BOOK REVIEWS
131
The Drunken Botanist—Plants That
Create the World’s Great Drinks
A m y Stew art
A lgon q u in B o o k s, 2 0 1 3
Amy Stewart’s The Drunken Botanist provides a botanist’s
perspective on the sources, advent, modern practices, and recipes o f the
world’s most populär alcoholic drinks. Other books Stewart has penned
include, Wicked Plants and Wicked Bugs. In The Drunken Botanist, she
proceeds, “in an orderly fashion through the alphabet,” discussing
fermentation and distilling, infusers, mixers and gamishes. She not only
lists the plant and its fermentation process, but also its history, and how
other organisms such as storage, bugs, and bacteria participate. Finally,
she lists terminology, recipes, and in some cases, how to grow the plant
on your own. Each section examines the plant, which is the study o f
botany, and also a host o f other scientific disciplines that reflect the
complexity o f creating alcoholic beverages from plants.
Examples in the fermentation and distilling section include a
revolutionary way to date when certain drinks were first consumed by
humans. The Agave section includes a discussion on botanist, Eric
Callen who first used human feces to date human consumption which
determined that maguey, a beer made from Agave, has been consumed
by South Americans for at least 2,000 years. The discussion also includes
mescaline and its properties, shamanic and otherwise. We leam that by
law, 100% Blue Agave is tequila made in the United States and that
putting worms in tequila bottles is a sales device making such products
substandard.
In the section on grapes, Stewart uses a multidisciplinary
approach to explain wine making, mentioning that fermentation o f grapes
to wine began about the time that pottery was invented and that yeast
from oak trees was first domesticated to make wine. She further explains
the immense importance o f the properties o f oak barreis in the
production o f wine, brandy, and whiskey, bringing chemistry into the
conversation
We leam that apples first appeared after the ice age. Their
genetics are so diverse that it is impossible to get two apple trees with the