That’s what this book is about. The bar moment is the culmination of the human relationship with our environment, the pinnacle of our technology, and a critical point for understanding our own bodies, brains, and behavior. William Faulkner is supposed to have said, “Civilization begins with distillation,” but I’d push even farther—beyond just distilled spirits to wine, beer, mead, sake . . . all of it. Booze is civilization in a glass.
