Getting your veggies in liquid form

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, botany, mixology

A favorite country tune, Rocky Top, has the lines

Corn don't grow so well on Rocky Top,
  Ground's too rocky by far.
That's why all the folk on Rocky Top
  Get their corn in a jar

Corn isn't all that gets into corn whiskey. As we read in The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create the World's Great Drinks, by Amy Stewart, if a plant can be ingested (and sometimes if it can't), it has been used to produce an alcoholic beverage.

My drinking days are long behind me. I recall preferring port wine to all other wines (I particularly didn't like "dry" wines), and smooth Scotch whiskey to the rest of the "hard stuff." That ended before I was 21 years old. Port is fortified (higher proof), but also sweeter and more "grape-y", and of course, one could call Scotch "barley in a jar", although there is much more behind these drinks than grapes or barley. That "much more" is what the book is about.

In orderly fashion, Ms Stewart starts with the plants that produce the alcohol, from agave to wheat, including apples, grapes, sorghum and a few others, and then introduces some that are a bit more strange, such as bananas, jack fruit and parsnips. If it'll ferment, someone's tried to drink it.

There follows a series of chapters on every kind of plant product that has been used in a beverage. The only one left out seems to be bark (Oh, yeah, Cinnamon is made from a bark). Stems. Flowers. Spices. Roots. Fruits.

Many recipes are found throughout, and also gardening tips for growing certain otherwise hard-to-obtain plants. There are also tips in a few places about brewing your own, frequently by doing little more than harvesting, grinding or mashing some plant part, and leaving it alone for days or weeks. The yeast varieties that grow on the plant are frequently the ones that ferment it best. This points up that the first domestic organism was almost certainly yeast!

I don't want to get further into this. I have some fond memories of "non professional" mixology, such as learning by accident how easy it is to produce cider ("hard cider" is a redundancy). But for me the drawbacks of an imbibing life outweighed the pleasures. If you enjoy "adult beverages" and mixology, this book is a delightful introduction to the botany behind the beverages.