Carol Fisher-Linn
While you’re enjoying your preferred beverage during the beer and wine festival, here are some facts from liquorlaboratory.com that could broaden your knowledge of spirits: You can drink more beer without feeling the effects because of its lower alcohol content. That’s why it’s so perfect for Bill’s games and casual get togethers. Wine, on the other hand, gets you inebriated much quicker with its 15% Alcohol by volume (ABV) per a standard 5-ounce glass, unlike beer’s ABV of 7 in a standard can. Recommended: chug the beer but sip that wine. The Wine Market Council / NielsenIQ’s 2022 Wine & Spirits Daily Summit revealed that while most consumers drank alcoholic beverages from more than one category, the percent of consumers who drank beverages from only one category are: Beer, 22%, Wine, 17%, Spirits, 14%, and Other (cider, hard seltzers, etc.), 11%.
Now, why not take a few minutes to enlarge your trivia know-how about how this love for spirits came to be. It is surmised that our ancient ancestors (wild guess – 100,000 years ago) found that leaving fruit in the bottom of their carved-out rock “containers” or jugs for a period quite naturally led to fermented juices full of alcohol. Scholars and scientists even have a name for it: “The Drunken Monkey Hypothesis.” No, we did not evolve from monkeys.
As our society developed, perhaps to 30,000 years BCE, leaders emerged, some in the form of shamans who, according to cave paintings from that period worked in mind altered states, perhaps induced by alcohol. Eventually humans evolved further. First, we were hunter-gatherers, then we moved into more stable agrarian societies and began producing alcohol (beer), on purpose. It turns out that our farming ancestors raised grain not so much for bread as for beer, aka, “Beer Before Bread” hypothesis which holds that civilization began with beer. Makes sense since beer was safer to drink than pathogen-filled water. Also, the beer was more nutritious than early bread. The ancient Babylonians had beer, Egyptians were buried with kegs of it, and the Sumerians had a beer goddess. In modern times, the American anthropological Association sponsored a symposium called, “Did Man Once Live by Beer Alone?” The supposition was that early tools and grains were like those used in beer, not bread production. With all that beer production, they wondered what it tasted like. A research team created a recipe for ancient Chinese beer by scaping traces of beer from 5000-year-old fermenting jars.
The 5,000-year-old beer in China contained millet, barley, yam, lily root, and a grass known as Job’s Tears. Mashed, malted, and sealed for a week, the brew molded on top but when the researchers got through to the brew beneath, they found it sweet and fruity. So now they knew how Chinese beer tasted. Research showed that women were the first brewers. Think it had anything to do with math skills?
As for wine – that too has been around for centuries. So, once our ancestors figured out how to domesticate wild grasses, they then figured out how to grow grapes for fermentation of wines. These wines were very important because they became vehicles to deliver medication for the Egyptians. Or so they said. The ancient Etruscans who settled in and around Italy 3000 years ago also loved their alcohol. It is said that the Etruscan women were the most beautiful. Of course, those observers who said that were reputed to be the most consistently drunk, as were the women, so who knew? And yes, there was a hierarchy in the drinking world. Wine was the preferred potion of the wealthy, while beer was the staple drink of the poor. King Tutankhamen was buried with casks and casks of red wine – Tut’s favorite. Guess things were far different in those days. At 18, HRH would not have been able to drink given today’s drinking laws (age 21) in Egypt! Think he fudged on his official ID?
Join the fun as you Crawl Outta Fall and dazzle your fellow crawlers with your wealth of trivia about spirits.