Alcoholic beverage

• 1. Introduction

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  In a cave near Haifa, in modern-day Israel, researchers found the residue of beer brewed 13,000 years ago. It sat in stone mortars carved into the floor of a prehistoric burial site. They believe it may have been made for ritual feasts to honor the dead. This is the oldest verifiable brewery known, and it suggests something strange about our species. Humans are the only animal known to produce alcoholic drinks on purpose. Other animals are affected by alcohol much as we are, and once they taste it, they will seek it again. But only humans set out to ferment it. An alcoholic beverage is any drink containing alcohol, a central nervous system depressant. The drinks fall into three broad classes: beers, wines, and spirits. Their alcohol content runs roughly between 3 percent and 50 percent. People drink them primarily for the psychoactive effects they produce. So why has a depressant drug become woven into parties, religions, and law across nearly every society on Earth? Why did ancient gods get drunk, and why do modern governments tax, monopolize, and sometimes ban these drinks outright? And what happens inside a single-celled fungus to turn sugar into the most widely used recreational drug in the world?

• 2. Gods And The Dead

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  In the epic of Gilgamesh, Enkidu the wild man drinks seven jugs of beer, becomes elated, and sings with joy. In Sumerian culture, alcohol was a means for happiness, and other characters in the story drink water but turn to beer when they celebrate. Access to alcohol was regulated, the social elite indulged, and drinks served as sacrificial offerings to the gods. During new year celebrations, a ceremonial reenactment of a drunken union between the king of Uruk and the high priestess of Ishtar symbolized the genesis of Ninkasi, the beer goddess. A hymn to Ninkasi describes brewing in Sumer: the fermentation of bread, the addition of grapes and honey, and an unfiltered brew drunk through straws. In Hierakonpolis, Egypt, a brewery dating to around 3400 BCE could yield up to 1,135 litres of brew per day. Wine there was a symbol of power, imported from abroad and reserved for royalty and the elite, while beer was the drink of common society. In the tomb of the Scorpion king, who ruled Hierakonpolis when the brewery was built, around 700 wine jars imported from the southern Levant were unearthed. An annual festival called the Drunkenness of Hathor commemorated a myth in which gods tricked the goddess Sekhmet with beer disguised as blood. She fell into a drunken stupor, and this prevented her from exterminating humanity. In her honor, a red-colored alcohol was drunk in large quantities during the festival, producing similar stupors. Osiris too was tied to wine, his death and resurrection compared to the withering and regrowth of the vine. Wine jars buried with pharaohs carried labels noting origin, maker, and date, and over time those labels added quality grades: good, very good, or very very good. Some wines buried with their owners were several decades old, exceeding the average life expectancy, and so were thought to have outlived their creators.

• 3. The First Vintages

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  The Carmona Wine Urn, discovered in 2019 in Carmona, Spain, holds intact wine inside a first century Roman glass vessel. Analysis five years later judged it the oldest surviving wine in the world. It surpassed the previous record holder, the Speyer wine bottle found in 1867, by three centuries. The earliest evidence of winemaking itself was dated to between 6,000 and 5,800 BCE in Georgia, in the South Caucasus. Excavations there unearthed grape pips of a variety different from wild grapes, pointing to deliberate cultivation. Local pottery dated to about 6000 BCE was decorated with celebrating human figures. In the neolithic village of Jiahu, in the Henan province of northern China, ancient pottery jars revealed residue of a fermented drink made of grape and hawthorn fruit wine, honey mead, and rice beer, produced between 7000 and 5600 BC. Many such jars filled the houses of the village, suggesting wine was an important part of the diet. The earliest clear chemical evidence of barley beer dates to about 3500 to 3100 BCE, from Godin Tepe in the Zagros Mountains of western Iran. Pliny the Elder wrote of a golden age of winemaking in Rome during the 2nd century BCE, when vineyards were planted. Celtic people were making alcoholic cider as early as 3000 BCE, and wine was consumed in Classical Greece at breakfast and at symposia.

• 4. Distillation And Empire

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  Medieval Muslim chemists such as Jabir ibn Hayyan, known in Latin as Geber, and Abu Bakr al-Razi, known as Rhazes, experimented extensively with distillation. The distillation of wine appears in works attributed to al-Kindi and al-Farabi, and in the 28th book of al-Zahrawi's Kitab al-Tasrif. In the 12th century the process spread from the Middle East to Italy, where distilled drinks were recorded by the mid-12th century. In Italy, the works of Taddeo Alderotti, who lived from 1223 to 1296, describe concentrating alcohol through repeated fractional distillation in a water-cooled still. By the early 14th century, distilled drinks had spread across the European continent. Distillation reached Ireland and Scotland no later than the 15th century, along with the practice of distilling aqua vitae, mostly for medicinal purposes. In 1690, England passed an act to encourage the distillation of brandy and spirits from corn. In the Thirteen Colonies, drinking wine and beer was often safer than drinking water, which was usually drawn from sources also used to dispose of sewage and garbage. Hard liquor was common in the early nineteenth-century United States. That appetite for spirits would soon collide with the tax collector.

• 5. Rebellion And Monopoly

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  The Whiskey Rebellion was a violent tax protest that began in 1791 and ended in 1794, during the presidency of George Washington. The so-called whiskey tax was the first tax the new federal government imposed on a domestic product. Beer was hard to transport and spoiled more easily than rum and whiskey, which made distilled spirits the currency of the frontier. The Rum Rebellion of 1808 was a coup in the British penal colony of New South Wales, staged by the New South Wales Corps to depose Governor William Bligh. It was Australia's first and only military coup, and its name came from the illicit rum trade of early Sydney, controlled by the so-called Rum Corps. For a time it was widely known in Australia as the Great Rebellion. Governments also moved to control alcohol directly. An alcohol monopoly was created in the Swedish town of Falun in 1850, to curb overconsumption and reduce the profit motive behind sales. It spread nationwide in 1905 when the Swedish parliament ordered all vodka sales through local monopolies. In 1894, the Russian Empire established a state monopoly on vodka, which became a major source of government revenue. Later in the nineteenth century, the temperance movement gathered force in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Scandinavia, and India. It led to national prohibitions in Canada from 1918 to 1920, Norway for spirits from 1919 to 1926, Finland from 1919 to 1932, and the United States from 1920 to 1933, with provincial prohibition in India from 1948 onward.

• 6. Sugar Fungus At Work

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  Wine, beer, and spirits all depend on yeasts, a group of roughly 160 species of single-celled fungi. Some are beneficial, while others are tied to food spoilage or human disease. The most commonly used belong to the genus Saccharomyces, whose name means sugar fungus. These organisms are cultivated for the flavors and aromas they generate, and for their ability to suppress competing microbes that would otherwise infect food. Their alcohol production is linked to their ability to function with minimal oxygen. When oxygen is present, cells break fuel molecules down fully, leaving only carbon dioxide and water. When oxygen is absent, sugars are only partially broken down, and glucose becomes alcohol, carbon dioxide, and energy. From this single process flows a whole family of fermented drinks. Beer is fermented from grain mash, typically barley or a blend of grains, flavored with hops, and naturally carbonated. Cider comes from fruit juice, most often apple, with alcohol from 1.2 percent up to 8.5 percent or more in traditional English styles. Mead ferments honey with water, ranging from 3 percent to more than 20 percent. Pulque, the Mesoamerican drink, is made from the honey water of maguey, Agave americana. Rice wine, consumed across East, Southeast, and South Asia, includes sake, huangjiu, mijiu, and cheongju. Wine itself, most often from grapes, ferments longer than beer and ages for months or years, reaching 9 to 16 percent ABV. If a fermented mash is distilled, the drink becomes a spirit, and the alcohol climbs.

• 7. Spirits And Their Ghosts

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  Whisky and vodka, the most common distilled drinks, carry an alcohol content around 40 percent, and any unsweetened distilled drink of at least 20 percent ABV counts as a spirit. Distilling concentrates the alcohol and removes some of the congeners. Brandy, gin, mezcal, rum, tequila, vodka, whisky, baijiu, shochu, and soju are all examples. In North America the term hard liquor separates these from weaker, undistilled drinks. Rectified spirit, also called neutral grain spirit, is purified through repeated distillation. It is a clear, colorless, flammable liquid that may reach 95 percent ABV, used in mixed drinks, liqueurs, tinctures, and as a household solvent. Congeners are the substances produced during fermentation, and they tell their own story. Some are occasionally desired, like propanol; others are never wanted, like acetone and acetaldehyde. They give distilled drinks most of their taste and aroma, and it has been suggested they contribute to the symptoms of a hangover. In wine, tannins are congeners found alongside phenolic compounds. They add bitterness and a drying, astringent sensation, but also balance, complexity, and structure, and they help a wine last longer through aging. Fortified wines such as port and sherry take a different route, adding a distilled spirit, usually brandy, to wine that has already fermented. The line between a fermented drink and a fortified one comes down to whether a spirit was added or the wine itself distilled.

• 8. The First Drop

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  In 2023, a World Health Organization news release stated that the risk to a drinker's health starts from the first drop of any alcoholic beverage. Alcohol is a depressant that slows activity in the central nervous system. In low doses it brings euphoria, eases anxiety, and increases sociability. In higher doses come drunkenness, stupor, unconsciousness, or death from overdose. Because cell membranes are highly permeable to alcohol, once it enters the bloodstream it can diffuse into nearly every cell in the body. A meta-analysis of 107 cohort studies concluded that low daily intake offers no health benefits, and that risk rises even at low levels above two drinks a day for women and three for men. Alcohol is classified as a group 1 carcinogen. The International Agency for Research on Cancer points to acetaldehyde, the major metabolite of ethanol, as carcinogenic. The World Health Organization estimates that nearly half of alcohol-attributable cancers in its European Region are linked to light or moderate drinking. Yet the industry remains vast, exceeding 1.5 trillion dollars in 2017, and about 33 percent of all humans currently drink. Public awareness of the cancer link is low in the United States. In 2025, Dr. Vivek Murthy, the U.S. Surgeon General, argued for cancer warning labels on alcohol products, an idea that organizations of the temperance movement had supported long before him.