The Drunken Botanist Quotes

“Gardeners are the ultimate mixologists.”
― Amy Stewart, The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create the World's Great Drinks

“Drunken botanists? Given the role they play in creating the world’s great drinks, it’s a wonder there are any sober botanists at all.”
― Amy Stewart, The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks

“The vanilla bean is the fruit of a species of orchid native to southeastern Mexico, and it is unusually difficult to cultivate. Like most orchids, it is an epiphyte, meaning that its roots need to be exposed to air, not soil. It climbs the trunks of trees, thriving in limbs a hundred feet aboveground, and unfurls just one flower per day over a two-month period, awaiting pollination by a single species of tiny stingless bee, Melipona beecheii. If the flower is pollinated, a pod develops over the next six to eight months. And although the pods contain thousands of tiny seeds, they are incapable of germinating unless they are in the presence of a particular mycorrhizal fungus.”
― Amy Stewart, The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks

“Perfume makers know that, owing to genetic differences in how we experience fragrances, about half the people who inhale jasmine will think of honey, and the other half, unfortunately, will think of urine. They’re both right.”
― Amy Stewart, The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks

“American farmers were still trying to figure out how to make good wine from native American grapes. The difficulty had to do with the genetics of the grape itself. While the European V. vinifera enjoyed almost ten thousand years of selection by humans, who chose larger, tastier fruit and favored hermaphrodite vines over dioecious vines, very little human selection seems to have taken place in North America. Instead, the birds did it. They selectively picked blue-skinned varieties, an unattractive color for wine, because they could see them better—and they chose small fruit over large because they could eat it in one bite.”
― Amy Stewart, The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks

“During Prohibition, enterprising California grape growers kept themselves in business by selling “fruit bricks”—blocks of dried, compressed grapes that were packaged with wine-making yeast. A label warned purchasers not to dissolve the fruit brick in warm water and add the yeast packet, as this would result in fermentation and the creation of alcohol, which was illegal.”
― Amy Stewart, The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks

“In 1897, a Scientific American reporter wrote that “mezcal is described as tasting like a mixture of gasoline, gin and electricity. Tequila is even worse, and is said to incite murder, riot and revolution.”
― Amy Stewart, The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks

“Fermentation takes place in open tanks by necessity; otherwise, the pressure from the carbon dioxide would build to dangerous levels. But when a vat of fruit juice or grain mash is left to brew in an old barn or warehouse, bugs will surely find their way in. This is not always such a bad thing: lambic brewers in Brussels realize that some of their best strains of yeast come from insects falling from the rafters. In fact, yeast produce esters in order to attract insects, hoping they will pick up the yeast and move it around. This makes bugs unwitting accomplices in the dance between sugar and yeast.”
― Amy Stewart, The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks

“Rye growers face another challenge: the grain is vulnerable to a fungus called ergot (Claviceps purpurea). The spores attack open flowers, pretending to be a grain of pollen, which gives them access to the ovary. Once inside, the fungus takes the place of the embryonic grain along the stalk, sometimes looking so much like grain that it is difficult to spot an infected plant. Until the late nineteenth century, botanists thought the odd dark growths were part of the normal appearance of rye. Although the fungus does not kill the plant, it is toxic to people: it contains a precursor to LSD that survives the process of being brewed into beer or baked into bread. While a psychoactive beer might sound appealing, the reality was quite horrible. Ergot poisoning causes miscarriage, seizures, and psychosis, and it can be deadly. In the Middle Ages, outbreaks called St. Anthony’s fire or dancing mania made entire villages go crazy at once. Because rye was a peasant grain, outbreaks of the illness were more common among the lower class, fueling revolutions and peasant uprisings. Some historians have speculated that the Salem witch trials came about because girls poisoned by ergot had seizures that led townspeople to conclude that they’d been bewitched. Fortunately, it’s easy to treat rye for ergot infestation: a rinse in a salt solution kills the fungus.”
― Amy Stewart, The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks

“Every year, Australian ornithologists field calls about the strange behavior of the musk lorikeet population in the southeastern part of the country. These brilliantly colored parrots sometimes find themselves unable to fly. They stumble around on the ground and generally act like drunken louts. They even appear hung over the next day. It happens when their normal food source, eucalyptus nectar, ferments on the tree. This appears to be one of the only true accounts of wildlife being intoxicated by wild liquor.”
― Amy Stewart, The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks

“Romans thought the vine killed trees by strangulation and named it “little wolf,” which explains the origin of the plant’s genus, Lupulus.”
― Amy Stewart, The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks

“Gin is really nothing more than a flavored vodka whose predominant flavor is juniper, so gin drinkers who say they won’t drink vodka misunderstand the nature of their addiction. The base spirit itself is generally a mixture of barley, rye, and perhaps wheat or corn.”
― Amy Stewart, The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks

“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.”
― Amy Stewart, The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks

“It’s easy to see how disgruntled sailors might start to wonder if their rum had been diluted a little too much. They demanded proof that they were getting the rum they were entitled to. There were no hydrometers in those days (a hydrometer is an instrument that measures the density of a liquid as compared to water, thereby measuring alcohol content), so a method was developed using a material ships always had on board: gunpowder. A quantity of gunpowder, mixed with rum, would not ignite if the rum was watered down. It would have to contain about 57 percent alcohol to catch on fire. In the presence of the crew, the ship’s purser would mix the rum and gunpowder and light it on fire, offering “proof” of its potency.”
― Amy Stewart, The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks

“When rum goes into a barrel, the same wonderful interplay of alcohol and wood that makes whiskey so mellow and smooth also happens with rum. But in the tropics, it happens much, much faster. A barrel of rum (often a used bourbon barrel) loses a whopping 7 to 8 percent of its alcohol per year as the wood expands and softens in the steamy heat. What might take twelve years to accomplish in Scotland happens in just a few years in Cuba. For this reason, dark, well-aged Caribbean rums are astonishingly rich and complex after just a short repose in wood.”
― Amy Stewart, The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks

“As the tree matures, the older vessels become plugged with crystalline structures called tyloses, and as a result, the center of the tree—the heartwood—doesn’t conduct water at all, making it well suited for use as a watertight barrel. American oaks are particularly rich in tylose as compared to European oaks. In fact, the European trees have to be carefully split along the grain, rather than cut, in order to avoid rupturing vessels and creating a leaky barrel. The trees also happen to produce an astonishing array of flavor compounds that break free from the wood in the presence of alcohol. European oak, Quercus robur in particular, is high in tannins, which give wine a certain roundness and full-bodied quality. American white oak, on the other hand, releases the same flavor molecules found in vanilla, coconut, peach, apricot, and cloves.”
― Amy Stewart, The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks

“Angels’ Share: In storage, a small amount of alcohol escapes the barrel through evaporation. Distillers call this lost alcohol the angels’ share. Whiskey and brandy makers estimate that the angels get about 2 percent of the alcohol in a barrel each year, although that can vary depending on humidity and temperature. Fortunately, they can afford to lose some, as most spirits are aged at a higher proof than the final bottling.”
― Amy Stewart, The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks

“Those seeds are the kola nut, a mildly caffeinated treat enjoyed by West Africans as a stimulant. Once Europeans discovered it, the nut followed a now-predictable journey from eighteenth century medicine to nineteenth century tonic to twentieth-century flavoring extract.”
― Amy Stewart, The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks

“Even today, chocolate is made by fermenting the beans for several days to allow richer and more complex flavors to emerge. They are then dried, roasted, and cracked open so that the nibs—the meaty part of the bean—can be extracted. The nibs are ground into a powder or paste that, along with a little sugar, becomes dark chocolate. If milk is added, it becomes milk chocolate. And if the fat, called cacao butter, is extracted by itself and mixed with sugar, that is white chocolate.”
― Amy Stewart, The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks

“But first, rice diversified and spread around the world. It is a water-loving grass that reaches up to sixteen feet in flooded fields. However, it does not have to grow in standing water. Its peculiar method of cultivation in rice paddies probably came about when people noticed healthy rice plants growing in flooded fields during the monsoon season. The”
― Amy Stewart, The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks

“It is not much of an exaggeration to claim that the very process that gives us the raw ingredients for brandy and beer is the same one that sustains life on the planet.”
― Amy Stewart, The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks

“yeast produce esters in order to attract insects, hoping they will pick up the yeast and move it around. This makes bugs unwitting accomplices in the dance between sugar and yeast.”
― Amy Stewart, The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks

“The Aztec Codex Fejérváry-Mayer, one of the few pre-Columbian books not destroyed by the Spanish, portray Mayahuel, goddess of the agave, breast-feeding her drunken rabbit children, presumably offering them pulque instead of milk.”
― Amy Stewart, The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks

“The science of fermentation is wonderfully simple. Yeast eat sugar. They leave behind two waste products, ethyl alcohol and carbon dioxide. If we were being honest, we would admit that what a liquor store sells is, chemically speaking, little more than the litter boxes of millions of domesticated yeast organisms, wrapped up in pretty bottles with fancy price tags.”
― Amy Stewart, The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks

“(Botanists who study “twining handedness” have discovered that hops are unusual in their proclivity to twine in a clockwise direction; 90 percent of all climbing plants prefer to go counterclockwise.)”
― Amy Stewart, The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks

“American white oak, on the other hand, releases the same flavor molecules found in vanilla, coconut, peach, apricot, and cloves. (In fact, artificial vanilla is made from a sawdust derivative because it has such high levels of vanillin.)”
― Amy Stewart, The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks

“If we were being honest, we would admit that what a liquor store sells is, chemically speaking, little more than the litter boxes of millions of domesticated yeast organisms, wrapped up in pretty bottles with fancy price tags.”
― Amy Stewart, The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks

“Even today, we tend to think of sake as a miserable hot, sour, yeasty drink we once tasted at the urging of an aunt who took us to a Japanese restaurant in Kansas City.”
― Amy Stewart, The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks

“If barley be wanting to make into malt,
We must be content and think it no fault,
For we can make liquor to sweeten our lips,
Of pumpkins, and parsnips, and walnut tree chips.
—Edward Johns on, 1630”
― Amy Stewart, The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create the World's Great Drinks

“In fact, tequila and mezcal both work beautifully in any cocktail that calls for whiskey, rye, or bourbon.”
― Amy Stewart, The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks