The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks (32 page)

Zingiber officinale

zingiberaceae (ginger family)

T
his tropical plant might not look like much—it rarely blooms, instead producing only green, reedy stalks three to four feet tall with strappy leaves—but its root is one of the world's oldest spices. A native of China and India, ginger was an important part of ancient Chinese medicine and was adopted for medicinal use in Europe after arriving on the earliest trading routes. It has been used to flavor beer since the Middle Ages and adds a note of heat and spiciness to herbal liqueurs, bitters, and vermouth. Domaine de Canton, Snap, and the King's Ginger are just a few modern liqueurs that add a bite of ginger to cocktails.

Today ginger is grown around the world, primarily in Nigeria, India, Thailand, and Indonesia. How the plant is grown, harvested, and stored has tremendous influence on its flavor. Roots harvested after only five to seven months are quite mild, but the flavorful oil content increases quickly after that, peaking at about nine months of age. Plants grown in the shade tend to have more citrus flavor than those grown in the sun. If the root is harvested and dried rather than sold fresh, about 20 percent of the oil simply evaporates, taking with it the bright, citrus characteristics and leaving more zingiberene, the compound that gives it such sharp spiciness. There are several dozen different varieties cultivated for the spice trade today, and each has its own distinct reputation.

Ginger beer was once a mildly alcoholic beverage made with water, sugar, ginger, lemon, and yeast. In its modern nonalcoholic incarnation, also called ginger ale, it plays a starring role in many classic cocktails. A shandy is a mixture of equal parts beer and some
fizzy soda like lemonade; a shandygaff is beer and ginger beer. A Dark and Stormy is a mixture of two parts dark rum and three parts ginger beer, served over ice. Gosling's has actually trademarked the name Dark 'n Stormy and recommends, not surprisingly, that you mix it with its brand of dark rum and its brand of ginger beer.

The Moscow Mule, invented in 1941 by a vodka distributor, not only put ginger beer to good use but also introduced Americans to vodka, helping sales of Smirnoff triple in just a few years. It is traditionally served in a copper mug, but this is merely a marketing gimmick. The story goes that a vodka distributor and a bartender concocted this drink to make use of the bartender's unsold ginger beer and to jump-start vodka sales. Apparently the bartender's girlfriend owned a company that manufactured copper mugs, so her product became part of the recipe, too.

GRAINS OF PARADISE

Aframomum melegueta

zingiberaceae (ginger family)

T
he small black seeds of this West African plant deliver a peppery heat, along with a richer, spicier note similar to cardamom and its other relatives in the ginger family. It made its way to Europe through early spice trade routes and became a flavoring not just for food but for beer, whiskey, and brandy as well, sometimes to disguise the flavor of poor-quality or diluted spirits. Today it is still found in some beers (Samuel Adams Summer Ale is a popular example) and remains an important ingredient in aquavit, herbal liqueurs, and gin, including Bombay Sapphire.

Like other plants in the ginger family, it doesn't look like much: the thin, reedy stalks reach just a few feet in height and produce a spray of long, narrow leaves. The purple, trumpet-shaped blooms give way to reddish oblong fruits that each contain sixty to one hundred of the small brown seeds.

The medicinal properties of grains of paradise have helped solve a long-standing problem at zoos. Captive western lowland gorillas often suffer from heart disease; in fact, it is the cause of death for forty percent of them. In the wild, grains of paradise make up 80 to 90 percent of their diet, suggesting that the anti-inflammatory properties of the plant were keeping them healthy. A gorilla health project is under way now to improve the well-being of captive gorillas, with actual grains of paradise—not gin—under consideration as a prescription for better living.

JUNIPER

Juniperus communis

cupressaceae (cypress family)

C
ocktail historians are on a race to discover the earliest precursor to gin in medical literature. Franciscus de le Boë Sylvius, a Dutch physician working in the seventeenth century, had the lead for a while, as he was making use of juniper extracts in medicinal potions. Now the winner seems to be Belgian theologian Thomas van Cantimpré, whose thirteenth-century
Liber de Natura Rerum
was translated to Dutch by a contemporary, Jacob van Maerlant, in his 1266 work
Der Naturen Bloeme.
The text recommended boiling juniper berries in rainwater or wine to treat stomach pain. That's not gin, but anything that combines juniper and alcohol is a step in the right direction.

Which is not to say that the Dutch invented the use of juniper as medicine. The Greek physician Galen, writing in the second century AD, said that juniper berries “cleanse the liver and kidneys, and they evidently thin any thick and viscous juices, and for this reason they are mixed in health medicines.” This certainly suggests a mixture of juniper berries and alcohol, although that, too, would have tasted nothing like the superb gins we drink today.

Junipers are members of the ancient cypress family. They made their earliest appearance during the Triassic period, 250 million years ago. This puts them on the earth at a time when most of the land masses were grouped together in a single continent called Pangaea—and explains why a single species,
Juniperus communis,
can be native to Europe, Asia, and North America.

Because junipers have been around so long, several subspecies have evolved. The juniper used most widely in gin is
J. communis communis,
a small tree or shrub that can live for up to two hundred years. They are dioecious, meaning that each tree is either male or female. The pollen from a male shrub can travel on the wind over a hundred miles to reach a female. Once pollinated, the berries—which are actually cones whose scales are so fleshy that they resemble the skin of a fruit—take two to three years to mature. Harvesting them is not easy: a single plant will hold berries in every stage of ripeness, so they have to be picked a few times a year.

Gin distillers prefer juniper berries from Tuscany, Morocco, and eastern Europe. Much of it is still wild-harvested: for example, Albania, Bosnia, and Herzegovina together produce over seven hundred tons of juniper berries per year, much of it gathered in the wild by individual pickers who sell their harvest to a large spice company. The decidedly low-tech method is time consuming: pickers will place a basket or a tarp under a branch, whack it with a stick, and try to dislodge only the ripe, dark blue berries while leaving younger, green fruit alone. Once picked, they are spread out in a cool, dark place to dry. Too much sun or heat would cause them to lose their flavorful essential oils, and a damp environment could invite mold.

The berries contain α-pinene, which imparts a pine or rosemary flavor, as well as myrcene, which is found in cannabis, hops, and wild thyme. Limonene, the lively citrus flavor common in many herbs and spices, is present as well. It is no wonder that juniper is combined with coriander, lemon peel, and other spices to make gin—the same flavor compounds are found in many of those plants, just in different combinations.

The Dutch were already distilling gin for something other than medicinal use by the time they revolted against Spain, a conflict that began in 1566 and lasted, in one form or another, until 1648. When British soldiers came to the aid of the Dutch, they learned to enjoy a little gin on the battlefield, calling it Dutch courage for the strength it gave the troops. Edmund Waller memorialized it in a 1666 poem called “Instructions to a Painter”: “The Dutch their wine, and all their brandy lose / Disarm'd of that from which their courage grows.”