The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks (21 page)

Manihot esculenta

euphorbiaceae (spurge family)

T
he cassava root has been an important food source for people in impoverished and famine-prone areas around the world. Even today it feeds four hundred million people in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The starchy roots, which grow to over three feet in length and weigh several pounds, do offer some nutrition, particularly vitamin C and calcium, but they are also poisonous if not processed properly. In order to leach the cyanide out of the roots, they must be soaked in water, cooked, or pounded into a flour and spread out on the ground for several hours to allow the cyanide to break down or escape into the air. So-called sweet varieties require less processing than the more nutritious, but also more poisonous, bitter varieties. Neither is necessarily safe to eat raw.

In spite of these difficulties, the cassava—also called manioc root—is a staple food because it is drought-tolerant and fairly easy to grow. In the Caribbean and parts of Latin America, especially in Brazil, Ecuador, and Peru, manioc beer (called
ouicöu
on the islands) is made by peeling and chopping the root, boiling it in water, and then chewing the pulp and spitting it back into the mash. This introduces amylase, an enzyme in saliva that helps convert starch to sugar. It is then brought back to a boil, and sugar, honey, or fruit might be added to help increase the alcohol content and improve the flavor.

Cassava is native to South America; it was domesticated in Brazil by about 5000 BC. Although it was introduced to East Africa by the Portuguese in 1736, it wasn't widely grown there until the twentieth century. Any cassava beer-making tradition in Africa is therefore relatively recent. Multinational beer conglomerate SABMiller, known for such brands as Coors Light and Henry Weinhard's, recently
announced plans to brew cassava beer in Angola, sourcing ingredients from local farmers and selling the beer at a lower cost, in hopes of creating not only jobs but also a new market for beer among thirsty, impoverished Africans.

Cassareep
is a thick, dark syrup made by boiling the cassava root and adding spices such as cloves, cayenne, cinnamon, and salt and sugar. it is used as a meat sauce and to flavor a guyanese stew called pepperpot. it does not appear that anyone has had the wit or courage to invent a cocktail that uses cassareep as an ingredient—yet.

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Apis
spp. ---

No insect is more important to the history of alcohol than the honeybee. Just about every kind of fermentable fruit—from grapes to apples to the strange and lovely tamarind—is pollinated by bees, which means that without them, we risk a sudden and shocking sobriety, not to mention scurvy and starvation. But there is a more direct route from bees to intoxication—honey.

Even before the advent of beekeeping in Egyptian times, honey was collected in the wild. Primitive drawings of bee hunters climbing cliffs to rob hives of honey date back to the Neolithic and Mesolithic eras. The earliest beehives, called skeeps, were made of simple baskets that could at least be hung in a more convenient location, making long treks through the forest in search of honey unnecessary.

The earliest form of honey wine, or mead, probably came about when honeycomb was drained of most of its honey and then soaked in water to remove the rest. This honey water would have fermented naturally in the presence of wild yeast. Later, when beekeepers
realized that they could get lighter, sweeter honey by placing beehives near particular crops like clover, alfalfa, and citrus, the wild honey collected in forests went first to mead, while more refined, cultivated honey was preferred as a sweetener.

The Greeks used the word
kykeon,
meaning “mixture,” to refer to a strange beverage that combined beer, wine, and mead. In Homer's
Odyssey,
Odysseus's crew was drugged with
kykeon
by Circe, a sorceress who turned them into pigs. Greek and Roman mead-making traditions spread throughout Europe, but Africans had their own methods as well. The Azande tribe in north-central Africa made mead, and in Ethiopia, a kind of mead called
tej,
or
t'edj,
is still widespread. The recipe calls for about six parts water to one part honey. After a few weeks of fermentation, usually in a pottery or gourd vessel, the drink achieves the alcohol content of wine and is ready to drink. It is sometimes flavored with the bitter leaves of a buckthorn shrub (
Rhamnus prinoides
), or with khat (
Catha edulis
), a leaf that is chewed as a mild stimulant. And in sub-Saharan Africa, tamarind or other fruit would be added to the mixture of honey and water to create an even sweeter drink.

In Paraguay, the Abipón tribe simply mixed honey and water and waited a few hours, which produced a mildly alcoholic beverage fermented on wild yeast. The Sirionó of Bolivia added honey to a gruel of corn, manioc root, or sweet potato, which fermented for a few days until it became as strong as beer. Even early Americans made their own kind of mead, a murky, dark concoction that settlers said was so strong it made them hear the bees buzz.

Today's high-quality meads have a bright, floral flavor that is sometimes enhanced with fruit, herbs, or hops to change the character of the drink. A beer and mead hybrid called braggot is made by some craft brewers; Beowulf Braggot from Dogfish Head Brewery is one such example. Although mead can be distilled into a stronger spirit (sometimes called honeyjack), it's not commonly made. Hidden Marsh, a distillery in Seneca Falls, New York, makes its Bee Vodka from honey; it is surprisingly smooth, with only the slightest hint of sweetness. But the best true honey flavor can be found in a German liqueur called Bärenjäger, which even comes in a bottle with a beehive-shaped cap.

 

DATE PALM

Phoenix dactylifera

arecaceae (palm family)

I
n 2005, an archeologist in Israel had a simple but stunning idea: why not try to germinate the two-thousand-year-old date palm seeds that had been sitting in storage? While old seeds from archeological excavations had been sprouted before, nothing this old had ever been resurrected. But date palms produce what botanists call orthodox seeds, which means that they remain viable long after they have thoroughly dried. (The opposite of an orthodox seed is a recalcitrant seed, which can only be sprouted while fresh and damp. Avocados, for instance, produce recalcitrant seeds.)

This particular ancient seed came from an excavation at Masada, in Israel, where Jewish Zealots committed mass suicide in 73 AD rather than submit to Roman rule. The seed had been found at that site and stored carefully away until the day archeologists decided to sprout it. If plants could act surprised, this one certainly would have been startled to awaken, after a nearly two-thousand-year slumber, in a modern greenhouse, housed in a plastic pot and fed by drip irrigation. This particular variety of palm, called a Judean date palm, went extinct around 500 AD, making it even more astonishing that the plant was resurrected from the dead. Its caretakers are still waiting to find out if they have sprouted a boy or a girl; they hope for a girl so they can sample a long-vanished fruit.

Date palm fruit is a staple of Mediterranean, Arabic, and African cuisine. Date palm wine, however, comes not from the fruit but from the sugary sap of the tree. This is an ancient drink, depicted in Egyptian paintings dating back to at least 2000 BC. The process to make it has not changed much over the millennia. To get the sap flowing, the tree is tapped, usually by inflorescence decapitation, which is the technical term for cutting off a flower. In some cultures, an elaborate ritual of bending, twisting, beating, kicking, and otherwise abusing the flower precedes its decapitation. All of this leads to a more productive flow of sap.

Other palm tree species, including the coconut tree (
Cocos nucifera
), are tapped for their sap throughout Asia, India, and Africa, and for each tree there is a different technique. Sometimes the tree is cut down entirely. Sometimes a hole is cut in the trunk at the very top of the tree, bringing it to the verge of death and sometimes killing it. And in many cases, the tree is simply scraped or punctured as a maple tree would be.

Once the sap is collected, it can be used as a sweetener or cooked into a block of sugar called jaggery. If left alone, it begins to ferment almost immediately, thanks to wild yeast in the air and on the gourds used to collect it. Within hours, a sweet, mild, alcoholic beverage is ready to drink. The fermentation can continue for a few more days, which allows the alcohol content to rise slightly, but the yeast eventually give way to bacteria—and a bacterial fermentation yields vinegar, not wine. At some point during the fermentation the drink reaches the perfect balance of alcohol, sweetness, and a mild acidity, and at that moment it must be consumed at once. Don't go looking for date palm wine in a liquor store; it won't keep long enough to bottle it. The wine can also be distilled into a stronger spirit, sometimes called arrack, which is a general term referring to spirits made from sugary sap.

In West Africa alone, over ten million people enjoy date palm wine—but unfortunately, humans aren't the only ones who love it. In Bangladesh and India, fruit bats visit the gourds and drink the fresh sap that is collecting there. The bats carry a serious disease called Nipah virus, which they can leave behind in the date palm sap. This has been responsible for transmitting the virus from bats to humans. The solution? Health-care workers are scrambling to find a way to tap the date palm without letting the bats have a sip.