.

  Until recently, the needs of brewers and distillers were ignored by wheat farmers. Planting a hard, high-protein wheat, and feeding it plenty of nitrogen, is a good strategy for a farmer who wants to feed the world. But if the farmer wants a nice glass of whiskey at the end of the day, putting in a few fields of soft wheat would help. Wheat varieties are distinguished by growing season (winter vs. spring), by color (amber, red, or white), and by protein content, with soft wheat being lower in protein. Now plant breeders are more focused on breeding low-protein varieties, and farmers who want to grow for brewers are using less nitrogen fertilizer in their fields. Wheat for brewing and distilling might make up only a small fraction of the 689 million tons produced around the world, but without it, beer, whiskey, and vodka wouldn’t be the same.

  WHAT ABOUT the LEMON WEDGE?

  Wheat beers are often served with a lemon wedge to highlight their natural citrus flavors, but some beer aficionados consider this a sacrilege. They argue that good beer should never require additional flavorings. In certain company, what one does with a lemon wedge and a glass of wheat beer could make or break a friendship. It’s your drink, so do what you want—but proceed with caution.

  DRINK YOUR WHEAT

  There are thousands of wheat varieties around the world. Most of the wheat sold to brewers and distillers is simply labeled by type, such as “soft red winter wheat.” But here are a few of the specific varieties you might find in your bottle.

  WHISKEY

  BEER

  Alchemy

  Andrew

  Claire

  Crystal

  Consort

  Gambrinus

  Glasgow

  Madsen

  Istabraq

  Riband

  Robigus

  Zebedee

  strange brews

  A stiff drink can be made from more than barley and grapes. Some of the most extraordinary

  and obscure plants have been fermented and distilled. A few of these are dangerous, some are downright bizarre, and one is as ancient as dinosaurs—but each represents a unique cultural contribution to our global drinking traditions.

  Banana | Cashew Apple | Cassava | Date Palm | Jackfruit | Marula | Monkey Puzzle | Parsnip | Prickly Pear Cactus | Savanna Bamboo | Strawberry Tree | Tamarind

  BANANA

  Musa acuminata

  musaceae (banana family)

  The banana tree is actually not a tree but an enormous perennial herb. It is disqualified from being a tree because its stem contains no woody tissue. Most of us have only ever eaten one kind of banana, the Cavendish, which is what our supermarkets carry, but there are in fact hundreds of cultivars, including the so-called beer bananas of Uganda and Rwanda. Farmers prefer to grow beer bananas (as opposed to cooking bananas, also known as plantains), because they can process the fruit into a highly profitable beer that, while short-lived, does not perish as quickly as the bananas themselves do. Transformed into beer, the bananas are easier to get to market.

  The traditional method is to pile ripe, unpeeled bananas into a pit or basket. People tread on them to extract the juice, much like the stomping of grapes. The juice is roughly filtered through grass and left to ferment in a gourd, to which sorghum flour might be added. After a couple of days, the cloudy, sweet and sour beer is ready to drink. It can be bottled and stored for two or three days at the most.

  While Ugandan banana beer is usually a homemade affair, brewers have made commercial versions. Chapeau Banana is a Belgian lambic. The British Wells & Young’s Brewing Company makes Wells Banana Bread Beer, and the Mongozo brewery in the Netherlands offers a banana beer made in the African style with fair-trade bananas.

  CASHEW APPLE

  Anacardium occidentale

  anacardiaceae (cashew family)

  Most people have never taken a cashew nut out of its shell. There’s a good reason for this: the cashew tree is a close relative to poison ivy, poison oak, and poison sumac. Like its cousins, it excretes a nasty, rash-inducing oil called urushiol. The shells have to be carefully steamed open to extract the edible, urushiol-free nut inside.

  The nut hangs from a small fruit called the cashew apple. (In botanical terms, the cashew apple is actually a pseudo-fruit because it does not contain any seed; the real fruit is the cashew nut hanging below it.) This fruit, which is also free of the noxious oil, is used in India to make a fermented drink called feni.

  The cashew tree, native to Brazil, was described in 1558 by French botanist André Thevet. In a woodcut, he depicted people squeezing the fruit while it still hung on the tree. Portuguese explorers brought the cashew to their colony in Mozambique and to the eastern coast of India. European tastes in liquor called for new uses of the cashew: in 1838, a report on the drinking habits of people in the West Indies included a description of a punch, presumably rum-based, flavored with the juice of the cashew apple.

  These squat, fast-growing trees, which climb to about forty feet tall and stretch twice as wide, were planted in India with the idea that they would help with erosion control. Cashew trees are now also found in East Africa and throughout Central and South America, but the world’s supply of cashew nuts comes primarily from Brazil and India.

  Cashew apple feni (sometimes fenny or fenni) is still made in the tiny Indian state of Goa, which was occupied by Portugal from 1510 through 1961. It’s a popular vacation spot for European tourists, who seek out the local beverage while on holiday.

  The apples signal their ripeness by dropping from the tree or separating with only the slightest pressure; they must then be crushed immediately because they spoil quickly. To make feni, locals separate the cashew apple, which they call caju, from the nut. The fruit is placed into a pit and stomped, sometimes by children wearing rubber boots. The juice is set aside to make a lightly fermented summer drink called urak. Some of this fermented beverage is then distilled in a copper pot to about 40 percent ABV; it is this strong, clear drink that is called feni. The locals enjoy it with lemonade, soda, or tonic water.

  CASSAVA

  Manihot esculenta

  euphorbiaceae (spurge family)

  The cassava root has been an important food source for people in impoverished and famine-prone areas around the world. Even today it feeds four hundred million people in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The starchy roots, which grow to over three feet in length and weigh several pounds, do offer some nutrition, particularly vitamin C and calcium, but they are also poisonous if not processed properly. In order to leach the cyanide out of the roots, they must be soaked in water, cooked, or pounded into a flour and spread out on the ground for several hours to allow the cyanide to break down or escape into the air. So-called sweet varieties require less processing than the more nutritious, but also more poisonous, bitter varieties. Neither is necessarily safe to eat raw.

  In spite of these difficulties, the cassava—also called manioc root—is a staple food because it is drought-tolerant and fairly easy to grow. In the Caribbean and parts of Latin America, especially in Brazil, Ecuador, and Peru, manioc beer (called ouicöu on the islands) is made by peeling and chopping the root, boiling it in water, and then chewing the pulp and spitting it back into the mash. This introduces amylase, an enzyme in saliva that helps convert starch to sugar. It is then brought back to a boil, and sugar, honey, or fruit might be added to help increase the alcohol content and improve the flavor.

  Cassava is native to South America; it was domesticated in Brazil by about 5000 BC. Although it was introduced to East Africa by the Portuguese in 1736, it wasn’t widely grown there until the twentieth century. Any cassava beer-making tradition in Africa is therefore relatively recent. Multinational beer conglomerate SABMiller, known for such brands as Coors Light and Henry Weinhard’s, recently announced plans to brew cassava beer in Angola, sourcing ingredients from local far
mers and selling the beer at a lower cost, in hopes of creating not only jobs but also a new market for beer among thirsty, impoverished Africans.

  Cassareep is a thick, dark syrup made by boiling the cassava root and adding spices such as cloves, cayenne, cinnamon, and salt and sugar. it is used as a meat sauce and to flavor a guyanese stew called pepperpot. it does not appear that anyone has had the wit or courage to invent a cocktail that uses cassareep as an ingredient—yet.

  BUGS in BOOZE: honeybees

  --- Apis spp. ---

  No insect is more important to the history of alcohol than the honeybee. Just about every kind of fermentable fruit—from grapes to apples to the strange and lovely tamarind—is pollinated by bees, which means that without them, we risk a sudden and shocking sobriety, not to mention scurvy and starvation. But there is a more direct route from bees to intoxication—honey.

  Even before the advent of beekeeping in Egyptian times, honey was collected in the wild. Primitive drawings of bee hunters climbing cliffs to rob hives of honey date back to the Neolithic and Mesolithic eras. The earliest beehives, called skeeps, were made of simple baskets that could at least be hung in a more convenient location, making long treks through the forest in search of honey unnecessary.

  The earliest form of honey wine, or mead, probably came about when honeycomb was drained of most of its honey and then soaked in water to remove the rest. This honey water would have fermented naturally in the presence of wild yeast. Later, when beekeepers realized that they could get lighter, sweeter honey by placing beehives near particular crops like clover, alfalfa, and citrus, the wild honey collected in forests went first to mead, while more refined, cultivated honey was preferred as a sweetener.