The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks (17 page)

The grain is widely grown in the American South; in fact, it's the fourth largest crop in the nation, behind corn, wheat, and soybeans. Some form of broomcorn was grown during in the eighteenth century, but sorghum as we know it today wasn't grown here until a remarkable set of experiments began in 1856, when the editor of
American Agriculturist
magazine planted a seventy-five-foot row of sorghum from seed he imported from France. The crop he harvested—sixteen hundred pounds in all—went out in small packets to his thirty-one thousand subscribers. He repeated the stunt two years later. The United States Patent Office distributed large quantities as well, including varieties sourced from China and Africa. With free seeds arriving by mail, it didn't take long for farmers to start growing it as a fodder and grain crop—and then they realized it made good moonshine, too.

In 1862,
American Agriculturist
ran an advertisement for “sorghum wine,” made from syrup pressed from the sweet stalks, which was touted as being “difficult to distinguish from the best Madeira wines.” North Carolina governor and U.S. senator Zebulon Vance, reflecting on his days as a Confederate officer in the Civil War, remembered a drink made from sorghum “sugarcane.” He said that “in its flavor and in its effects it was decidedly more terrible than ‘an army with banners,'” meaning that it was worse than enemy fire. Which is not to say that Vance was opposed to homemade hooch. He disapproved of whiskey taxes and revenue agents chasing after moonshiners; in 1876, he complained that “the time has come when an honest man can't take an honest drink without having a gang of revenue officers after him.”

Sorghum syrup liquor continued to be produced illegally. In 1899, moonshiners in South Carolina were arrested for making a sorghum spirit called tussick, which probably got its name from “tussock,” a clump of grass. It was also called swamp whiskey for the swampy water that went into it. North Carolinian moonshiners referred to their sorghum cane spirit as monkey rum; while the term has disturbing racial overtones, some writers at the time claimed that it was so named because drinking it made a person want to climb a coconut tree.

Sorghum moonshining continued well into the twentieth century. In 1946, when postwar grain shortages posed a problem for moonshiners and legal distilleries alike, a four-thousand-gallon still in Atlanta exploded, and the fire destroyed three thousand gallons of sorghum syrup intended for distillation. In 1950, 789,000 tons of sorghum were used to make legitimate distilled spirits, but that number dropped to just 88,000 tons by the 1970s, the last time statistics were kept. From the 1930s to the 1970s (the only years the numbers were published), more sorghum was distilled than rye.

In spite of our long tradition of making spirits from sorghum—and in spite of the fact that even now American farmers produce four to
six million gallons of sorghum syrup, there are very few sorghum spirits on the market today. In 2011, Indiana-based Colglazier & Hobson Distilling began production of a sorghum syrup rum, which they're calling Sorgrhum. (It can't legally be called rum, because rum, by law, can only be made from sugarcane, so the decidedly unromantic name “sorghum molasses spirit” or “spirit distilled from sorghum molasses” must appear on the label instead of “rum.”) The Old Sugar Distillery in Madison, Wisconsin, makes small batches of Queen Jennie Sorghum Whiskey. This, in addition to the sorghum beer being marketed to gluten-intolerant beer drinkers, may represent the beginning of a sorghum revival in the United States.

Sorghum grain has also been an important beer ingredient in China, and the Chinese learned to press the stalks of sweeter varieties to extract the juice and make wine. But the distilled hooch known as
baijiu
is China's best-known sorghum drink. The style that President Nixon drank,
mao-tai,
is said to have originated in the Guizhou Province over eight hundred years ago. The story—which is often repeated but impossible to verify—is that
mao-tai
was sent to the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. A Chinese official, worried that the national product was being overlooked, dropped a bottle and shattered it, allowing the smell to permeate the exhibit hall. That got people's attention, and it won a gold medal. (Unfortunately, no records of this incident, or of the gold medal, survive in the exposition's archives.)

Mao-tai,
and particularly a premium brand called Moutai, is the beverage of choice for banquets and celebrations. It made the news in early 2011 when prices hit two hundred dollars per bottle in China while selling for half that in Europe and the United States. The distillery is state run, so the high prices caused protests by citizens who felt their national drink should be more affordable to them. (Meanwhile, of course, people brew their own in homemade stills.) Although government secrecy makes Chinese markets notoriously difficult to analyze, liquor industry experts believe that if the most popular
baijiu
brands reported their sales, they would easily outstrip the world's other top-selling brands, including the current leader, Jinro
soju,
and other popular brands like Smirnoff vodka and Bacardi rum.

The
mao-tai
served to President Nixon was surely the best China had to offer. At the state dinner, Prime Minister Chou En-lai held a match to his glass to show the president that the spirit could be lit on fire, a fact Nixon filed away for future use. In 1974, National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger told another Chinese official that the president tried to repeat the trick for his daughter when he returned home. “So he took out a bottle and poured it into a saucer and lit it,” Kissinger said, “but the glass bowl broke and the
mao-tai
ran over the table and the table began to burn! So you nearly burned down the White House!”

SUGARCANE

Saccharum officinarum

poaceae (grass family)

There is a kind of coalesced honey called sakcharon found in reeds in India and Arabia the happy, similar in consistency to salt, and brittle enough to be broken between the teeth like salt. It is good dissolved in water for the intestines and stomach, and taken as a drink to help a painful bladder and kidneys. Rubbed on it disperses things which darken the pupils.

T
his odd passage from Dioscorides' five-volume book of medicine,
De Materia Medica,
described a sweet grass that had only been known in Europe since about 325 BC, when Alexander the Great brought it from India. (“Arabia the happy,” by the way, refers to Yemen, which is not to be confused with “Arabia the desert” and “Arabia the stony,” common terms for other parts of Saudi Arabia.) Sugarcane, and the crystallized sugar that could be extracted from it, was a novelty to the Greeks at that time, but it was well known in India and China, thanks in part to a unique anatomical advantage that allowed it to travel well.

Botanists believe that sugarcane was cultivated in New Guinea as early as 6000 BC. The tender young reeds were probably simply cut and chewed for a source of sweetness, but the more mature plants served another purpose: they could have been used as a building material. It's easy to see how someone could have cut a number of sturdy canes, stuck them in the ground as supports for a thatched hut, and noticed how quickly the canes put down new roots and kept growing. Sugarcane, like bamboo, turned out to be astonishingly easy to propagate. No special knowledge was required: just cut a piece, keep it damp, and put it in the ground somewhere else.
Imagine, then, how easy it was to move the plant around. Sugarcane could have simply floated to Indonesia, Vietnam, Australia, and India. In fact, much early trading and cultural contact happened exactly like that. Any number of early exchanges were the result of flotsam, jetsam, and rafts blown off course. A sturdy, lightweight reed, suitable as either a building material or food, would have traveled well.