Drink

• 1. Introduction

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  A drink is a liquid intended for human consumption, and the complete deprivation of one of them kills faster than the removal of any substance except oxygen. That drink is water. The human body, when it runs short of fluid, sends out a craving the hypothalamus regulates in response to subtle changes in electrolyte levels and the volume of blood circulating. This is the floor beneath every beverage ever poured. Yet from this biological emergency, humanity built an enormous culture of liquids: warm and cold, sacred and forbidden, brewed and distilled and fermented. Wine and beer have run through human civilization for more than 8,000 years. Coffee was banned by the Ethiopian Church and by Ottoman Turkey. Beer was once said to be the gift of a goddess who left grain in jars that were rained upon. How did a substance that simply keeps us alive become a thing of gods, gatherings, and global trade? And why do we still gather in rooms whose whole purpose is to hand each other something to drink?

• 2. Gods And Gatherings

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  In ancient Greece, a social gathering held for the purpose of drinking was called a symposium, where the wine was served watered down. The aim could be anything from serious discussion to plain indulgence. Ancient Rome kept a similar custom in the convivium, which took place regularly. Drinking, across the centuries, was rarely a solitary act. Many early societies treated alcohol as a gift from the gods. This belief gave rise to deities such as Dionysus. Other religions moved the opposite way, forbidding, discouraging, or restricting alcoholic drinks for various reasons. In some regions with a dominant religion, the production, sale, and consumption of these drinks is forbidden to everybody, whatever their own faith. Toasting honors a person or wishes them good will through the act of taking a drink. The loving cup carries a related idea: at weddings, or at celebrations such as sports victories, a group shares a single drink from one large receptacle, passing it until it is empty. Coffee carried its own ritual weight. In East Africa and Yemen, it was used in native religious ceremonies, and because these clashed with the beliefs of the Christian church, the Ethiopian Church banned its secular consumption until the reign of Emperor Menelik II.

• 3. From Plant To Glass

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  Fermentation, a metabolic process that converts sugar to ethanol, has been used by humans to make drinks since the Neolithic age. In winemaking, grape juice meets yeast in an anaerobic environment, and the amount of sugar present and the length of fermentation together decide the alcohol level and the sweetness. Beer follows a longer choreography. Its four primary ingredients are water, grain, yeast, and hops. The grain is coaxed to germinate by soaking and drying in heat, a step called malting, then milled and soaked again to create the sugars fermentation needs, a step called mashing. Hops go in for flavor, then yeast is added to the mixture, now called wort, and the process begins. Distillation works by a different principle entirely, separating mixtures according to the volatility of their components in a boiling liquid. It purifies water and it lifts milder alcoholic drinks into spirits. Before any of this, water itself must be made safe. It is purified through filtration and the addition of chemicals such as chlorination. The World Health Organization underscores the stakes: 94% of deaths from diarrhea, the third biggest cause of infectious death worldwide at 1.8 million annually, could be prevented by improving the victim's environment, especially through safe water.

• 4. The Everyday Liquids

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  Water is the world's most consumed drink, and yet 97% of the water on Earth is non-drinkable salt water. Fresh water sits in rivers, lakes, wetlands, groundwater, and frozen glaciers, but less than 1% of that fresh supply is reachable through surface and underground sources cheap enough to retrieve. Western cultures often drink it cold; in Chinese culture it is typically drunk hot. Milk stands beside water as one of the original drinks, the primary source of nutrition for babies. In many cultures, especially in the Western world, people keep drinking dairy milk well beyond infancy, taking the milk of cattle, goats, and sheep. Carbonated drinks carry carbon dioxide dissolved into them, which can happen naturally through fermenting and in natural water spas, or artificially under pressure. The first commercially available artificially carbonated drink is believed to have been produced by Thomas Henry in the late 1770s. Today the most consumed carbonated soft drinks come from three major global brands: Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and the Dr Pepper Snapple Group. The word soft drink itself marks the absence of alcohol, in contrast to a hard drink.

• 5. Brewed And Steeped

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  Coffee comes from the roasted seeds of an evergreen shrub of the genus Coffea, drawn most often from the highly regarded Coffea arabica and the hardier robusta form, Coffea canephora. The plants are cultivated in more than 70 countries. Slightly acidic at a pH of 5.0 to 5.1, coffee can stimulate humans through its caffeine, and its effect on health has drawn many studies with varied results. Its trail begins in southern Arabia. The earliest credible evidence of coffee-drinking appears in the middle of the 15th century in the Sufi shrines of Yemen. Tea is the second most consumed drink in the world, made by infusing the dried leaves of the Camellia sinensis shrub in boiling water. Its preparations spread into a global map of habits: butter and salt in Bhutan, Nepal, and Tibet; bubble tea in Taiwan; mint in North Africa and Senegal; cardamom in Central Asia; rum to make Jagertee in Central Europe; and coffee to make yuanyang in Hong Kong. It is brewed with a samovar in Iran, Kashmir, Russia, and Turkey, and in the Australian Outback it is traditionally brewed in a billycan. Hot chocolate runs deeper into the past than either. The first chocolate drink is believed to have been created by the Mayans around 2,500 to 3,000 years ago, and a cocoa drink was an essential part of Aztec culture by 1400 AD, who called it xocolatl.

• 6. The Goddess And The Vine

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  Beer is said to have been discovered by the goddess Ninkasi around 5300 BCE, when she left grain in jars that were later rained upon and stood for several days, accidentally discovering yeast. For much of history, women were the chief creators of beer, because brewing was tied to domesticity and done at home for the family. Only in recent history have men begun to dabble in it. Some of humanity's earliest writings reach for it: the Code of Hammurabi set laws regulating beer and beer parlours, and The Hymn to Ninkasi, a prayer to the Mesopotamian goddess of beer, doubled as a way to remember the recipe in a culture with few literate people. Wine carries an equally old and tangled history. The earliest production so far discovered occurred around 6000 BC in Georgia, and it had reached the Balkans by around 4500 BC before being celebrated in ancient Greece and Rome. Its religious role runs just as deep. Red wine was closely linked with blood by the ancient Egyptians, who, according to Plutarch, avoided drinking it freely as late as the 7th-century BC Saite dynasty, thinking it to be the blood of those who had once battled against the gods. The Greek cult and mysteries of Dionysus, carried on by the Romans in their Bacchanalia, were the origins of western theater. Judaism places wine in the Kiddush and Christianity in its Eucharist, while alcohol consumption was forbidden in Islam. Spirits stand apart from both: distilled, with no added sugar and at least 20% alcohol by volume.

• 7. Rooms Built For Drinking

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  Pubs are fundamental to the culture of the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, Canada, New England, Metro Detroit, South Africa, and New Zealand. In many villages a pub is the focal point of the community, and the writings of Samuel Pepys describe the pub as the heart of England. Because many pubs are controlled by breweries, cask ale or keg beer may offer better value than wines and spirits. Bars take a different shape, ranging from seedy dive bars and nightclubs to elegant places of entertainment for the elite. The word bar comes from the specialized counter on which drinks are served, where patrons sit or stand to be served by the bartender, or sit at tables served by cocktail servers. Cafés and coffeehouses center on hot drinks and light snacks. Many coffeehouses in the Middle East, and in West Asian immigrant districts in the Western world, offer shisha, called nargile in Turkish and Greek, smoked through a hookah. In China and Japan the equivalent is the tea house, where Chinese scholars have long gathered to share ideas. The vessels matter as much as the rooms. A brandy snifter is shaped to encourage evaporation while trapping the aroma inside, and a champagne glass narrows at the opening to hold the carbonation in.

• 8. A Commodity Worth Trading

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  Coffee was the top agricultural export for twelve countries in 2004, and in 2005 it ranked as the world's seventh-largest legal agricultural export by value. Green, unroasted coffee is one of the most traded agricultural commodities anywhere. The trade reaches back into the substance's own past, when increasing trade between Europe and North Africa made coffee more widely available to Europeans gathering at social locations that served it, possibly feeding the growth of coffeehouses. Some drinks move beyond the cup and into the portfolio. Wine can be used as an alternative investment, either by buying and reselling individual bottles or cases of particular wines, or by buying shares in an investment wine fund that pools investors' capital. The fruit behind such drinks was always fragile, which is why preservation carried such value. Fruits are highly perishable, so the ability to extract their juices and store them mattered, and the earliest storage was labor-intensive, demanding the crushing of fruit and the mixing of pure juices with sugars before bottling. From that humble act of saving a perishable liquid grew a wine market traded by the case and the share, the same grape juice that, simply left to ferment, becomes wine.