Preface. This is a book review of “A short history of Drunkenness” by Mark Forsyth.

I expect alcohol to be a big part of life postcarbon not only because most cultures have embraced alcohol, but to drown the sorrows and memories of the time when we lived likes Gods & Goddesses during the brief oil age. Those of you who survive The Great Simplification may find brewing a good way to make a living. 

Taxation of alcohol is also how governments pay for wars, elites grow rich, and a large role in many religions:

There is, in the Western world, no tradition of religious drunkenness. But it is a practice found across history and across the globe. From Mexico to the Pacific islands to Ancient China there is or has been drunken mysticism, god found at the bottom of a bottle.

The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. It is in fact the great exciter of the Yes function in man. It brings its votary from the chill periphery of things to the radiant core. It makes him for the moment one with truth. Not through mere perversity do men run after it. To the poor and the unlettered it stands in the place of symphony concerts and of literature. The drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic consciousness.”

Alice Friedemann    www.energyskeptic.com   author of 2021 Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy best price here; 2015 When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity, XX2 report

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Mark Forsyth. 2018. A Short History of Drunkenness: How, Why, Where, and When Humankind Has Gotten Merry from the Stone Age to the Present.

Drunkenness

Drunkenness is near universal. Almost every culture in the world has booze. The only ones that weren’t too keen—North America and Australia—have been colonized by those who were. And at every time and in every place, drunkenness is a different thing. It’s a celebration, a ritual, an excuse to hit people, a way of making decisions or ratifying contracts, and a thousand other peculiar practices. When the Ancient Persians had a big political decision to make they would debate the matter twice: once drunk, and once sober. If they came to the same conclusion both times, they acted.

History books like to tell us that so-and-so was drunk, but they don’t explain the minutiae of drinking. Where was it done? With whom? At what time of day? Drinking has always been surrounded by rules, but they rarely get written down. In present-day Britain, for example, though there is no law in place, absolutely everybody knows that you must not drink before noon, except, for some reason, in airports and at cricket matches.

All we know for sure is that if a male fruit fly has his romantic advances spurned by a cruel and disdainful female fruit fly, he ups his alcohol consumption dramatically. Unfortunately for animals, alcohol doesn’t occur naturally in large enough quantities to allow for a proper party.  Though sometimes it does. There’s an island off Panama where the mantled howler monkey can feast happily on the fallen fruit of the astrocaryum palm (4.5 percent ABV). They get boisterous and noisy, and then they get sleepy and stumbly, and then sometimes they fall out of trees and injure themselves. If you adjust their alcohol intake for bodyweight, they can get through the equivalent of two bottles of wine in thirty minutes. But they are a rarity.

What happens if you give a whole colony of rats an open bar? Actually, they’re rather civilized. Though not for the first few days, when they go a bit crazy, but then most of them settle down to two drinks a day: one just before feeding (which the scientists refer to as the cocktail hour) and one just before bedtime (the nightcap). Every three or four days there’s a spike in alcohol consumption as all the rats get together for little rat parties.  Rat colonies usually have one dominant male, the King Rat. The King Rat is a teetotaler. Alcohol consumption is highest among the males with the lowest social status. They drink to calm their nerves, they drink to forget their worries, they drink, it seems, because they’re failures.

Load a couple of barrels of beer onto the back of a pickup truck, drive to somewhere near the elephants, take the lids off and let them have a sip. There’s usually a bit of jostling and the big bull elephants take most of it. But you can then observe them stumbling around and falling asleep and it’s all rather amusing. Even this, though, can go wrong. One scientist who allowed a dominant bull to get a bit too pissed found himself having to break up a fight between a soused elephant and a rhino. Usually, elephants don’t attack rhinos, but the beer makes them quarrelsome.

On the following morning monkeys who drank were very cross and dismal; they held their aching heads with both hands and wore a most pitiable expression: when beer or wine was offered them, they turned away with disgust, but relished the juice of lemons.  If, Darwin thought, man and monkey both react the same way to hangovers, they must be related. This wasn’t his only proof, but it was a start in proving that bishops were primates.     From the New Yorker: In “Descent of Man,” Darwin states, “Many kinds of monkeys have a strong taste for . . . spirituous liquors.” And he cites the reported effects of the monkeys’ being exposed to strong beer—“cross and dismal . . . aching heads . . . a most pitiable expression”—as suggestive evidence for the evolutionary affinity between humans and primates. “These trifling facts prove how similar the nerves of taste must be in monkeys and man, and how similarly their whole nervous system is affected”—by alcohol.

Humans are designed to drink. We’re really damned good at it. Better than any other mammal, except maybe the Malaysian tree shrew. Never get into a drinking contest with a Malaysian tree shrew; or, if you do, don’t let them insist that you adjust for bodyweight. They can take nine glasses of wine and be none the worse for it. That’s because they’ve evolved to survive on fermented palm nectar. For millions of years evolution has been naturally selecting the best shrew drinkers in Malaysia and now they’re champions. But we are the same. We evolved to drink. Ten million years ago our ancestors came down from the trees. Why they did this is not entirely clear, but it may well be that they were after the lovely overripe fruit that you find on the forest floor. That fruit has more sugar in it and more alcohol. So we developed noses that could smell the alcohol at a distance. The alcohol was a marker that could lead us to the sugar.

Alcohol has led us to our food, alcohol has made us want to eat our food, but now we need to process the alcohol; otherwise we’ll just become food for somebody else. It’s hard enough to fight off a prehistoric predator when you’re sober, but trying to punch a saber-toothed tiger when you’re five sheets to the wind is a nightmare.

So now that we’d acquired the taste, we needed—evolutionarily—to develop a coping mechanism. There is one quite precise genetic mutation that occurred ten million years ago that makes us process alcohol nearly as well as a Malaysian shrew. It’s to do with the production of a particular enzyme that we started to produce. Humans (or the ancestors of humans) were suddenly able to drink all the other apes under the table. For a modern human, 10% of the enzyme machinery in your liver is devoted to converting alcohol into energy.   From the internet: Once alcohol has entered your bloodstream it remains in your body until it is processed. About 90-98% of alcohol that you drink is broken down in your liver, the other 2-10% is removed in your urine, breathed out through your lungs or excreted in your sweat.  The average person will take about an hour to process 10 grams of alcohol, which is the amount of alcohol in a standard drink. So if you drink alcohol faster than your body can process it, your blood alcohol level will continue to rise.

Benjamin Franklin, Founding Father of the United States, famously observed that the existence of wine was “proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy.  He also made a significant observation about human anatomy: To confirm still more your piety and gratitude to Divine Providence, reflect upon the situation which it has given to the elbow. You see in animals who are intended to drink the waters that flow upon the earth, that if they have long legs, they have also a long neck, so that they can get at their drink without kneeling down. But man, who was destined to drink wine, is framed in a manner that he may raise the glass to his mouth. If the elbow had been placed nearer the hand, the part in advance would have been too short to bring the glass up to the mouth; and if it had been nearer the shoulder, that part would have been so long, that when it attempted to carry the wine to the mouth it would have overshot the mark, and gone beyond the head…

Most of the early drinks wouldn’t so much have been invented as discovered. A pleasant theory involves bees. Imagine a bees’ nest in the hollow of a tree. Then there’s a storm, the tree falls over and the nest is flooded with rainwater. So long as you have roughly one part honey to two parts rainwater, fermentation ought to kick in pretty soon.   More prosaically you simply need to be picking and storing fruit somewhere reasonably watertight. The juice at the bottom will start to bubble and pretty soon you’ll have a very primitive wine. For that you would probably need pottery. More importantly you need to remain in the same place for a while, and all of the evidence suggests that our ancestors were mostly on the move.

It looks like there was beer, and, importantly, it looks like there was beer before there were temples and before there was farming. This leads to the great theory of human history: that we didn’t start farming because we wanted food—there was loads of that around. We started farming because we wanted booze. This makes a lot more sense than you might think, for six reasons. 1) beer is easier to make than bread as no hot oven is required, 2) beer contains vitamin B, which humans require if they’re going to be healthy and strong. Hunters get their vitamin B by eating other animals. On a diet of bread and no beer, grain farmers will all turn into anemic weaklings and be killed by the big healthy hunters. But fermentation of wheat and barley produces vitamin B. 3) beer is simply a better food than bread. It’s more nutritious because the yeast has been doing some of the digesting for you.

From NPR: Charlie Bamforth, a professor of brewing sciences at the University of California, Davis. Though it’s been blamed for many a paunch, it’s more nutritious than most other alcoholic drinks, Bamforth says. “There’s a reason people call it liquid bread,” he says. Beer, he says, has more selenium, B vitamins, phosphorus, folate and niacin than wine. Beer also has significant protein and some fiber. And it is one of a few significant dietary sources of silicon, which research has shown can help thwart the effects of osteoporosis. 150 calories in your typical, 12-ounce serving of 5 percent-alcohol beer. A 12-ounce bottle of 9.6 percent has 300 calories, 200 from the alcohol.   

4) beer can be stored and consumed later, 5) the alcohol in beer purifies the water that was used to make it, killing all the nasty microbes.  6) The biggest argument is that to really change behavior you need a cultural driver. If beer was worth traveling for (which Göbekli Tepe suggests it was) and if beer was a religious drink (which Göbekli Tepe suggests it was), then even the most ardent huntsman might be persuaded to settle down and grow some good barley to brew it with.

And so in about 9000 BC, we invented farming because we wanted to get drunk on a regular basis.

Cities are the result of farmers working too hard. In fact, history is the result of farmers working too hard. If you have a job that doesn’t involve food-production (and you’re alive), that means that somewhere there’s a farmer producing more food than he needs. The second that happens you get specialized jobs, because ultimately you’ve got to be providing something to the farmer in exchange for the food, whether it’s clothes or housing or protection or accountancy services.

The sure sign of agricultural surplus is that there are populated places that produce no food at all. Such places are called cities, inhabited by citizens. The Latin for citizen was civis, and from that we get the words civil and civilization. When we give the farmers something in return, it’s called trade, and trade causes disputes, and the people who solve these disputes are called the government. The government requires money to spend on important things like thrones, armies and fact-finding trips. And because it’s terribly hard to remember who’s paid their tax and who hasn’t, tax requires writing. Writing causes Prehistory to stop, and History to begin.

Everybody drank beer. Kings drank it on their thrones. Priests drank it in temples.

There was a myth that civilization had only come about through beer. The story went that Enki, the god of wisdom, had sat down with the goddess of hanky-panky, whose name was Inana. At the time, humans had no skills or knowledge. So it came about that Enki and Inana were drinking beer together in the abzu, and enjoying the taste of sweet wine. The bronze aga vessels were filled to the brim, and the two of them started a competition, drinking from the bronze vessels of Uraš. Long story short: Inana wins. While Enki is passed out drunk, she steals all the wisdom from heaven and takes it down to earth. When Enki wakes up, he notices that all the wisdom is missing and throws a fit, but by then it’s too late.

The most famous Sumerian myth of all, The Epic of Gilgamesh, starts with a wild man called Enkidu who lives among the animals like a Mesopotamian Mowgli, until a priestess of Inana turns up and tries to make him human. She does this by having sex with him, and then giving him a drink (not the usual order).

SUMERIA: So now we sit down at a table and the beer is brought to us in an amam jar, along with two straws. Beer has to be drunk through a straw. This is because Sumerian beer is not like our lovely modern clear amber nectar. It’s a sort of fizzing barley porridge with lots of solid stuff floating on the surface. A straw lets us go below the surface and suck out the sweet liquid. There are lots of representations of Sumerians doing this, and people still do it with palm wine in parts of central Africa.

RELIGION AND ALCOHOL

There is, in the Western world, no tradition of religious drunkenness. But it is a practice found across history and across the globe. From Mexico to the Pacific islands to Ancient China there is or has been drunken mysticism, god found at the bottom of a bottle

The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. It is in fact the great exciter of the Yes function in man. It brings its votary from the chill periphery of things to the radiant core. It makes him for the moment one with truth. Not through mere perversity do men run after it. To the poor and the unlettered it stands in the place of symphony concerts and of literature;

The drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic consciousness,

The Greeks didn’t drink beer, they drank wine; but they watered it down by a ratio of about two or three parts water to one part wine, which made it almost exactly the same strength.  The Persians drank beer; that made them barbarians. The Thracians drank undiluted wine; that made them barbarians. The Greeks were the only people who had it just right, according to the Greeks.

It’s rather intriguing that the Greek god of wine and the Egyptian goddess of beer were both said to arrive from the exotic south with a dancing menagerie of humans, animals and spirits, but it’s probably just a coincidence.

The myths about Dionysus mostly fall into two categories. (1) There are the stories of people who don’t recognize him, and don’t even realize that he is a god. Who these people are varies from pirates to princes, but their fate is usually the same. Dionysus punishes them by turning them into animals. The moral of the stories is reasonably clear. When you’re dealing with wine you need to remember that you are dealing with something powerful, something divine. This is no ordinary drink. It is holy. Moreover, alcohol, if you’re not careful, can bring out the beast in you.

The only fully human friends Dionysus had were the maenads. Maenads were women who worshipped Dionysus. They did this by going out into the mountains wearing next to nothing and getting very, very drunk. Then they would dance and let their hair down and rip animals to pieces in a sort of terrifying Arcadian hen party. Nobody is quite sure whether maenads ever actually existed, or whether they were just a sexual fantasy of Greek men, like the Amazons.  The maenads, though, were terribly important in the second type of Dionysus myth.  Dionysus didn’t like teetotalers. This is unsurprising for a god of wine, but Dionysus being Dionysus he tends to kill them cruelly. The most famous example is a play by Euripides where the King tries to outlaw maenadism so Dionysus makes his maenads believe that the King is a lion and they rip him limb from limb (the group is led by the King’s mother). There’s another story about Orpheus wandering the countryside. His wife has died and he wants to have a good cry. Unfortunately, he comes across a group of maenads who are all getting plastered and want him to join in. Orpheus politely declines and they rip him limb from limb as well.

There are a lot of stories like this and they all end the same way. The moral is pretty clear: you should recognize that drinking is dangerous and that it might turn you into a wild beast, but you should still drink. Never turn down an invitation to a party.

CHRISTIANITY. Paul notes that people were getting drunk at communion. He has to point out that communion is for drinking, not for getting drunk, which must have come as something of a shock to the Corinthians. Once you start to look for it, you find this problem a lot in early Christianity. The poor apostles were going out preaching the good news of a new religion that required you to drink wine. And people seem to have got the wrong impression. The Acts of the Apostles opens with Pentecost and the Holy Spirit descending upon the Christians, who proceed to speak in tongues. The people in the crowd that gathered: asked one another, “What does this mean?” Some, however, made fun of them and said, “They have had too much wine.” And poor St. Peter has to jump up and explain: Fellow Jews and all of you who live in Jerusalem, let me explain this to you; listen carefully to what I say. These people are not drunk, as you suppose. It’s only nine in the morning! When you think about it, the drink would have made a perfect stick with which to beat early Christianity. It would be so easy to caricature this strange new sect as a group of drunkards, a Jewish version of the cult of Dionysus, that it would be surprising if pagans didn’t do this.

Greek drinking

Plato, quite specifically, says that getting drunk is like going to the gym: the first time you do it you’ll be really bad and end up in pain. But practice makes perfect. If you can drink a lot and still behave yourself, then you are an ideal man. If you can do this in company, then you can show the world that you are an ideal man, because you are displaying the great virtue of self-control even under the influence. Self-control, said Plato, was like bravery.

A chap who spends his days fighting battles can train himself to be brave. A man who spends his evenings getting drunk can train himself to ever higher levels of self-control.

Let us say that you were a lady in classical Athens and you wanted to get drunk. You couldn’t. Women weren’t allowed at symposiums. Or, to be more precise, women might be allowed but not ladies

So it was the men who gathered, and they gathered at somebody’s private house. Not at a bar. For a typical symposium you might have a dozen chaps over. A really large one might be up to thirty fellows, but that was unusual. First, you had supper. This was a plain meal that was consumed pretty quickly and pretty silently. The food was not the thing—it was only really there to soak up the wine. Arranged in a circle around the room were couches with cushions on them. The men would lie down on the couches with a pillow under one arm. Young men, though, were not allowed to lie down.

It may then have been necessary to choose a symposiarch—the leader of the evening’s drinking. This would almost always be the host, whose first job was to choose the wine. Usually, this would be from his private estate as most Athenian gentlemen would own a vineyard, indeed the class system in Athens was built around how big your vineyard was. The lowest level was 7 acres or less; the highest had over 25.  If it was summer, the wine would have been cooled by lowering it into a well, or burying it.

At a symposium you got deliberately, methodically and publicly drunk. Everybody was given a bowl of wine. Everybody had to drink their bowl of wine before there’s a refill. Just as the guests at a symposium didn’t get to choose how much they drank, so they didn’t get to choose what they talked about, or indeed if they talked at all. The symposiarch would name a subject and then each guest in turn would have to give their opinion on it.  Each guest is meant to launch into a long and detailed answer.

There would be none of the free flow of conversation that we associate with a drinking session, and no opportunity simply to remain silent.

A game that Athenians played at symposiums was called kottabos. You took the last few drops of wine in your drinking bowl and tried to flick it at something. Sometimes a special bronze target would be brought in and everyone would flick their wine at it. Sometimes the target was a bowl floating in a pot of water and your aim was to sink it. Sometimes the target was a person. It all sounds rather messy, and old people used to complain about it and say that young men should be doing something constructive instead.

For sensible men I prepare only three kraters: one for health (which they drink first), the second for love and pleasure, and the third for sleep. After the third one is drained, wise men go home. The fourth krater is not mine any more—it belongs to bad behavior; the fifth is for shouting; the sixth is for rudeness and insults; the seventh is for fights; the eighth is for breaking the furniture; the ninth is for depression; the tenth is for madness and unconsciousness.

ROMAN EMPIRE

Early Rome was a very stern and sober place. In the days of the high republic (we’re talking about 200 BC–ish), they were all clean-shaven, short-haired militaristic types. Drunkenness was frowned upon. Sternly. It was associated with the long-haired, bearded, luxurious Greeks, whom the Romans were busy defining themselves against.

The Roman Empire was, in essence, a system whereby the entire wealth of the known world was funneled back to one city. This produced possibly the wealthiest city that the earth has ever known. Money corrupts and huge amounts of money are huge amounts of fun. The result, as every schoolboy learns, was decadence. Roman men started enjoying wine more than water. Then they even let their womenfolk try some. Then they finally read some Greek books and realized they were rather good. And then they thought they’d give homosexuality a go, and that was a big hit. By the time you got to the mid-first century AD those stern senators of 186 BC would have been turning in their graves.

So how did you get in on the fun? The problem with Roman money was that, though there was an awful lot of it, it arrived at the very top of society and flowed down. If you wanted a bit of wealth and wine, you had to find yourself a patron, somebody to sponge off. This sounds horribly parasitical, and in a sense it was, but it was all out in the open. There were patrons with money, and there were dependents with flattery. Everyone knew what was going on. So long as you were prepared to sell your dignity, you got paid in good food and wine. The central component of the system was a banquet called the convivium. Not everybody liked the system. The poet Juvenal asked: “Is a dinner worth all the insults with which you have to pay for it? Is your hunger so importunate, when it might, with greater dignity, be shivering where you are, and munching dirty scraps of dog’s bread?” And most people said yes.

The Roman convivium was not about being convivial. The Roman convivium was all about showing off, and about asserting who was on the top and who was right down at the bottom. You are not here to have fun. You’re here to learn your place, to applaud those above you, and to sneer at those below you. This was accomplished through seating, slaves, quality of wine, quantity of wine, food, what the wine was served in and where that was thrown.

The dining room contained one big table. One side was left empty as that was the side where the slaves, those endless crowds of slaves, served the brimming platters, and took away the empties. The other three sides had a couch each, and each couch held three people, lying down, because the Romans liked to drink horizontally. Looked at from the slaves’ point of view, the couch on the right was for inferior guests, with the least honored guest nearest to you. That corner of the table, diagonally opposite the host and his friend, could be covered with inferior food and inferior wine for the clearly inferior guest. If you’re there, you weren’t really welcome, you certainly weren’t honored. The host is telling you that he doesn’t give a galley-slave’s cuss about you. And you still have to say thank you. That’s the point of the convivium.  

The whole house is crawling with crawling slaves. They had to crawl, or they got whipped. Hosts would whip their slaves in front of their guests as a demonstration of power.  

The monks of the Dark Ages, indeed the people of the Dark Ages, needed booze because the alternative was water. Water requires a well-maintained well, or preferably an aqueduct, and that requires effective organization and government and all the things that the Dark Ages are not best known for. In the absence of these, your best source of water is the nearest stream, and for most of us, those who don’t live high in the mountains, that is a murky prospect.

Water drawn from the nearest stream was barely transparent. It was liable to contain creeping things, whatever they were—worms or leeches. One Anglo-Saxon book recommends a cure for swallowing creeping things: immediately drink some hot sheep’s blood. This tells us two things: (a) water was disgusting; (b) people did nonetheless drink it sometimes. Sometimes you had to, you were thirsty and you could afford nothing better. The standard Anglo-Saxon attitude to the subject is summed up in Abbot Aelfric’s dictum: “Ale if I have it, water if I have no ale.

Wine, continued Aelfric in a wistful tone, was way too dear for the average English monk. Instead, the standard ration was a mere gallon of ale a day (and more on feast days).

THE VIKINGS

Most polytheistic religions have one chief god, and then a god of drunkenness/wine/brewing, etc., somewhere on the side. Enlil was superior to Ninkasi; Amun to Hathor; Zeus to Dionysus. The drunken god turns up, causes some fun and chaos, but is always subject to the wiser ways and greater powers of the chief god, who usually has a beard. You don’t need to be the sharpest theologian to interpret this as drunkenness having to find its niche within society, its little spot where it can be tamed and controlled. But with the Vikings the chief god is the drunk god. The chief god is actually called “the drunk one.” There is no other Viking god of alcohol. It’s Odin. That’s because alcohol and drunkenness didn’t need to find their place within Viking society, they were Viking society. Alcohol was authority, alcohol was family, alcohol was wisdom, alcohol was poetry, alcohol was military service and alcohol was fate.

There were only three kinds of Viking booze.  There was wine which was immensely expensive and almost nobody could get hold of it. The next drink down the pecking order was mead, fermented honey, sweet and reasonably expensive. Almost everybody almost all the time just drank ale, which was much less expensive. Their ale was probably slightly stronger than ours at about 8 percent ABV.

If you wanted to set yourself up as a lord, you needed to build a mead hall, even if all you ever served in it was ale. You still called it a mead hall for appearances’ sake. Your mead hall could even be quite small—some were only about 10 by 15 feet. Others were huge, a hundred yards in length. In Beowulf when Hrothgar wants to become a mighty king, he builds Heorot, the biggest mead hall that anyone has ever seen, filled with pillars and gold.

The mead hall makes you a lord because the very first duty of a lord is to provide booze to his warriors. This was the formal way in which you showed your lordship. And conversely, if you went to somebody’s mead hall and drank their mead, you were honor-bound to protect them militarily.

Alcohol was, literally, power. It was how you swore people to loyalty. A king without a mead hall would be like a banker with no money or a library with no books.

You also needed a queen, because, strange as it may seem, women were a rather important (if a trifle subjugated) part of the mead hall feast. Women—or peace-weavers as the Vikings called them—were the ones who kept the formal footing of the feast going, who lubricated the rowdy atmosphere and provided a healthy dose of womanly calm. They were in charge of the logistics of the sumbl, which was the Norse name for a drunken feast. They may even have enjoyed the beginning of the evening, the first three drinks which were to Odin (for victory), to Njord and Freya (for peace and good harvest), and then the minnis-öl, the “memory-ale” to spirits of ancestors and of dead friends.

There’s a funny kind of Viking frost-cup that archaeologists call a funnel glass. That’s because archaeologists aren’t poets. A funnel glass is about 5 inches tall and is shaped just as you might imagine it, which means that it can’t be put down on a table. It would just fall over. This is quite deliberate as the idea is to make you down your whole drink in one. This was immensely important to the Vikings as downing drinks made you a real man. This was also the purpose of the more traditional drinking horn: to test your virility by reference to your ability to swallow.

There’s a story about Thor (the god of warfare and hammers) and Loki (the god of mischief). Loki challenged Thor to drink a horn of ale. Thor, who could never resist a challenge, accepted and Loki had a horn brought to the table and told Thor that a real man could down it in one. Thor grabbed the horn, put it to his mouth, and drank, and drank, and drank, and, when he could drink no more, the horn was still almost full. Loki looked disappointed and said that a normal chap might need to do it in two. So Thor tried again, and again his godlike drinking had almost no effect. Loki murmured that a weakling could do it in three. Same thing happened. This left Thor feeling rather ashamed and effeminate, until Loki revealed that he had tricked him, and that the other end of the horn was connected to the sea. Thor had drunk so much that he had brought the whole level of the world’s oceans down, and that, according to the Vikings, was the origin of tides.

Along with the drinking competitions, Vikings did an awful lot of boasting. This was not seen as a bad thing. A Viking chap was meant to boast. He was meant to recount all of his great rapacious deeds. And then another Viking was meant to outdo him. These boasts were not quick one-liners either. They were long affairs that waxed poetic and lyrical. It was a big, formal occasion, much like a modern rap battle, or so I am informed. Moreover, your boasting was in deadly earnest. You were expected to stand by anything you said, whether it was a claim of something you had done in the past, or of something that you were merely planning on. There was no possibility of excusing yourself the next morning by saying, as we would, that that was just the drink talking.

It was a viciously violent society, a hall full of warriors who are being forced to drink much too quickly, ceremonial bragging and insulting, and they’re all carrying swords. The result of all this can best be summed up in the Viking/Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf, where the poet is trying to explain just what a wonderful man Beowulf was. He lavishes praise on him, and the highest praise of all is that Beowulf “never killed his friends when he was drunk”.

There’s a lovely mythical creature called the Heron of Oblivion (I’ve no idea why) that was said to come down and hover over the sumbl until everybody dozed off. Nobody went home. You stayed in your lord’s mead hall until you could stay awake no longer and then you lay down on a bench or a table or whatever you could find and you fell fast asleep.

SWEDEN

There was, apparently, an eighth-century Swedish king called Ingjald who invited all the neighboring kings to his coronation. When the bragarfull came round, he swore to enlarge his kingdom by half in every direction. Everyone drank. Everyone got drunk. The Heron of Oblivion did his restful work, and when everyone else was asleep, Ingjald went outside, locked the doors and burned down his own mead hall with all the other kings in it. I’d like to say that that was a one-off, but it wasn’t. There are a fair few accounts of burning down mead halls with everyone in them. There’s even one of a queen doing it to her husband, which seems fair.

ENGLAND

Taverns sold wine. Wine, because it had to be imported, was very, very expensive. Taverns were for wealthy men who wanted to splash a bit of cash, which meant that they were almost all in London. It also meant that taverns could have a rather degenerate side. This is where you’d find prostitutes and gamblers because, by definition, if you could afford wine you could afford other sinful luxuries.

Shakespeare, I’m pretty sure, was a wine-drinker. His works have over a hundred references to wine and sack, and only sixteen to ale.

In England in the year 1200 there was no such thing as a pub. Villages simply did not have drinking establishments. This may seem strange. Imagining England without a village pub is like imagining Russia with no vodka (there was, at this time, no vodka in Russia; but we’ll come to that in another chapter).

There were no pubs, because there was no need for pubs. Everybody was drinking at work. Often it was part of the pay. A carter, for example, might expect to have 3 pints and some food thrown in with his wages. When a lord employed laborers to work his land, he had to give them some booze. Medieval Englishwomen and children also drank. Water was still pretty dangerous, and only for the very poor.

Not that people got drunk. A few pints spread out over the course of a hard day’s toil in the fields won’t do that. But it will nourish you. Ale is, after all, liquid bread. People drank in church as well. The medieval village church was not so much a place of worship as a community center (with some worship thrown in on Sundays).   Opportunities to cadge booze in church were neither few nor far between.

A husband would expect his wife to cook and clean and look after children, and brew, and spin. Spinning wool into cloth and brewing ale had the added advantage that they could make you extra money. A wife would weave the cloth to clothe her husband, and, if there was any left over, she could sell it. This was almost the only way that the average medieval single woman could get an income. And it was so common that an unmarried woman is, to this day, called a spinster. 

A woman who brewed would be called a Brewster. A woman who brewed for profit could also be called an alewife. Medieval ale had a very short shelf life. It would go off after two or three days. So when an alewife had brewed more than her family needed, she would put up an ale stake above her front door. This was just a horizontal stick with a sprig of bush tied to the end. She would put the barrel outside her house, and sell to passersby who would turn up with a flagon and some pennies. They could then stroll off and drink it at work, at their own home or in church.

That’s how things were all the way up to the beginning of the 14th century. Then several things happened at once. First, people stopped drinking in churches. This was not because they didn’t like drinking in church, but because the church didn’t like people drinking in it.

Once upon a time, a nobleman employed people to till his fields. But in the 14th century noblemen decided that it was simpler just to rent plots of land out to the peasants and let them farm it for themselves. This meant that any peasant who didn’t have a good alewife now had to go and buy ale, which was good news for alewives. Thirsty laborers would show up after work, they wanted ale, but they also wanted somewhere to sit down and drink it. So alewives started to let people into their kitchens. Thus the pub was born.

Finally, beer was invented. Throughout this chapter I’ve been talking about ale, which was made with barley and water. It was not a very pleasant substance. Nutritious? Yes. Alcoholic? Yes. Tasty and pure and fizzy and refreshing? No. It was a sort of sludgy porridge with bits in it. The only way to make it taste nice was to flavor it with herbs and spices—horseradish was a favorite. But you were trying to disguise the taste. Trying to make something vile into something drinkable. Then hops arrived. When you add them to ale you get beer.

Most people much preferred the taste of hoppy beer. And beer had one other massive advantage over ale: it didn’t go off. You could keep beer for a year or so and, as long as the barrel was well sealed, it would still be good. Because of this, beer could be mass-produced. In every major town, breweries were set up which could produce lots of lovely beer that could then be sold to all the local alehouses (they continued to be called alehouses, long after the awful sludgy porridge had been forgotten).

The breweries could filter the beer and make a much better product.

Let us suppose that we are travelers sometime around the end of the 15th century. To find an alehouse we’d look for an ale stake. Pub signs (and by extension pub names) don’t come in until the 1590s.  The ale bench, which, as you may have guessed, was a bench just outside the door where, in fine weather, you could sit and drink in the sunshine. It’s also quite possible that we’ll spot some people playing games—bowls was a favorite—and betting on them. The door will be open. This was a legal requirement, except in the depths of winter. The idea was that any passing authority figure should be able to see inside an alehouse and thus check that nothing naughty was going on, while also not having to sully themselves by actually going in.

One of the great advantages of visiting an alehouse was that there was usually a fire blazing away. Many medieval peasants simply couldn’t afford such a luxury in their own homes. One of the first differences we’ll notice from a modern pub is that there is no bar. Countertop bars, the sort of thing we know and love, don’t actually come in until the 1820s. This place doesn’t look like a pub. It looks like somebody’s kitchen, which is basically what it is. There’s a barrel of beer somewhere in the room. And there are a few stools and benches, perhaps a trestle table or two. But the total value of the furniture isn’t more than a few shillings. We are in somebody’s house, but it’s public.

The person whose house we’re in is almost certainly a woman.  There’s also a good chance that she’s a widow. Running an alehouse was still one of the only ways that a woman could make money, and, in the days before pensions, alehouse licenses would be granted to widows out of pity. It was that or she would have to throw herself upon the parish, which the parish found inconvenient.

Women usually went to alehouses in groups. A woman on her own might be talked about. A group of respectable matrons, though, was in the clear. People also went on dates to alehouses. If a couple were known to be courting, then going out for drink was considered perfectly normal and respectable.

Alehouses were only for the poorest in society. Even moderately well-off people like yeoman farmers were still drinking at home. The alehouse was a place of escape. Servants came here for the same reason as lovers; it was what anthropologists call the Third Place. It wasn’t work, where you have to obey your boss, and it wasn’t home, where you have to obey your parents or your spouse. That’s also why the place is full of teenagers. Medieval England was an edenic place where there were absolutely no laws about underage drinking.

Not that people will actually get that drunk, unless it’s a Sunday. Just as we think of Friday night as the standard time for drinking, the medievals liked to get sloshed on a Sunday morning. This makes a lot of sense, if you think about it, as you get to be buzzed all day. But it does mean that there is a permanent war between the alehouse and the church for attendance on a Sunday morning. A war that the alehouse tended to win.

The standard greeting for a stranger arriving in an alehouse was “What news?” In the days before newspapers and even television, travelers were the main way to find out what was going on in the world. Who was king? Were we at war? Had we been invaded? Alehouses actually developed a rather bad reputation for spreading absolute lies. In 1619 the whole of Kent was sent into a panic by the news that the Spanish had taken Dover Castle; and, very curiously, the alehouse drinkers of Leicester heard the news of Elizabeth I’s death forty-eight hours before it happened.

AZTECS

But if drinking was so very, very illegal, how did it have such a central place in Aztec culture? And it did. They had gods of drinking. Several of them. Mayahuel, who was the goddess of the agave plant, was said to have married Patecatl, who was the god of fermentation. Mayahuel had 400 breasts, which was probably fun for Patecatl, but was also useful because she gave birth to 400 divine little rabbits, the Centzon Totochtin. The reason that there were 400 of them is that the Aztecs counted in base twenty. Four hundred is twenty squared and so the number had much the same place in their culture that 100 (ten squared) does in ours.

So, to recap, booze is ferociously forbidden and punishable by death. Booze is ubiquitous. Booze is revered and central to the culture and religion. Booze is legal for the elderly. This combination has left historians somewhat confused, and indeed inclined toward a quick dose of teonanacatl, the Aztec hallucinogen of choice that was entirely legal. There is, though, a theory that makes sense of all this. Anthropologists who study drunkenness draw a distinction between what they call “wet cultures” and “dry cultures.” In wet cultures people are terribly relaxed about alcohol. They sip it all day and have a terribly pleasant time, and very rarely get properly, falling-over drunk. Dry cultures are the opposite. They aren’t dry in the sense of being alcohol-free; they’re called dry because people are very wary of alcohol and have strict rules about when you can’t drink it. Then, when it is permitted, they get trollied.

But on the day of a religious festival—for example, one devoted to the 400 drunken rabbits—they got absolutely hammered. They got apocalyptically and religiously drunk, and, like the Ancient Egyptians and the Ancient Chinese before them, they used alcohol to give them an experience of the divine. And then for the rest of the month they didn’t drink at all.

It was the relaxation of the rules and the disorientation of society produced by Christianity which pushed the conquered to perpetual pulque.

The people of Zumbagua in Ecuador drink in order to communicate with ancestral spirits, and, indeed, believe that when you drink so much that you throw up, the vomit becomes food for the ghosts of the dead. To this day there is a phrase in Mexico: “As drunk as 400 rabbits.

DISTILLING

Ancient Greeks definitely knew about distilling over 2,000 years ago, but there’s no evidence that they distilled alcohol. Instead, they wasted their invention on producing drinkable water.

You start to get, in the 15th century, mentions of distilled alcohol being used as a medicine in very small doses.

James IV of Scotland bought several barrels of whisky, or aqua vitae as it was called, from a monastery in 1495.  A hundred years later, there was one bar in England—just outside London—that served aqua vitae. It was still a novelty drink that most people would never even have heard of. And then, in the second half of the 17th century, western Europe went crazy for spirits. The French suddenly got into brandy.

Come the Restoration, the English aristocracy stampeded back from France with a newfound taste for all sorts of funny newfound drinks: champagne, vermouth, and brandy. These became the drinks of the nobility.

Gin became popular in England for four reasons: monarchy, soldiers, religion and an end to world hunger. Some historians would add “hatred of the French,” which makes five. First, monarchy. King William III liked gin because he was Dutch and all Dutch people liked gin. Second, soldiers. Dutch soldiers liked gin for two reasons. Because they were Dutch and because gin infused Dutch soldiers with a peculiar form of bravery, which to this day we refer to as Dutch courage. Third, during this period European countries were constantly going to war with each other, usually on a Protestant vs. Catholic basis. England and Holland were both Protestant, so English soldiers fought alongside the Dutch, and drank alongside the Dutch, and came home with a hangover and a taste for gin. Gin was thus soldierly and Protestant. Fourth, an end to world hunger. From time immemorial, and probably before, every country in the world had had a problem with Bad Harvests. In a normal year farmers produced just enough grain to feed everybody. They didn’t produce any more than that, because they wouldn’t be able to sell it. Every so often, though, you got a year with a Bad Harvest. When this happened there wasn’t enough grain to go around, and farmers were not in the slightest bit upset. A funny aspect of the economics of farming is that a Bad Harvest means less grain; less grain means higher grain prices; these higher prices mean that farmers made just as much money from a Bad Harvest as they did from a good one, and it was less work.

William III thought he had this problem solved. Gin is made out of grain, and the quality of the grain doesn’t particularly matter. Once the stuff has been fermented and distilled, you can’t taste the difference. Therefore, if he could make gin popular in England he would produce a great big market for excess grain during normal years; and that meant that when a Bad Harvest came round there would be an excess to cover it. It might not be the highest-quality excess, but it would be edible. Thus he could end starvation forever.

But to do so he’d have to make gin really, really popular. To do that, you’d have to make gin more readily available than beer. You’d have to make it completely tax-free and unregulated and let anybody who wants to start distilling distill. Also, you’d have to ban the import of French brandy.

Where did a poor Londoner actually go to get gin? And when? And from whom? And the answer is absolutely everywhere. To set up shop you went to a distiller and got a gallon or so, distilled it a second time to make it even stronger, and added flavorings like juniper, turpentine, or sulfuric acid, whatever you liked.  Many drank way too much  and died.

Gin arrived in England in the 1690s and by the 1720s the streets of London were full of unconscious drunks who had sold their clothes for gin, so authorities tried to cut consumption by taxing it and requiring a license, which people ignored.

AUSTRALIA

Lord Sydney had a utopian idea of what Australia would be – hard work, fresh air, nature and no alcohol or money. But the sailors refused to sail without booze. And home-brewing began on day 1 of the convict ships arrival, mainly rum.  The sailors sold rum to the convicts at a markup of 1200 percent.

The economy was a bartered one with work exchanged for food or other goods.  Most of the population were convicts doing forced labor, to get them to do a speck more than they were expected to do you had to offer them something.  And that was rum, which greatly enabled the Governor to control the colony as a measure of social control.  Rum was the one and only lever of power.

The British government was not all OK with this and sent the famous Captain Bligh of mutiny on the bounty to dry out Australia as the next Governor and get rid of the militia who controlled the rum trade. He began by confiscating the stills of Captain John Macarthur, the richest man of the colony, and took him to court as well.  When he showed up, the jury cheered him, as did the hundreds of soldiers gathered outside the courthouse. He was absolutely furious, and ordered Major Johnston to get his men under control, but Johnston replied saying the was sorry, he’d been so drunk the night before he’d crashed his carriage, so couldn’t intervene.  Later that day, Johnston arrested Bligh and took control of the Colony.  Effigies of Bligh were burned in the street and had a roasted sheep and rum BBQ to celebrate.

So the government sent a new Governor called Macquarie who took control by realizing everyone was a crok and outcrooking them all.  He began by asking for exclusive rights to import rum for 3 years in exchange for a new hospital, and so began Australia’s health care system.

AMERICA

In 1979 George Washington own the largest distillery, producing 11,000 gallons of whisky a year, and after handing out free booze to voters, won his first election.  His military success came from doubling his men’s rum rations.   

Although Hollywood usually has just one giant saloon in the center of town which forces the hero and villain to confront each other, in real life there were many saloons in a town, so many they might not bump into each other.  The doors were solid, not swinging, and instead of a large room, bars were narrow, with the bar usually on the left, usually with a large mirror that lets those at the bar see anyone approaching them from behind. Although there are bottles of wine and crème de menthe, no one orders them. Everyone’s drinking whiskey and beer, though mainly whiskey. Another odd thing is that no one every asks how much drinks cost or gets change, because everyone knows the charge. It’s one-bit (about 12 cents) at the poor saloons, and two-bits at a fancier one with floor shows and a chandelier.

It’s mainly white men. A black man might be tolerated, native americans banned by law, and most unwelcome were the Chinese.  Respectable women never went into a saloon. Many weren’t for rent, why do that when you could earn $10 a week chatting with lonely men? At the back the card game would be faro, not poker, a very simple game of pure chance and easy to cheat at.

Prohibition was meant to get rid of saloons, which were perceived, especially in the Midwest, as the root of many evils.  Husbands drank their salaries, beat up their wives, died young.  Saloons were places decent women didn’t go, though the gals that were there often weren’t prostitutes but paid in whiskey (actually cold tea) to talk to men.  Saloons always had a bar on the left with a mirror behind it, and a brass rail with spittoons for every 4 people at the bottom, and no swinging doors like in the old westerns.  Horses were parked outside in huge piles of poop, since naturally while their owners drank, they pooped.  In a one-bit saloon, you plopped down a bit (12.5 cents, so really a quarter and had two drinks).  Or most often you bought someone else a drink, and the favor would be returned later by a newcomer.

Prohibition succeeded in getting rid of saloons.  That was its purpose, not stopping all alcohol, and Germans and other ethnic groups that made beer and wine weren’t worried about it.  But then the Vollmer act defined alcoholic beverages as anything over half a percent.  So for 13 years the U.S. lost the skills to make wine and beer or even whiskey well and it took 50 years to recover.  Speakeasies were quite unlike saloons, pretty much anything from someone’s living room where pasta might also be served, to the movie versions of New York city.  And women went too, unlike saloons.   

Russia

Traditions there were good at getting everyone to drink, a toast was made and all were expected to participate.  Ivan the Terrible began this in the 1500s to use drunkenness as a form of political control. Scribes attended who wrote down what everyone said while drunk, and read to him in the morning, with punishments handed out. He started state-run drinking to get as much tax money as possible. While most countries try to limit the crimes, riots, broken homes and health of drunkards, Russia was too keen for the revenue to discourage drinking in any way.

In 1914, Tsar Nicholas II outlawed vodka. In 1918 he and his family were executed. These two facts are not unrelated. It was poorly timed too, WWI was beginning and a quarter of all revenue came from taxes on alcohol.  And being sober the population could see what their government was doing to them. Today in Russia nearly a quarter of all deaths are related to alcohol.

Stalin ruled with terror and drunkenness.  He’d invite his politburo to dinner and make them drink and drink and drink, which they couldn’t refuse to do.  At one dinner there were 22 toasts before any food arrived.  He would tap out his pipe on Kruschev’s bald head and order him to do a Cossack dance. He loved to push one of the commissars into a pond.  But Stalin was mainly drinking water himself.  He did this to humiliate them, to set their tongues against each other, and make it hard to plot against him.  Even Peter the Great was known for forcing drinks on others. If he caught someone not drinking, they were forced to drink 1.5 liters of win in one go.  The head of Peter’s secret police had a tame bear who would offer guests a glass of vodka and attack if refused.