Proof: The Science of Booze
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Read between December 11 - December 22, 2019
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Yet no archaeologist has ever found evidence of Ptolemaic brandy. In fact, you don’t get signs of distilling to drink until sometime between 950 and 1100 AD, in—where else?—Russia. It’s vodka, “bread wine,” suggesting that it might have been distilled from a traditional Russian fermented drink called kvass, made from bread or just about anything cheap and sugary.
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The technology spread from a few medical schools and apothecaries to monasteries all over the continent and England and Scotland, if for no other reason than people like to drink and the economics make a lot of sense. Farmers could harvest all their grain or fruit, distill it down to a few easy-to-transport barrels of liquid that would never, ever spoil, and the liquid was worth more at market than the source material. Distillation was literally a transformative technology.
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The French translated aqua vita into eau de vie, and the Dutch called it “burnt wine,” or brandewijn. Exported to England, that got corrupted to “brandy-wine,” and eventually just “brandy.” The Scots started making the stuff out of grains; in Gaelic, they called it “water of life,” usquebaugh, eventually corrupted to “whisky.” By the early 1400s, people were getting addicted to ethanol. Liquor had spread across the world.
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A continuous column still, on the other hand, separates components not in time but in space. The stuff that comes off the top—the heads—are the lighter, more volatile molecules, and what comes off the bottom—the tails—are more concentrated and less volatile. It’s roughly the same technology used to crack crude oil into gasoline, kerosene, diesel, and so on.
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Heat—thermal energy—is actually mechanical movement, and in a solid with springy interatomic attachments like copper, that energy creates tiny whorls called phonons that move through the medium like a wave of sound does through air. When someone says that a metal like gold, silver, or copper is a good conductor of heat, what they’re really saying is that the metal is good at propagating phonons. And copper’s crystal structure, the way its atoms line up in bulk, is really good for working into new shapes—its atomic crystals are smoother on their faces than in other metals, so they slide across ...more
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Of thermally conductive, workable metals, copper is the cheapest. But it also turns out to have properties critical to the flavor of distillates. Yeast metabolism makes a lot of sulfur compounds, but most of them stay inside the bodies of the yeast. Get rid of the yeast corpses at the end of fermentation, as most winemakers and brewers do, and that’s no problem. But if you leave the yeast in the mash, as distillers tend to, the sulfur-bearing molecules spill into the mix as the yeast bodies crack open. You end up with hydrogen sulfide, which gives rotten eggs their odor, and dimethyl ...more
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the universe prefers copper sulfide to hydrogen sulfide. Inside a copper still, hydrogen sulfide is going to get pulled apart, and the sulfur is going to stick to the copper, forming a patina—a sort of rust. Even with new, clean copper, what looks like a smooth, burnished surface actually has microscale peaks and valleys, and all that surface area provides reaction sites for esters and other aromatic molecules to join into new compounds.
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(No chance of contamination in something that’s 80 percent alcohol.)
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Winters is a big guy who walks around chewing an unlit, tar-black cigar the size of a roll of quarters.
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You think you were an iconoclast in college? Try being a tall, gay, banjo-playing fungus major with a microscope in your dorm room, walls decorated with fungal family trees you drew yourself.
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Depending on who you believe, there are between 1.5 million and 5 million species of fungi on earth. Only 100,000 of them have been named and characterized according to the (arcane, ancient) rules in the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature. Of those, barely a fifth have gene sequences in GenBank, the world’s main storehouse of genomic data. Only a couple hundred have been sequenced completely, and most of those are yeast—because those are commercially useful.
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Magnified fungi look like alien plants from a 1930s pulp sci-fi magazine cover, or a Dr. Seuss illustration rendered by Pixar.
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With his wisps of white hair and an illuminated magnifying glass hanging from a silver chain around his neck, Hughes looks every bit the Gandalf of fungi that Scott needed.
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Of the structural components of wood, cellulose and hemicellulose are giant chains of repeating glucose molecules, and the heat of coopering breaks those into sugars—glucose, hexose, and pentose. But the third major component, lignin, is different. It’s a massive molecule, too, but with nonrepeating subunits. About half of them are vanillin (vanilla flavored), and the rest is barbecue-flavored guaiacyl, clove-flavored eugenol, and syringaldehyde. At high heat, the spicy aromatic aldehydes in the lignin undergo Maillard reactions and yield the same flavors as browned meat.
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Quandt doesn’t really think anyone, no matter how expert, can produce an objective assessment of a wine’s quality, origins, manufacture, or taste. Because that’s what his data tells him. “We are eight guys who are pretty experienced and have been doing this together for twenty years, and yet when we do the statistical analysis of our tastings, the amount of disagreement is extraordinary,” Quandt says. “Since people don’t have identical utility functions, they evaluate different characteristics of the wine. As a result, a wine that tastes fantastic to one person will taste shitty to another ...more
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Since there are many wine writers, and there is a substantial overlap in the wines they write about (particularly Bordeaux wines), it is important that there be substantial agreement among them. And secondly, what they write must actually convey information; that is to say, it must be free of bullshit. Regrettably, wine evaluations fail on both counts.
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In 2011 a team of researchers from the University of Padua in Italy and Macquarie University in Australia compared the discriminatory abilities of trained sommeliers to amateur wine drinkers and to sommeliers-in-training. It was a brutal test—the tasters were exposed to fifty aromas, ten of which were common household smells like shoe polish or garlic, and forty were wines. And of the wines, they were trying to specifically identify just ten Italians—five red and five white. The other thirty were there to distract their noses. Oh, and they weren’t allowed to drink the wine—just sniff. Like I ...more
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the more training people had, the more descriptors they could call to mind. They had a bigger vocabulary to describe the aromas they smelled. But in terms of blind identification of what the researchers call “wine-relevant odorants,” the sommeliers didn’t do any better than the novices.
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That actually jibes with Gaiser’s description of his own experience. He and other sommeliers (and presumably the kind of people who can identify other exemplars of other drinks) are matching the new aroma or taste against a stored memory of what that class of drink tastes like. The difference isn’t in an innate ability or skill at constructing and synthesizing “wine bullshit,” in Quandt’s construction, but in experience.
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once the volatilized, moisturized aromas waft into the sinuses, they encounter a dense, wrinkled, mucus-covered square inch of tissue, the nasal epithelium. Underneath the mucus are the ends of neurons, and built into the ends of these are receptor molecules to detect aroma.
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Olfactory receptors thread back and forth through the membrane of the cells seven times, but most of the specific amino acids that make up those proteins are unknown. The sevenfold membrane crossing wasn’t described until 1991, by Columbia University scientists Linda Buck and Richard Axel. It won them the Nobel Prize.
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Receptor neurons bundle together into cables called axons, feeding up through holes in a perforated bone just behind the eyeballs called the cribriform plate. (In a serious head injury, the skull can shift, and the lateral movement of the cribriform plate shears those axons like a knife through spaghetti. Snip! No more sense of smell.)
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When we smell something, we are smelling tiny pieces of that thing that have broken off, wafted through the air, and then touched actual neurons wired to actual pieces of brain. Olfaction is direct, with nothing between the thing we’re smelling, the smell it has, and how we perceive that smell. It is our most intimate sense.
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You get “mouthfeel,” a subjective measure of viscosity and astringency due in large part to the presence of tannins. It’s actually the sensation of proteins getting stripped out of your saliva, and it’s received by the trigeminal nerve endings. Your taste buds pick up the sweetness and bitterness of the ethanol, plus the broad flavors of everything else.
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while nonalcoholic beer can be pretty good, “de-alcoholized” red wine tastes like existential death.)
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the same cells that pick up sour flavors on the tongue make enzymes that turn CO2 into bicarbonate ions—as in baking soda—and protons, which are really just hydrogen atoms stripped of their single electron. Protons are one of the hallmarks of an acid; the tongue perceives them as sour. So what’s really going on is the conversion of CO2 into carbonic acid, in a backward sort of way. That’s why flat soda pop tastes overly sweet. The sour CO2 isn’t there to balance it out.
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where smell and taste are concerned, ethanol has what researchers call “postingestive effects,” which is to say, it makes you feel funny. Animals tend to learn to associate those effects with the taste. The flavor might be repellent, but the effects are attractive—so we start to think of the flavor differently.
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vomiting is what the taste researcher Alexander Bachmanov describes as “a particular case of Pavlovian conditioning.”
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every drink other than vodka is really just a glass full of misdirection to get us around the fact that we hate the taste of the key ingredient.
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Drinks are full of congeners, the flavors, colors, aromas, even other alcohols like methanol and isopropanol. Whisky has over 150 of them, some perceivable at a parts-per-billion level. (Gin, by the way, usually shows only thirty to forty.)
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Absent any adulterations, like the glycerol some makers reportedly add to increase viscosity, any high-end vodka should taste like any other. One hypothesis for why they don’t says that at concentrations above 40 percent alcohol—that’s 80 proof—H2O forms crystalline molecular cages called clathrates, trapping ethanol inside. The researchers suggest that the length and strength of the hydrogen bonds that loosely tie the water molecules into those cages give vodkas their different flavors. No one knows how; it’s not like there are taste buds for hydrogen bond strength.
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“Fifteen years ago I would have said to you that all sulfur compounds in wine are negative,” says Hildegarde Heymann, a sensory scientist at UC Davis. In wine, sulfur shows up chemically as thiol groups and mercaptans like hydrogen sulfide. “But in the last fifteen years we found the volatile thiols that are the reason New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc smells like New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc. The gas chromatography work finally got to the point where they could see them. You could smell them—cat pee, passion fruit, tropical, grapefruit—they would have used those words, but we couldn’t have attached ...more
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To sum up the point of all that prep: the panel has inter-rater agreement on aromas, and Heymann knows what they mean when they use specific aroma words. The odor-object metaphors are generally agreed upon and connected to actual chemical compounds. “We’re calibrating the group to speak the same language, and we’re calibrating the language to a standard that we can use as a translation device,” Heymann says. It’s consistency of meaning, and when meaning is consistent, you can do statistics with it.
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Then she ran the wines past a trained panel of eighteen people. And sure enough, after some complicated statistics, not only did their reference words match to specific compounds in the wines, but Cabernets from different regions actually had different compositions to match. Heymann has done much the same thing for Malbec grapes from California, Washington, and Argentina—this time starting only with juice and making all the wine either at UC Davis or a site in Argentina, to minimize variations in the fermentation. “The regions had characteristics on their own,” she says.
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In neat, sans serif type is an epigram from the British statistician George E. P. Box: “Statisticians, like artists, have the bad habit of falling in love with their models.”
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Whether the subjects were occasional drinkers, heavy drinkers, or bona fide alcoholics (recruited by giving sign-up sheets to “cooperating hotel desk clerks and bartenders in areas known to be frequented by alcoholics”), none of them experienced loss of control unless they thought they were getting alcohol. Even the alcoholics drank no more than the non-drinkers if they were in the expect placebo/get ethanol group. Expectancies—people’s perceptions of what would happen if they had a drink—were critical to the effects of ethanol.
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In short, our state of mind affects what alcohol does to us, just as alcohol affects our state of mind.
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To recap: professional researchers took a scrawny Harvard med student, taped primitive electrodes made of wet gauze to his hands and feet, stuffed him into an airtight coffin, played buzzing noises at him until he fell asleep, and then squirted booze through a rubber tube into his butt.
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Once you have someone in the magnet, nicely buzzed, brains loaded with radioactive super-heroin, you can go hunting.
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(One cool thing about absinthe: it’s translucent and sort of greenish, but when you add water it turns cloudy, almost milky. One of the major congeners in anisettes like absinthe, ouzo, and pastis is an oil called anethol. Straight out of the bottle, it’s at a kind of equilibrium with ethanol and water. But drip more water in and the ethanol diffuses into the water and away from the anethol, which then forms into larger droplets. It’s a spontaneously formed emulsion, in other words, that snaps the liquid from translucent to opaque.)
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If you really want to blame a chemical for wine-induced headaches, I might point you to another choice—5-hydroxytryptamine, more generally known as serotonin. It’s a neurotransmitter used widely throughout the brain, involved in things like mood regulation. Psychiatric drugs like Prozac are selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors; they enhance the effects of serotonin in the brain. Red wine induces the release of serotonin more effectively than white wine. Like Prozac, red wine also inhibits its reuptake at synapses in the brain. It blocks serotonin from locking into receptors, specifically a ...more
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It’s true that the markets for illicit drugs can be violent, but except for some stimulants (like methamphetamine), alcohol is the only drug that has the intrinsic ability to make people violent—across cultures and genders.
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If, when you say whiskey, you mean the devil’s brew, the poison scourge, the bloody monster that defiles innocence, yea, literally takes the bread from the mouths of little children; if you mean the evil drink that topples the Christian man and woman from the pinnacles of righteous, gracious living into the bottomless pit of degredation and despair, shame and helplessness and hopelessness, then certainly I am against it with all my power. But if, when you say whiskey, you mean the oil of conversation, the philosophic wine, the stuff that is consumed when good fellows get together, that puts a ...more
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GOOD MORNING, SUNSHINE! You are so screwed.
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Governments often try to calculate how much money the economy loses due to alcohol use by summing up productivity lost to hangovers, to people who can’t make it into work the next day. In the United States, that’s $160 billion a year.
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Specific variations in a gene called ADH1C seemed to correlate to a lack of perceived hangover symptoms. The downside: those same variations also correlate to a risk for alcoholism. That fits with the idea that people who are less sensitive to the overall effects of alcohol are also the ones most likely to become dependent on it.
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pretty much everything anyone has ever told you about the causes of hangover is wrong.
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But just as with dehydration, if low blood sugar were the problem, administering glucose and fructose ought to be the solution. And it’s not—sugar doesn’t help the morning after.
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If we’re looking for congeners to blame, we might set our sights on methanol. Levels aren’t high in anything you buy in the store, because the stuff can kill you, but it’s present at nontoxic levels in almost every alcoholic beverage. The enzyme alcohol dehydrogenase breaks it down rapidly in the body, but where ADH turns ethanol into acetaldehyde, it turns methanol into formaldehyde. These molecules are toxic and very unpleasant. The science here isn’t clear, because some studies dismiss the effects of methanol and its metabolites, but one piece of evidence is suggestive: the relative ...more
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On first sip, methanol gets you just as drunk as ethanol does. Both are, in medical parlance, depressants of the central nervous system. After consuming a lot of methanol, you might feel fine for a few hours, up to a full day. And then you get sick: vomiting, dizziness, and a variety of flu-like symptoms. That’s ADH making formaldehyde, which is bad, but doesn’t last long. The problem is, it turns into formic acid—ant venom.