Mankind's relationship with alcohol through the ages

Following mankind's taste for alcohol from eating fermented fruit through the development of wine and up

the present time of craft beers and botanical gins.

Alcohol Through the Ages

Drunken monkeyTo our fruit-eating primate ancestors swinging through the trees started eating fermented fruits on the forest floor.

The ethanol in rotting fruit would have had three appealing characteristics.

1. First, it has a strong, distinctive smell that makes the fruit easy to locate.

2. Second, it’s easier to digest, allowing animals to get more of a commodity that was precious back then: calories.

3. Third, its antiseptic qualities deterring infectious microbes that may have made the primates sick.

Habituation to alcohol• Alcohol makes fruit easier to digest, so animals

could eat more of them.

• Our ape ancestors eventually started eating fermented fruit, and this helped humans adapt to drinking alcohol.

• However there is not much evidence to suggest our ape ancestors every got very drunk, as this would have made them more vulnerable to predators.

• It seems that the feeling of an alcohol buzz might be unique to humans - and its in our genes.

• Ten million years ago, a gene in the last common ancestor of ours and apes mutated, allowed us to digest ethanol up to 40 times faster.

Process to produce alcohol• All alcoholic drinks are made by yeasts - tiny single-

celled life forms that consume sugar and break it down into carbon dioxide and ethanol.

• There are many different types of yeast, and they've probably been fermenting fruit for 120 million years - when fruits first arose on Earth.

• Yeasts produce ethanol as a form of chemical warfare—it’s toxic to other microbes that compete with them for sugar inside a fruit.

• It explains why beer, wine, and other fermented beverages were, at least until the rise of modern sanitation, often healthier to drink than water.

Benefits? of alcohol - Arts• Throughout history, the consumption of alcohol

may have helped people become more creative, advancing the development of language, art and religion.

• This is because alcohol lowers inhibitions and makes people feel more spiritual.

• Many human enjoy drinking alcohol because it makes us feel good - it releases serotonin and dopamine in the brain which reduces anxiety and make us feel happy.

Benefits? of alcohol - Nutritional• During the fermenting of sugar, yeasts make more

than ethanol.

• They produce all kinds of nutrients, including such B vitamins as folic acid, niacin, thiamine, and riboflavin.

• Those nutrients would have been more present in ancient brews than in our modern filtered and pasteurized varieties.

• In the ancient Near East at least, beer was a sort of enriched liquid bread, providing calories, hydration, and essential vitamins.

Bread and Beer• In early civilizations, fermented beverages

were made from whatever wild plants were available locally and later from domesticated plants.

• Beer, rather than bread, may have been the inspiration for our hunter-gatherer ancestors to domesticate grains.

• Eventually, simply harvesting wild grasses to brew into beer wouldn’t have been enough.

• Demand for reliable supplies pushed humans first to plant the wild grasses and then over time to selectively breed them into the high-yielding barley, wheat, and other grains we know today.

Model Depicting the Preparation of Bread and Beer

Chinese wine• The oldest firm evidence of

an alcoholic beverage comes from Jiahu, China, where by 7000 B.C. farmers were fermenting a mix of rice, grapes, hawthorn berries, and honey in clay jars.

• Early Chinese emperors had bronze drinking vessels like this one, from 1100 B.C. (right), for sipping rice wine.

• It’s still a popular drink in China.

Chinese rice wine• A Chinese newlywed toasts

her guests with a traditional cup of rice wine.

• The drink has been consumed in China for at least 9,000 years

• A chemical residue found in a jar of that age is the oldest proof of a deliberately fermented beverage using rice, honey and fruit.

Ancient beer• In 4,500 BC, central Asian nomads didn't

have access to crops, so they used fermented milk from a horse to make a mild alcoholic beverage.

• Around 3,150 BC, ancient Egyptians used industrial-scale breweries that the used to provide beer for the worked who built the pyramids of Giza.

• In AD 500, Europeans made a fruit beer from native fruits, barley, honey, wine, herbs and tree sap.

• In AD 600 Peru made Pepper berry wine from a red fruit that grows on the Peruvian pepper tree.

Grape wine• Grapes were one of the earliest fruits

to be domesticated. in Georgia, which has more than 500 indigenous varieties.

• The origin of wine grapes can be traced back to 6,000 BC in the Caucasus mountains in Georgia and the Zagros Mountains of Iran.

• Some Georgian white wines look golden because they're fermented with the whole grape, including the skin and stems - which is how red wine is fermented

• Today, some families in Georgia still make their own wine.

• They ferment wine in clay jars lined with beeswax, and the jars are buried underground up till the neck for fermentation.

Hollowed out logs called satsnakheli

Greek wine at symposiums• in ancient Greece

symposiums were an all-male, after-dinner drinking party.

• Guests drank wine from a cup called a kylix.

• A drinking master diluted the wine with water and filled each cup.

• If he did his job judiciously, a symposium might well include learned conversation.

• Ancient Greek warriors even grated goat cheese onto their beer.

kylix from the fifth century B.C

Greek wineAncient Greek hosts used to serve wine mixed with water.

1. They served their (only male) guests a first bowl for health,

2. a second for pleasure

3. the third for sleep. 'When this bowl is drunk up, wise guests go home,' the comic poet Eubulus warned in 400 BC.

4. the fourth bowl is ours no longer, but belongs to violence

5. the fifth to uproar

6. the sixth to drunken revel

7. the seventh to black eyes

8. the eighth is the policeman’s

9. the ninth belongs to biliousness

10. the 10th to madness and the hurling of furniture.

Roman wine• Winemaking technology

improved considerably during the time of the Roman Empire.

• Many grape varieties and cultivation techniques were developed.

• Following the Greek invention of the screw, wine presses became common in Roman villas.

• Grapes are picked by hand and pressed with a massive oak-tree trunk.

• The juice was then fermented in open clay jars

Roman wine• Barrels (invented by the Gauls) and glass bottles

(invented by the Syrians) began to compete with terracotta amphoras for storing and shipping wine.

• Wine, perhaps mixed with herbs and minerals, was assumed to serve medicinal purposes. During Roman times, the upper classes might dissolve pearls in wine for better health.

• The Romans flavored it with surprising ingredients: One of Durand’s wines contains fenugreek, iris, and seawater.

• Roman warriors drank heavily before battle and went into battle drunk

French wine making• Massalia (Marseilles) was

founded around 5,500 BC by Greek immigrants from Phocaein Asia Minor bringing grape vines with them.

• By the 2nd century BC, came under Roman influence as a vital trading port. Eventually the area became a Roman province first known as Provincia (Provence)

• Between100 BC and 100 AD viticulture started to spread to other areas of Gaul

• Expansion continued in 300 AD to places such as Bordeaux in Aquitania and Burgundy

Spread of wine• In the 1500's the Spanish conquistadors brought Vitis vinifera vines with

them to Chile.

• In 1659, The first vineyard in South Africa was established near Cape Town

• in the 1700's the Spanish planted vineyards with each mission they established in California.

• Vine cuttings from the Cape of Good Hope were brought to the penal colony of New South Wales in 1788.

• In 1836, New Zealand first attempted to produce wine

Prohibition• Throughout history, alcohol has also raised

concerns about its effect on people's behaviour.

• Prohibition in the United States was a nationwide constitutional ban on the production, importation, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages that lasted beween1920 and 1933.

• In the 1920s the laws were widely disregarded, and tax revenues were lost.

• Very well organized criminal gangs took control of the beer and liquor supply for many cities, unleashing a crime wave that shocked the nation. By the late 1920s a new opposition mobilized nationwide.

• Prohibition ended in 1933 but some states continued statewide prohibition.

• Although popular opinion believes that Prohibition failed, it succeeded in cutting overall alcohol consumption in half during the 1920s.

• Consumption remained below pre-Prohibition levels until the 1940s.

English Gin• The first confirmed date for the production of gin is

the early 17th century in Holland. It was produced as a medicine and sold in chemist shops to treat stomach complaints, gout and gallstones.

• To make it more palatable, the Dutch started to flavour it with juniper, which had medicinal properties of its own.

• British troops fighting in the Low Countries during the Thirty Years' War were given 'Dutch Courage' during the long campaigns in the damp weather through the warming properties of gin.

• Eventually they started bringing it back home with them, where already it was often sold in chemists' shops.

• Distillation was taking place in a small way in England, but it now began on a greater scale, though the quality was often very dubious. Nevertheless, the new drink became a firm favourite with the poor.

English Gin• In 1720's London had over 7,000 shops that sold only

spirits.

• In 1729, an excise licence of £20 was introduced (two shillings per gallon). In addition, retailers now required a licence. This almost suppressed good gin, but the quantity consumed of bad spirits continued to rise.

• The Gin Act was introduced in1736, which made gin prohibitively expensive. Riots broke out and the law was widely and openly broken.

• Gin had been known as 'Mother's Milk' from the 1820s but later in the century it became known as 'Mother's Ruin'

• In the 1830's the 'gin palaces' appeared about 1830 and were designed to be an escape from home. As home for the poor (who continued to be gin's main supporters) was often a sordid slum, the gin palace was large, imposing and handsome and even luxuriously furnished.

• By the 1850s there were about 5,000 such palaces in London.

Beer consumptionMunich's Oktoberfest beer festival began in 1810 as a wedding celebration for the Bavarian crown price.

Today, it's one of the largest festivals with more than six million visitors per year

Alcohol consumptionPeople in wealthy regions with long drinking traditions, such as Europe, tend to drink the most. Abstainers are more often found in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, where laws or tradition limit consumption.

Alcohol consumption (liters/year)

Per capita alcohol consumption

Further reading