Proof Quotes

“William Faulkner is supposed to have said, "Civilization begins with distillation," but I'd push even further -- beyond just distilled spirits to wine, beer, mead, sake ... all of it. Booze is civilization in a glass.”
― Adam Rogers, Proof: The Science of Booze

“Distillation tells us that having less of something can make it more potent. It is concentration. It is focus.”
― Adam Rogers, Proof: The Science of Booze

“It’s not enough to admire the pretty bottles filled with varicolored liquids behind the bar. You’re supposed to ask questions about them—what they are and why they’re different, and how people make them. The only people who can get away with going that far down a rabbit hole are journalists, scientists, and three-year-olds. And three-year-olds aren’t allowed in bars.”
― Adam Rogers, Proof: The Science of Booze

“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 song in their hearts and laughter on their lips and the warm glow of contentment in their eyes; if you mean Christmas cheer; if you mean the stimulating drink that puts the spring in the old gentleman’s step on a frosty morning; if you mean the drink that enables a man to magnify his joy, and his happiness and to forget, if only for a little while, life’s great tragedies and heartbreaks and sorrows, if you mean that drink, the sale of which pours into our treasuries untold millions of dollars, which are used to provide tender care for our little children, our blind, our deaf, our dumb, our pitiful aged and infirm, to build highways, hospitals, and schools, then certainly I am in favor of it.”
― Adam Rogers, Proof: The Science of Booze

“Yay! We have made booze.”
― Adam Rogers, Proof: The Science of Booze

“The English “yeast” comes, via the Dutch “gist,” from the Greek word for boiling. Getting the gist of something is literally boiling it down.”
― Adam Rogers, Proof: The Science of Booze

“Alexandria was "the single place on earth where all the knowledge in the entire world was gathered together -- every great play and poem, every book of physics and philosophy, the key to understanding ... simply everything," as the historians Justin Pollard and Howard Reid wrote. "Most of the knowledge of the first thousand years of Western civilization is missing. These were the books that formed the library of Alexandria.”
― Adam Rogers, Proof: The Science of Booze

“The CO2 has to come out, which it does by forming bubbles. Now, champagne is pressurized to six times the atmospheric pressure on earth at sea level, enough to propel a popped champagne cork faster than 30 miles an hour. Lesson: letting the cork shoot out of a bottle when you open it is both tacky and dangerous.”
― Adam Rogers, Proof: The Science of Booze

“If dust disperses through the air it behaves like an explosive gas -- any spark can ignite a particle, which then sets fire to all the particles near it, and so on, in a three-dimensional, fast-moving exothermic wave, which is a fancy way of saying "fiery death explosion.”
― Adam Rogers, Proof: The Science of Booze

“Every four seconds, someone on earth buys a bottle of Glenlivet.”
― Adam Rogers, Proof: The Science of Booze

“the distilled spirits business is dominated by giant producers who run immensely productive facilities that produce complex, expensive chemical admixtures year after year. That’s not necessarily a criticism: just because Jack Daniel’s comes from a chemical plant doesn’t mean it isn’t a damn-fine-tasting chemical.”
― Adam Rogers, Proof: The Science of Booze

“for another compound with proven effect on hangover symptoms, extract of the skin of the prickly pear cactus, Opuntia ficus indica. Mexican restaurants sell the paddles of this plant as nopales,”
― Adam Rogers, Proof: The Science of Booze

“Ethanol might help with a hangover because it stops the body from breaking down methanol.”
― Adam Rogers, Proof: The Science of Booze

“Depending on height and sex, getting your blood alcohol above 0.10 pretty much guarantees a hangover the next day, with symptoms peaking at about twelve to fourteen hours later.”
― Adam Rogers, Proof: The Science of Booze

“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 song in their hearts and laughter on their lips and the warm glow of contentment in their eyes; if you mean Christmas cheer; if you mean the stimulating drink that puts the spring in the old gentleman’s step on a frosty morning; if you mean the drink that enables a man to magnify his joy, and his happiness and to forget, if only for a little while, life’s great tragedies and heartbreaks and sorrows, if you mean that drink, the sale of which pours into our treasuries untold millions of dollars, which are used to provide tender care for our little children, our blind, our deaf, our dumb, our pitiful aged and infirm, to build highways, hospitals, and schools, then certainly I am in favor of it.”
― Adam Rogers, Proof: The Science of Booze

“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.”
― Adam Rogers, Proof: The Science of Booze

“odds are the sommelier isn’t a whole lot better at discriminating among wines than you are.”
― Adam Rogers, Proof: The Science of Booze

“Sugar is the most important molecule on earth.”
― Adam Rogers, Proof: The Science of Booze

“Two thousand years ago, give or take, we humans built the second miracle for ourselves: distillation, one of the earliest tools used by the earliest scientists. Invented by alchemists searching for the fundamental spirits that inhabit everything on earth, the still accidentally gave rise to an entirely new way to convey flavor and aroma, and an array of drinks that became a staple of human consumption. Plus it gave rise to the modern study of chemistry and made possible our petroleum-based economy.”
― Adam Rogers, Proof: The Science of Booze

“Distillation takes intelligence and will. To distill, literally or metaphorically, requires the hubris to believe you can change the world.”
― Adam Rogers, Proof: The Science of Booze

“We distill ideas from something diffuse and hard to grasp into something precise. We distill knowledge to its essence the same way we distill fruit wine to brandy, beer to whisky, fermented sugar cane juice to rum.”
― Adam Rogers, Proof: The Science of Booze

“The miracle of yeast is awesome enough to strain credulity. It’s a fungus, a naturally occurring nanotechnological machine that converts sugar to the alcohol we drink. It breeds pretty much everywhere and is one of the organisms on which scientists have built much of our knowledge of how life works . . . and, postscript, it also makes possible the baking of bread.”
― Adam Rogers, Proof: The Science of Booze

“The manufacture of alcohol was, arguably, the social and economic revolution that allowed Homo sapiens to become civilized human beings. It’s the apotheosis of human life on earth. It’s a miracle.”
― Adam Rogers, Proof: The Science of Booze

“Some archaeologists and anthropologists have argued that the production of beer induced human beings to settle down and develop permanent agriculture—to literally put down roots and cultivate grains instead of roam nomadically.”
― Adam Rogers, Proof: The Science of Booze

“It’s arguably the dumbest mixed drink ever invented.”
― Adam Rogers, Proof: The Science of Booze

“(Nobody’s exactly sure whether ethanol makes a red wine taste better, but from experience I’ll tell you that while nonalcoholic beer can be pretty good, “de-alcoholized” red wine tastes like existential death.)”
― Adam Rogers, Proof: The Science of Booze

“A study titled, simply, “The Color of Odors,” will destroy your faith in anybody’s ability to taste anything. Here’s how it worked: three French researchers started with two wines from Bordeaux, a white made with Sémillon and Sauvignon grapes and a red made with Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot. The researchers first had a group of subjects taste both the white wine and the red, under white light in clear glasses, and write down all the words they could think of to describe each one. In this test it didn’t matter whether the tasters perceived the same things. Inter-rater reliability wasn’t a factor here—the researchers didn’t care if tasters agreed with each other about the wine color and taste, just that each taster would consistently call one “red” and one “white.” Then the researchers took an odorless, tasteless extract of the grape-skin pigment anthocyanin and dripped it into the white wine, turning it red. And they called the tasters back for a second go-around, asking them to compare the white wine and the colored wine—the same wine, in other words, with red food coloring. The result was a taste-test catastrophe. Almost to a person, the tasters chose to use the same words for the white wine from the initial tasting on the white wine in the second. And they used the same words for the red wine on the red-colored white wine. They simply could not tell the difference. Color alone—not aroma, not flavor—told them what to expect, and that’s exactly what they tasted.”
― Adam Rogers, Proof: The Science of Booze

“Koji is at the core of Japanese cuisine—it’s the key to sake, soy sauce, miso (the fermented soy paste used as a basis for soup), vinegar, and tofu. Technically, it’s the fungus Aspergillus oryzae, and if you were an infectious disease specialist, that would freak you out a little bit because most of the Aspergillus genus is poisonous.”
― Adam Rogers, Proof: The Science of Booze

“Carbon dioxide has its own flavor, which affects the overall taste of a drink. (At high partial pressures—which is to say, when a gas contains lots of CO2 relative to other gases—it also sets off the body’s pain receptors, called “nociceptors.” One trick almost every distiller I visited tried to play on me was to get me to stick my head into the vat during the final stages of fermentation, when the headspace—the volume of air above the liquid—is a cloud of CO2. Taking a whiff is like sticking a knitting needle up your nose. Too much of it, and you can pass out and fall right into the vat. Fun!)”
― Adam Rogers, Proof: The Science of Booze

“Now, champagne is pressurized to six times the atmospheric pressure on earth at sea level, enough to propel a popped champagne cork faster than 30 miles an hour. Lesson: letting the cork shoot out of a bottle when you open it is both tacky and dangerous.”
― Adam Rogers, Proof: The Science of Booze