The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks
Read The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks Online
Authors: Amy Stewart
Tags: #Non-Fiction
also by amy stewart
From the Ground Up: The Story of a First Garden
The Earth Moved:
On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms
Flower Confidential:
The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful
Wicked Plants:
The Weed that Killed Lincoln's Mother & Other Botanical Atrocities
Wicked Bugs:
The Louse that Conquered Napoleon's Army & Other Diabolical Insects
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We explore the twin alchemical processes of fermentation and distillation, from which wine, beer, and spirits issue forth.
Proceeding in an Orderly Fashion through the Alphabet:
The Classics, from Agave to Wheat
Then Moving onto a Sampling of More Obscure Sources of Alcohol from around the World:
Strange Brews
We then suffuse our creations with a wondrous assortment of nature's bounty.
At last we venture into the garden, where we encounter a seasonal array of botanical mixers and garnishes to be introduced to the cocktail in its final stage of preparation.
Sorted in a Similar Fashion, including Recipes and Sufficient Horticultural Instruction:
Some Final Business:
COCKTAILS
The (Hybridized) Brooklyn Cocktail
Lavender-Elderflower Champagne Cocktail
SYRUPS, INFUSIONS, AND GARNISHES
Garden Cocktails: A Template for Experimentation
The inspiration for this book came from a chance encounter at a convention of garden writers in Portland, Oregon. I was sitting in a hotel lobby with Scott Calhoun, an agave and cactus expert from Tucson. Someone had just given him a bottle of Aviation, a fine locally made gin. “I'm not much of a gin drinker,” he said. “I don't know what to do with this.”
I knew what to do with it.
“I've got a drink recipe that will make you love gin,” I said. He looked doubtful, but I continued. “We're going to need fresh jalapeños, some cilantro, a few cherry tomatoes . . .”
“Stop,” he said. “That's enough. I'm in.” No one from Tucson can resist a jalapeño-based cocktail.
We spent the afternoon running around Portland, gathering our ingredients. On the way, I subjected Scott to my rant on the many virtues of gin. “How can anyone with even a passing interest in botany not be fascinated by this stuff?” I said. “Look at the ingredients. Juniper! That's a conifer. Coriander, which is, of course, the fruit of a cilantro plant. All gins have citrus peel in them. This one has lavender buds, too. Gin is nothing but an alcohol extraction of all these crazy plants from around the worldâtree bark and leaves and seeds and flowers and fruit.” We had arrived at the liquor store by then, and I was gesturing wildly at the shelves around us. “This is horticulture! In all of these bottles!”
I hunted for the ingredient I neededâproper tonic water, made with actual cinchona bark and real
Saccharum officinarum,
not that artificial junkâwhile Scott browsed the selection of bottled
Agave tequilana.
He was in the habit of trekking into Mexico in search of rare agave and cactus, and he'd encountered many of his prized specimens coming out of the working end of a handmade Oaxacan still.
Before we left, we stood in the doorway for a minute and looked around us. There wasn't a bottle in the store that we couldn't assign a genus and species to. Bourbon?
Zea mays,
an overgrown grass. Absinthe?
Artemisia absinthium,
a much-misunderstood Mediterranean herb. Polish vodka?
Solanum tuberosum
âa nightshade, which is a weird family of plants if there ever was one. Beer?
Humulus lupulus,
a sticky climbing vine that happens to be a close cousin to cannabis. Suddenly we weren't in a liquor store anymore. We were in a fantastical greenhouse, the world's most exotic botanical garden, the sort of strange and overgrown conservatory we only encounter in our dreams.
The cocktail (Mamani Gin & Tonic,
p. 238
) was a hit with the garden writers. Scott and I signed copies of our books in our publisher's booth that night, and we took turns putting down our pens to slice peppers and muddle cilantro. The broad outlines of this book were conceived right then, over two or three of those decidedly botanical cocktails. I should dedicate this to the person who gave Scott that bottle of Aviationâif only either of us could remember who it was.
In the seventeenth century, British scientist Robert Boyle, one of the founders of modern chemistry, published his
Philosophical Works,
a three-volume treatise on physics, chemistry, medicine, and natural history. He understood perfectly the connection between booze and botany, which fascinates me as well. Here is an abridged version of his take on the subject:
The inhabitants of Carribbe islands supply us with remarkable instances hereof where the poisonous root Mandiboca is converted into both bread and drink: by being chew'd, and spit out into water, it soon purges itself of its noxious quality. They, having in some of our American plantations, found it very difficult to make good malt of maiz or Indian corn, they first reduce it to bread, and afterwards brew a very good drink from it. In China, they make their wine from barley; in the northern parts thereof, from rice and apples. In Japan, also they prepare a strong wine from rice. We in England, likewise, have great variety of wines from cherries, apples, pears, &c. little inferior to those of foreign growth. In Brazil, and elsewhere, they make strong wine of water and sugarcane: and in Barbadoes they have many liquors unknown to us. Among the Turks, where wine of the grape is forbid by their law, the Jews and Christians keep, in their taverns, a liquor made of fermented raisins. The Sura in the East-Indies is made of the juice that flows from the cocoa-tree; and sailors have often been inebriated, in that country, with the liquors made of the fermented juices obtain'd by the incision of vegetables.