The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks (41 page)

Chamomile flowers contain a rich mixture of aromatic and medicinal compounds that are strongest just after the flowers ripen and dry. In addition to their well-known sedative qualities, pharmacological studies show that the flowers' anti-inflammatory and antiseptic effects actually do help calm the stomach.

The makers of Hendrick's Gin claim chamomile as an ingredient, and a few distillers have made it the central ingredient in their liqueurs. J. Witty Spirits in California makes a chamomile liqueur, and the Italian distillery Marolo infuses chamomile in grappa for a sweet, soothing, and surprisingly floral digestif. It is also a key ingredient in vermouth, and one of the few that vermouth makers will admit to on tours of their facilities.

ELDERFLOWER

Sambucus nigra

caprifoliaceae (honeysuckle family)

T
he flowers of the elderberry bush impart a flavor that, until recently, was virtually unknown to American palates. Then, in 2007, a pale yellow liqueur called St-Germain entered the cocktail scene. Although it was marketed as an elegant French liqueur, the taste is probably more familiar to British drinkers, who have been imbibing elderflower wine and nonalcoholic elderflower cordial for years.

The elderberry bush flourishes throughout Europe and the United Kingdom. It is a classic hedgerow plant: it grows wild in the countryside, pushing up new shoots from a massive root base every year. The bush produces tiny purplish black berries that can be pressed into juice, cooked into jam, or made into a homemade fruit wine. Elderberry wine has a robust, fruity flavor that is not to everyone's liking, but unscrupulous wine merchants in the nineteenth century knew they could use it to extend wine and port and no one would know the difference.

But it is the flat-topped cluster of honey-scented flowers, not the berries, that contribute their remarkable perfume to elderflower liqueur. No other spirit tastes quite so much like a meadow in bloom; if one tries to imagine what honeybees taste when they dive between a flower's petals, this drink is surely it.

St-Germain's distiller reveals little of its recipe, and what is disclosed has been cloaked in fanciful prose. French farmers, the distiller claims, harvest the blossoms in spring and carry them by “specially rigged bicycles” from the foothills of the French Alps to “local depots.” They declare that the flowers are not macerated, but that a secret method allows them to persuade the flavor to reveal itself. The extract is then combined with grape eau-de-vie, sugar, and (although they are vague on this point) probably some citrus fruit. The result is a liqueur that tastes of flowers, honey, and the distant, spectral seduction of fruit—pear, perhaps, or melon.

HOPS

Humulus lupulus
and
H. japonicus

cannabaceae (cannabis family)

B
eer is not made from hops. It is made from barley, and sometimes other grains, then flavored with hops. But it is impossible to imagine beer without this strange, bitter vine.

Before the discovery, in about 800 AD, that hops could be added to beer to improve its flavor and preserve it, brewers mixed all kinds of strange herbs and spices into their beer. The word
Gruit
is an old German term for the bouquet of herbal ingredients that once went into beer. Yarrow, wormwood, meadowsweet, and even intoxicating and deadly herbs like hemlock, nightshade and henbane all went into the fermentation tank, often with unfortunate results. But that changed once hops migrated from China to Europe in the Middle Ages.

One of the earliest hop farms was established in Bavaria in 736 AD. At that time, brewing and other such scientific and medicinal pursuits were in the hands of monks. Hop farms became common at monasteries throughout Europe and turned up in England by the sixteenth century. With their arrival, a new style of beer was born.