INTRODUCTION:

A JOLLIFICATION

Don’t tell the social services, but when my siblings and I were children, our parents allowed us to drink a tiny glass of low-alcohol cider with Christmas dinner. It was a once-a-year treat that made the day even more special. We lifted our glass and Dad gave a toast to deceased family members. Then we sipped the sweet sparkling juice knowing that we were participating in a ritual. Even back then I preferred the cider with the pork rather than turkey. A nascent sommelier!

My three wonderful maiden great-aunts used to throw jollifications when the extended family would gather for singing, laughter, and maybe a jig fuelled by something stronger than lemonade. An abiding memory is what fun it all was when people congregated and had a drink. They relaxed, laughed, told jokes, sang, acted daft, and everyone felt the warmth of companionship.

I have always been fascinated by the story behind alcohol—how it is made, the effect it has, the cultural history, and its central role in so many societies. This led me to found an events business called School of Booze. I host tutored beer, cider, wine, whisky tasting events for private groups, appear as a public speaker, and recreate libations from historic eras. My passion is beer and I am an accredited beer sommelier, which if you like beer is one of the most enjoyable things a person can do!

When it comes to the urge for a drink, necessity is the mother of invention. In my experience the greatest example of this is the nomads of Mongolia (and other central Asian countries) who roam around the steppes in search of pasture for their animals. These people would not know what to do with a piece of fruit or a vegetable as they do not stay anywhere long enough to grow anything to eat or supply ingredients to make hooch with. So what do they do when the nearest off-licence may be hundreds of miles away? They drink airag (also known as kumis) which is made from fermented horse’s milk.

Horses play a central role in their society and so does airag as an important part of the daily diet. A nineteenth-century book celebrating the nutritional and health qualities of airag referred to it as ‘milk champagne’. In Mongolia airag is also distilled into a clear spirit called shimiin arkhi. At around 12 per cent ABV it has a bigger kick than its low alcohol sibling. Fermentation is easy to achieve when airborne yeast cells land on the milk and ferment the sugars, but milking the mare is a little trickier. A foal suckles its mother’s teat to start the milk flow and then a milkmaid moves in with a bucket, wraps an arm around the mare’s hind leg and starts milking. I can vouch for the fact that airag tastes similar to yoghurt with a sour flavour and slight tingle on the tongue because I spent some time in Mongolia. My hosts offered me a drink and, well, it would be rude not to. They passed a bowl, the size of a heavyweight boxer’s fist, full of a pale thin liquid. With all eyes on me I accepted it and smiled as I tucked in, trying to avoid the horse hairs floating around on the top, and finished the entire serving. Little did I know that in Mongolia if you eat and drink everything served up, it means you want more.

This book is dedicated to the peerless British boozer and is a guide to what’s behind the bar. If you’ve ever wondered how your favourite drink is made, then this is the book for you. It also includes highlights of the history of some of the most popular alcoholic beverages with compelling pieces of trivia to tell your mates, where else, but down the pub.

It’s not the whole story, just an overview because alcohol is such a vast subject it would not all fit into a book that could be lifted without dislocating the back. The content is unapologetically British-centric. When I mention Britain it is sometimes shorthand for England, Wales and Scotland even if it refers to the time before the Act of Union 1707. Sorry, Scots, I do know that Scotland was an independent country before then. I also refer to some historic regions or principalities by their modern geographic locations in Germany or Italy.

The majority of alcohol’s history took place before humans developed writing, so historians rely on archaeology if the evidence exists, or assumptions. And the nature of intoxication means that contemporaneous accounts cannot always be trusted. If repeated enough times ale house legends become their own truth and I found many such examples during my research. This will come as no surprise but there is so much rubbish on the Internet! Juicy tales about alcohol are copied from one website to another without any fact checking. This is particularly true of the provenance of a beer style called India Pale Ale. Most sites that mention it contain incorrect information. For the true story, and other beer-related topics, the best source is historian Martyn Cornell, who writes books and a blog called Zythophile and meticulously researches his subject.

Books I really enjoyed reading for research were: Drink by Iain Gately (Gotham Books); Uncorking the Past by Patrick McGovern (University of California Press); Intoxication by Ronald K. Siegel (Park Street Press), and Beer and Britannia by Peter Haydon (Sutton Publishing).

Alcoholic drinks all have their own personalities. They also instil certain attitudes or expectations in their tipplers. These are my collective nouns for the imbibers of some popular libations:

Beer: a conviviality

Champagne: a vivaciousness

Wine: a civilisation

Whisky: a kilter

Absinthe: a sorcery

Mezcal: a mariachi

Brandy: a night-cap

My Dad, Bill, was a great raconteur who enjoyed Scotch whisky with a drop of room-temperature water to open it up. ‘No need to drown it,’ he would say. In honour of Bill, here is a limerick he taught me:

On the chest of a woman from Sale

Was tattooed the price of ale

And on her behind

For the sake of the blind

Was the same information in Braille

Bottoms up!