Read an Excerpt
Excerpt from Preface
There’s no shortage of scientific—and pseudoscientific—discussion about alcohol in our world. Pick up any bar guide or talk to any barfly, and eventually a theory of solution chemistry or human ethanol metabolism will be trotted out for your benefit. Sometimes these claims are even true—though it can be hard to tell which ones. Consider:
"You should never add water to whiskey.” (False. )
"Carbonated mixers get you drunker.” (True.)
"A hangover is a dehydrated brain.” (Partially.) (Sometimes.) (A hangover is a lot of things. )
The maddening thing is, all the information you could want about drinking is out there. Scientists and industry professionals have done the research, but it’s hard to know where to look to get the answers—particularly if you have a lot of questions.
I know this from experience. Drinking has a remarkable ability to stimulate my academic interest (along with conversation and the desire to drink more). I’ve been geeking out about cocktail recipes and booze history since college; it was only a matter of time before I started looking into the science.
Off and on, at odd hours over the course of several years, I tried to dig up information on alcohol "facts” I’d never heard substantiated. Most of the time I was researching things that supposedly affect how drunk you get—carbonation, heat, the gold flakes in Goldschläger, and so on. It surprised me that there was no one-stop shop where I could get my questions answered.
That was the kernel that germinated into this book. It took a couple of years and a fortuitous conversation with a dear friend before "Somebody should write a book about that” finally turned into "I should write a book about that”—and so Distilled Knowledge was born. If it saves even one person a few hours of frustrated Googling, I’ll be happy.
What Is This Book?
Distilled Knowledge is a compendium of basic scientific information that pertains to alcohol at all stages—from first fermentation to the last dregs of your hangover. I hope to answer common questions, put disputes to rest, and perhaps prompt some of you to further research on your own.
What Isn’t This Book?
Oh, so many things. It isn’t a work of original scientific scholarship I am not a scientist; I come at this topic from the other side— I'm a barfly, like you. What you’re holding is my best understanding of the science that’s already out there. If you’re obsessive enough, you can find all this information yourself, by digging through library stacks and scouring the Internet—believe me, I know. I wrote this book so you won’t have to do all that.
It isn’t a cocktail book or a guide to bar techniques. There are no recipes in these pages (not even as Easter eggs for those of you who assume I’m being facetious—you know who you are). If you’re looking for recipes presented with a scientific flair, I recommend Dave Arnold’s Liquid Intelligence or Kevin Liu’s Craft Cocktails at Home.
It also isn’t the only book in the world that looks at alcohol from a scientific perspective. If you’d like to read more on the topic but don’t want to dive directly into the technical literature, Adam Rogers’s Proof is an excellent next move. If you’re one of those people who enjoys eating as well as drinking, Harold McGee’s magisterial On Food and Cooking is an invaluable reference to the whats and hows of both.
How Do I Use This Book?
Distilled Knowledge is structured so that it can be read straight through or consulted as a reference text. Each chapter is divided into sections that address particular topics. Where necessary, they’re cross-referenced with other sections or the Appendix for further reading. Say hello to the Distilled Knowledge marginalia gremlins, which will be your guides in these situations.
I’ve tried to include at least a quick-and-dirty version of whatever background explanation you may need in each section. That way, if you’re jumping around, you won’t have to go back and read prior sections to understand what you’re looking at; and if you’re going straight through, you’ll know which of the things you’ve already learned will be specifically relevant to what you’re reading. You’ll also find a handy list of references in the back of this book, as well as footnotes that point you towards specific studies I mention
Who Should Read This Book?
Everyone, naturally! My goal is for people at all levels of expertise to find something to appreciate. But Distilled Knowledge will probably be most helpful to the curious amateur, the person who knows just enough about science or alcohol to know that there's much more to learn.
Excerpt from A Nightcap: Alcohol Consumption in Animals
This book has focused on drinking in just three sorts of creatures: yeast, bacteria, and humans. There’s good reason for that: these microbes make the booze, and most of my readers who drink it are, I assume, human. But we’re not nature’s only creations to have a relationship with ethanol—far from it.
Let’s start with our closest relatives. Chimpanzees, like humans’ perennial teenage cousins, are less advanced than we are in their drinking but impressively resourceful in getting a buzz going. They’re fans of palm wine, the naturally fermenting sap of the palm tree, also enjoyed by many people across the world. It clocks in at about the strength of a beer.
Wild chimps make scoops and sponges out of leaves to get at the good stuff. The first scientific study of this phenomenon observed this behavior in West Africa over the course of seventeen years, finding that the drinking could be either social or solitary, that some individuals drank more—or more frequently—than others, and that chimpanzees display such signs of intoxication as somnolence and agitation. Perhaps most important of all, it this study provided hard evidence that ethanol consumption is a natural behavior and doesn’t show up only when animals have been introduced to man-made alcohol products.
On the other side of the world, the vervet monkeys of the Caribbean are famous for their love of a good drink. They’re not satisfied with the products of natural fermentation, though—they prefer rum, mixed into tropical cocktails, and they like it so much they’ve been known to steal drinks from inattentive tourists at beach bars.
Vervet monkeys have some other traits that might seem familiar. They drink most heavily as adolescents, and sober up a bit as they get older. Females are more likely to imbibe moderately and to prefer sweeter drinks. Alcoholic vervets tend to like their drinks strong. Some will drink themselves unconscious or show signs of withdrawal if you they’re shut off. Females are more likely to imbibe moderately and to prefer sweeter drinks,
But it’s not just primates that like an adult beverage, as much fun as the chimps and the vervets are. Some bears seem to have a taste for beer, though they need to consume quite a lot of it to really enjoy themselves. A family of Norwegian bears went through a hundred beers in a single bender back in 2012, in addition to gorging themselves on marshmallows and trashing the cabin in which they found all this stuff.
Another bear in Washington Sstate went through thirty-six cans of beer before passing out. He had a clear brand preference, too. He evidently didn’t care for Busch beer—after trying one can of it, he declined to open another—but liked local favorite Rainier so much that the authorities used cans of it to trap him for transportation.
It is commonly thought that elephants to get drunk off naturally fermenting fruit, but that’s almost certainly not true. Those drunken bears probably weighed a few hundred pounds each; an elephant is heavier by an order of magnitude, sometimes two. It would take a lot of dedication for a five-ton animal to get drunk on slightly fermented fruit.
What definitely can get elephants drunk, however, is the consumption of large amounts of man-made booze. Indian pachyderms are known to enjoy rice beer and go on the occasional drunken rampage. Ever broken something during a bender? Imagine the damage you’d do if you were a hundred times heavier and stronger.
Primates, elephants, and bears are just the tip of the ice cube. At least one Swedish moose has gotten drunk enough from fermented apples to get stuck in a tree. A feral pig in Australia knocked back eighteen beers before getting into a heated disagreement with a cow. There are stories of a pet rhinoceros in eighteenth-century Britain that liked the occasional glass of red wine, and in present-day Canada, a ranch is giving its beef cattle a liter of wine daily.
Insects get in on the game, too. Butterflies will sometimes find their way into beer cans, and certain butterfly species will get loaded on fermenting fruit before settling in for the winter. (It’s not entirely clear, at least to me, whether this latter behavior is intentional, or a consequence of dwindling supplies of non-fermented foods.) Drunken honeybees have trouble standing and tend to end up on their backs, and drinking also screws up their social behavior. Fruit flies can become alcoholics, will drink more if they haven’t gotten laid lucky recently, and, incidentally, definitely prefer vinegar to honey.
A few species are famous for their tolerance. The pen-tailed treeshrew of Malaysia, for instance, enjoys a few nightly rounds of fresh palm wine, which occurs naturally in its habitat. It can drink the rough equivalent of a nine drinks for a human without showing loss of coordination or other visible signs of intoxication. Not bad, right? Slow lorises also come to the treeshrews’ party and leave without getting too buzzed, though that may be because they are larger and tend to spend much less time drinking. Meanwhile, Central American bats, after feeding on fermented fruit and nectar, can hit a BAC four times the legal driving limit without flying or echolocating any worse than they normally would.
But my personal favorite would have to be the birds. Avian species, however, largely small and lightweight, don’t need much to get plastered. A lot of birds like eating fruits and berries, which are potent natural sources of alcohol. European blackbirds, redwings, and Bohemian waxwings have all been known to get very drunk in this manner, particularly during winter and especially if they’re young.
My favorite nonhuman drinker of all would have to be the zebra finch. Researchers in Oregon got a bunch of these little Australian songbirds buzzed, with BACs between .05 and .08, by putting a bit of ethanol and juice in their water bottles. The idea was to test how drinking affected the finches' singing. The drunken birds got a little quieter, and their musical patterns got a little muddled. In other words, just as you and I may slur our words when we get drunk, zebra finches slur their songs.
