The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks (9 page)

Connoisseurs of Scotch will run across a strange term from time to time in whisky reviews. A particularly pungent, heavy, malty spirit might be described as having a distinctive worm flavor. Given the fact that earthy peat smoke is such a predominant flavor in Scotch whisky, it is not too much of a stretch to imagine that a few earthworms got into the mix as well.

But to distillers, a worm is a coiled copper tube submerged in water. This particular condensing technique is just another way to subtly alter the flavor of the spirit through the shape of the still and the manner in which flavors are extracted. Some distillers claim that the use of a “worm tub” does give a meatier flavor to the finished product—but no actual worms are harmed in the making of whisky.

Which is not to say that worms have never been used in boozy, medicinal tonics. This 1850s era recipe for the treatment of “Eyaws” (presumably yaws, a nasty bacterial infection of the skin and joints) from the archives of Kentucky farmer John B. Clark calls not just for earthworms but for other frightful ingredients. If it didn't cure people, it would certainly knock them back into bed for a few more days.

Recipte for the Eyaws

Take 1 pint of hogs Lard

1 handfull of earth worms

1 handfull of Tobacco

4 pods of Red pepper

1 spunfull of Black pepper

1 Race of Ginger

Stew them well together, & when Applyed mix Sum Sperits of Brandy with it.

 

CORN

Zea mays

poaceae (grass family)

V
ery little good news came out of the Jamestown colony in the early days. The settlers suffered starvation, disease, drought, and horrific accidents. Crops failed and supplies were slow to arrive from England. It must have been nice, then, for John Smith, one of the organizers of the effort to establish a settlement, to get a letter in 1620 from colonist George Thorpe that included this cheerful line: “Wee have found a waie to make soe good a drinke of Indian corne as I protest I have for divers times refused to drinke good stronge Englishe beare and chosen to drinke that.” Apparently, there was just enough copper among their meager supplies to build a still. Corn whiskey was one of the first innovations to come from the struggling Virginia colony.

Corn—called maize by Columbus, who might have heard the word
mahis
from the Taíno people in the Caribbean—was a revelation to the Europeans. (At the time, the word
corn
referred to any sort of grain, so Europeans called it Indian corn to distinguish it from wheat, millet, rye, barley, and other grains.) Columbus brought it back from his voyages and it quickly went into cultivation in Europe, Africa, and Asia. It was easy to grow, adaptable, and—best of all—the grains could be saved for winter. As Thorpe learned, it made a nice drink, too.

In Mexico, archeological evidence points to corn as a dietary staple as early as 8000 BC. Its range extended into parts of Central and South America, where every culture found different uses for the plant. When the Spanish arrived, two fermented beverages were widespread: corn beer, made from the ripe yellow kernels, and cornstalk wine, made from the sweet juice of the stalk. Exactly when these traditions began, and what sort of wild
Zea
might have been used, are questions that continue to vex archeologists.

Corn was domesticated so long ago that its ancestor no longer survives. Botanists assume that early corncobs were much smaller, the size of a finger, perhaps. They probably resembled their cousins in the
Zea
genus, many of which look like ordinary tall grass with an unremarkable seed head. These weedy relations are called teosinte. They look nothing like modern corn. Instead of producing a sturdy central stalk, they take the form of a wide, bushy clump of grass. The seed heads hold five to ten small seeds in a straight line, as opposed to a few hundred arranged around a corncob.

A team of archeologists led by Michael Blake at the University of British Columbia now believe that early corn might have been selected and domesticated not for its grain but for its juice. Cornstalk quids—bits of plant fiber that were chewed and then spit out—have been found at archeological sites dating to 5000 BC, suggesting that people prized the plant for its sweetness. And analysis of human remains found at those sites indicates that they were getting corn sugar in their diet but not much corn grain.

Over time, through some combination of human selection, chance hybridization, and mutation, corn came to resemble the plant we know today. When Columbus saw it for the first time, the ears might have been smaller, but it would have been obvious that its real value came from the kernels of corn, not sugar from the stalk. Columbus brought a new sweetener to the Americas in the form of sugarcane, and from that time on, cornstalk sugar declined in importance.

But cornstalk wine didn't disappear entirely: A few centuries later, Benjamin Franklin wrote that “the stalks, pressed like sugarcane, yield a sweet juice, which, being fermented and distilled, yields an excellent spirit,” suggesting that the practice was still alive. Even today some tribes, such as the Tarahumara of northwest Mexico, continue to make the wine as a traditional tribal practice. The stalks are pounded against rocks to extract the juice, which is mixed with water and other plants, then naturally fermented and consumed within a few days.

Corn beer, called chicha, was the other corn beverage Europeans encountered. Its exact origins are a bit of a mystery, but the rather sophisticated process was already centuries old when the Spaniards arrived, and the tradition continues today. Like other grains, the starch in corn has to be converted to fermentable sugar before the yeast can go to work on it. In Peru and surrounding areas, it is made by chewing uncooked, ground corn, then spitting it out and mixing the wads of chewed corn with water. Digestive enzymes in saliva are effective at converting starch to sugar, so the spit was an integral part of the process.

Archeologist Patrick McGovern, who studies the ancient origins of alcoholic beverages, worked with Dogfish Head brewery in Delaware to brew a batch using the traditional method. The experiment reads like the setup for an old joke: two anthropologists, a brewer, and a reporter from the
New York Times
walk into a bar. But what happened next was no joke. Behind the bar was a batch of ground purple Peruvian corn that they planned to chew, spit out, and mix with a traditional recipe of barley, yellow corn, and strawberries. But chewing the corn was almost unbearable: the reporter compared the texture to uncooked oatmeal, and the wads they spat out “resembled something a cat owner might be familiar with, if kitty litter came in purple.” One very small batch came out of the experiment, and that was the end of it. With a brewery full of modern equipment, chewing raw corn was clearly not worth the effort.

Apparently Dogfish Head is not the only brewery to come to this conclusion. The chicha sold today in Latin America is made using methods more similar to modern beer making. Like pulque, the agave-based beer, chicha is made on a small scale, served fresh, and often flavored with fruit and other sweeteners.