The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks (20 page)

BANANA

Musa acuminata

musaceae (banana family)

T
he banana tree is actually not a tree but an enormous perennial herb. It is disqualified from being a tree because its stem contains no woody tissue. Most of us have only ever eaten one kind of banana, the Cavendish, which is what our supermarkets carry, but there are in fact hundreds of cultivars, including the so-called beer bananas of Uganda and Rwanda. Farmers prefer to grow beer bananas (as opposed to cooking bananas, also known as plantains), because they can process the fruit into a highly profitable beer that, while short-lived, does not perish as quickly as the bananas themselves do. Transformed into beer, the bananas are easier to get to market.

The traditional method is to pile ripe, unpeeled bananas into a pit or basket. People tread on them to extract the juice, much like the stomping of grapes. The juice is roughly filtered through grass and left to ferment in a gourd, to which sorghum flour might be added. After a couple of days, the cloudy, sweet and sour beer is ready to drink. It can be bottled and stored for two or three days at the most.

While Ugandan banana beer is usually a homemade affair, brewers have made commercial versions. Chapeau Banana is a Belgian lambic. The British Wells & Young's Brewing Company makes Wells Banana Bread Beer, and the Mongozo brewery in the Netherlands offers a banana beer made in the African style with fair-trade bananas.

CASHEW APPLE

Anacardium occidentale

anacardiaceae (cashew family)

M
ost people have never taken a cashew nut out of its shell. There's a good reason for this: the cashew tree is a close relative to poison ivy, poison oak, and poison sumac. Like its cousins, it excretes a nasty, rash-inducing oil called urushiol. The shells have to be carefully steamed open to extract the edible, urushiol-free nut inside.

The nut hangs from a small fruit called the cashew apple. (In botanical terms, the cashew apple is actually a pseudo-fruit because it does not contain any seed; the real fruit is the cashew nut hanging below it.) This fruit, which is also free of the noxious oil, is used in India to make a fermented drink called
feni.

The cashew tree, native to Brazil, was described in 1558 by French botanist André Thevet. In a woodcut, he depicted people squeezing the fruit while it still hung on the tree. Portuguese explorers brought the cashew to their colony in Mozambique and to the eastern coast of India. European tastes in liquor called for new uses of the cashew: in 1838, a report on the drinking habits of people in the West Indies included a description of a punch, presumably rum-based, flavored with the juice of the cashew apple.

These squat, fast-growing trees, which climb to about forty feet tall and stretch twice as wide, were planted in India with the idea that they would help with erosion control. Cashew trees are now also found in East Africa and throughout Central and South America, but the world's supply of cashew nuts comes primarily from Brazil and India.

Cashew apple
feni
(sometimes
fenny
or
fenni
) is still made in the tiny Indian state of Goa, which was occupied by Portugal from 1510 through 1961. It's a popular vacation spot for European tourists, who seek out the local beverage while on holiday.

The apples signal their ripeness by dropping from the tree or separating with only the slightest pressure; they must then be crushed immediately because they spoil quickly. To make
feni,
locals separate the cashew apple, which they call
caju,
from the nut. The fruit is placed into a pit and stomped, sometimes by children wearing rubber boots. The juice is set aside to make a lightly fermented summer drink called
urak.
Some of this fermented beverage is then distilled in a copper pot to about 40 percent ABV; it is this strong, clear drink that is called
feni.
The locals enjoy it with lemonade, soda, or tonic water.

CASSAVA