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If God had intended us to drink beer, he would have given us stomachs.
-David Daye
Writer’s block is a fancy term made up by whiners so they can have an excuse to drink alcohol.
-Steve Martin
Alcohol may be man’s worst enemy, but the bible says love your enemy.
-Frank Sinatra |
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Long ago, before the dawn of civilization, humankind discovered alcohol. That was good timing, as this innovation was what made civilization bearable.
We knew how it worked before we knew why it worked: take a sugar, any sugar; feed it to some microorganisms; give it time and the right conditions; and you get booze.
It's the microorganism part that we didn't figure out until fairly recently. Until then, it was magic. Anyone could turn water into wine; you just needed fruit.
Fantasy writers deal with magic, so this should be right up our alley.
All alcoholic beverages begin with fermentation, and for that we have three major sources: Grain, fruit, or flowers. Grains, along with their cousin the tuber, are starchy, and the starch can be converted to sugar for fermentation. Fruits, such as grapes or apples, naturally have a high sugar content that is easily converted to alcohol. And flowers produce pollen, which bees use to make honey, and honey is basically sugar already. There are outliers, like the fermented milk consumed by cultures like the Mongols, but those three are the main ones.
Essentially, beer is a fermented beverage made from grain; wine is a fermented beverage made from fruit; and mead is a fermented beverage made from honey. There are exceptions to this general rule; for example, cider, although it's made from fruit, has its own category, and Japanese sake is often called "rice wine," although its source is (obviously) grain.
The alcohol content of a fermented beverage is mostly determined by the hardiness of the yeast used in the process. Once a particular level is reached, it destroys the yeast and fermentation ends. To get a bigger kick, you have to take fermentation one step further and distill the elixir, basically reducing the water content to increase the alcohol concentration. There's an upper limit to this, too, around 95% alcohol, because of complicated things related to partial vapor pressures. (There are ways to get nearly 100% ethanol, but that's outside our scope here.)
Here on Earth, we've probably fermented everything that can be fermented, and distilled most of them also. But as fantasy writers, we're not limited to Earth, are we?
There's more to alcohol than just the results of its consumption on the human body. As I noted above, we didn't really know about microorganisms and their role in the fermentation process until pretty late in the game. This also means that we didn't know much about contamination of water supplies. Well, it turns out that for most of history, people got around water contamination problems by turning the water into wine (or beer, or cider, or whatever). And if that's not magic, I don't know what is. Sure, we know the science behind it now, but before the microscope, it must have seemed like magic - or divine providence.
There's an old myth about the Sumerian goddess Inanna. This myth was written down maybe 6000 years ago, which means it probably came from an even older oral tradition. Basically, Inanna wants to give civilization to her worshippers, so she goes up to heaven and confronts the god Enki. She gave him beer, and they got into a beer-drinking contest, which Inanna handily won, so while Enki is passed out, she grabs the keys to civilization and buggers off back to Ur, where she sets the people up with all of the art and science of city-building.
Myths are, of course, a reflection of the culture from which they came; this one, I think, says a lot about the world-view of the first humans to become "civilized."
So if you're writing about times past, don't forget that we didn't always have the attitudes toward alcohol that we, with our (mostly) safe indoor plumbing and scientifically pure water, have today. As the Inanna story illustrates, while beer might or might not be the root of civilization, it sure played a part in its development. |
Let's look at a few works of fantasy from writing.com members.
| | Reverie [E] #1791754
Crossing the line between reality and fantasy - An Open Expressions Entry
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Last time, in "Cities" , I wrote about cities and civilization.
brom21  : I loved this topic. As many may know, castles and stone structures appear in fantasy cities more often then not. It is so nostalgic to take in these old-world wonders that comes from descriptions using similes and metaphor. The next city I make will be affected by the unique origins and culture of the beings like you suggested. Thanks! This helped!
Glad to help!
That'll do it for me for now - see you next time. Until then,
DREAM ON!!!
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Fantasy: May 10, 2017 Issue [#8276]
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