The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks

by Amy Stewart

  The Greeks used the word kykeon, meaning “mixture,” to refer to a strange beverage that combined beer, wine, and mead. In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus’s crew was drugged with kykeon by Circe, a sorceress who turned them into pigs. Greek and Roman mead-making traditions spread throughout Europe, but Africans had their own methods as well. The Azande tribe in north-central Africa made mead, and in Ethiopia, a kind of mead called tej, or t’edj, is still widespread. The recipe calls for about six parts water to one part honey. After a few weeks of fermentation, usually in a pottery or gourd vessel, the drink achieves the alcohol content of wine and is ready to drink. It is sometimes flavored with the bitter leaves of a buckthorn shrub (Rhamnus prinoides), or with khat (Catha edulis), a leaf that is chewed as a mild stimulant. And in sub-Saharan Africa, tamarind or other fruit would be added to the mixture of honey and water to create an even sweeter drink.

  In Paraguay, the Abipón tribe simply mixed honey and water and waited a few hours, which produced a mildly alcoholic beverage fermented on wild yeast. The Sirionó of Bolivia added honey to a gruel of corn, manioc root, or sweet potato, which fermented for a few days until it became as strong as beer. Even early Americans made their own kind of mead, a murky, dark concoction that settlers said was so strong it made them hear the bees buzz.

  Today’s high-quality meads have a bright, floral flavor that is sometimes enhanced with fruit, herbs, or hops to change the character of the drink. A beer and mead hybrid called braggot is made by some craft brewers; Beowulf Braggot from Dogfish Head Brewery is one such example. Although mead can be distilled into a stronger spirit (sometimes called honeyjack), it’s not commonly made. Hidden Marsh, a distillery in Seneca Falls, New York, makes its Bee Vodka from honey; it is surprisingly smooth, with only the slightest hint of sweetness. But the best true honey flavor can be found in a German liqueur called Bärenjäger, which even comes in a bottle with a beehive-shaped cap.

  DATE PALM

  Phoenix dactylifera

  arecaceae (palm family)

  In 2005, an archeologist in Israel had a simple but stunning idea: why not try to germinate the two-thousand-year-old date palm seeds that had been sitting in storage? While old seeds from archeological excavations had been sprouted before, nothing this old had ever been resurrected. But date palms produce what botanists call orthodox seeds, which means that they remain viable long after they have thoroughly dried. (The opposite of an orthodox seed is a recalcitrant seed, which can only be sprouted while fresh and damp. Avocados, for instance, produce recalcitrant seeds.)

  This particular ancient seed came from an excavation at Masada, in Israel, where Jewish Zealots committed mass suicide in 73 AD rather than submit to Roman rule. The seed had been found at that site and stored carefully away until the day archeologists decided to sprout it. If plants could act surprised, this one certainly would have been startled to awaken, after a nearly two-thousand-year slumber, in a modern greenhouse, housed in a plastic pot and fed by drip irrigation. This particular variety of palm, called a Judean date palm, went extinct around 500 AD, making it even more astonishing that the plant was resurrected from the dead. Its caretakers are still waiting to find out if they have sprouted a boy or a girl; they hope for a girl so they can sample a long-vanished fruit.

  Date palm fruit is a staple of Mediterranean, Arabic, and African cuisine. Date palm wine, however, comes not from the fruit but from the sugary sap of the tree. This is an ancient drink, depicted in Egyptian paintings dating back to at least 2000 BC. The process to make it has not changed much over the millennia. To get the sap flowing, the tree is tapped, usually by inflorescence decapitation, which is the technical term for cutting off a flower. In some cultures, an elaborate ritual of bending, twisting, beating, kicking, and otherwise abusing the flower precedes its decapitation. All of this leads to a more productive flow of sap.

  Other palm tree species, including the coconut tree (Cocos nucifera), are tapped for their sap throughout Asia, India, and Africa, and for each tree there is a different technique. Sometimes the tree is cut down entirely. Sometimes a hole is cut in the trunk at the very top of the tree, bringing it to the verge of death and sometimes killing it. And in many cases, the tree is simply scraped or punctured as a maple tree would be.

  Once the sap is collected, it can be used as a sweetener or cooked into a block of sugar called jaggery. If left alone, it begins to ferment almost immediately, thanks to wild yeast in the air and on the gourds used to collect it. Within hours, a sweet, mild, alcoholic beverage is ready to drink. The fermentation can continue for a few more days, which allows the alcohol content to rise slightly, but the yeast eventually give way to bacteria—and a bacterial fermentation yields vinegar, not wine. At some point during the fermentation the drink reaches the perfect balance of alcohol, sweetness, and a mild acidity, and at that moment it must be consumed at once. Don’t go looking for date palm wine in a liquor store; it won’t keep long enough to bottle it. The wine can also be distilled into a stronger spirit, sometimes called arrack, which is a general term referring to spirits made from sugary sap.

  In West Africa alone, over ten million people enjoy date palm wine—but unfortunately, humans aren’t the only ones who love it. In Bangladesh and India, fruit bats visit the gourds and drink the fresh sap that is collecting there. The bats carry a serious disease called Nipah virus, which they can leave behind in the date palm sap. This has been responsible for transmitting the virus from bats to humans. The solution? Health-care workers are scrambling to find a way to tap the date palm without letting the bats have a sip.

  JACKFRUIT

  Artocarpus heterophyllus

  moraceae (mulberry family)

  The jackfruit may be the largest fruit from which an alcoholic beverage is made. It grows to three feet in length and can weigh as much as a hundred pounds. The fruit’s strange, rubbery exterior is covered in spiky, conelike structures, each of which represents a spent flower. Inside, there is a seed for every flower that once bloomed on its surface: as many as five hundred seeds can come from a single jackfruit. When ripe, the fruit emits a foul odor from the rind, but the flesh is mild and sweet. It flavors desserts, curries, and chutneys.

  The tree, a close relative of breadfruit, grows throughout India, as well as parts of Asia, Africa, and Australia. In India, wine is made by soaking the pulp in water, sometimes with extra sugar, and allowing it to ferment naturally for up to a week, at which point the alcohol content reaches 7 to 8 percent and the drink becomes mildly acidic, but still light and fruity.

  MARULA

  Sclerocarya birrea subsp. caffra

  anacardiaceae (cashew family)

  The marula tree, a close relative of mango, cashew, poison ivy, and poison oak, is native to Africa. Its yellowish white fruit, about the size of a plum, has a flavor similar to lychee or guava. Because it is unusually high in vitamin C, the fruit is an important part of the traditional diet in southern and western African nations. It can be made into wine, also called marula beer, by soaking the fruit in water and allowing it to ferment. It is also distilled and blended with cream to make Amarula Cream, a dessert drink that tastes very much like an Irish cream liqueur.

  Because the tree has, since at least 10,000 BC, served so many purposes in traditional African culture—for food, medicine, rope fiber, wood, cattle feed, oil, and resin—efforts are under way to protect and conserve the marula. South Africa’s spirits manufacturer Distell purchases the fruit from local pickers, providing them a source of income and donating money to community projects. Development experts believe that, with good oversight, the global trade in Amarula Cream can provide an economic incentive to preserve the trees while helping impoverished families.

  The elephant on the bottle of Amarula Cream reminds drinkers of a popular, but widely discredited, story about the marula: that elephants can get drunk by slurping up overripe, fermenting fruit that has fallen from the tree. Drunken elephant stories started circulating around 1839 and continue to
day, with Internet videos purporting to show intoxicated elephants stumbling around.

  But scientists have proven otherwise. Elephants do not pick rotten fruit off the ground; instead, they very deliberately select ripe fruit from the tree. There is also the sheer difficulty in getting an elephant drunk. It would take about a half gallon of pure alcohol, which would require the elephant to rapidly consume some fourteen hundred rotten marula fruits—something no elephant has ever been interested in attempting.

  MONKEY PUZZLE

  Araucaria araucana

  araucariaceae (araucaria family)

  The poet Marianne Moore called it “a conifer contrived in imitation of the glyptic work of jade / and hard-stone cutters, / a true curio in this bypath of curio-collecting.” And in fact, the monkey puzzle tree is a curio, an oddity of the sort prized by Victorian plant collectors. It is also quite likely the oldest plant in the world from which an alcoholic beverage is made.

  Monkey puzzle trees originate in Chile and Argentina. Their ancestry goes back at least 180 million years, placing them squarely in the middle of the Jurassic period. The trees themselves are vaguely reptilian: the tough, diamond-shaped leaves arranged in tight geometric whorls bring to mind the scales of a lizard. Stand back for a better view and the tree cuts an odd figure in the landscape. From a single trunk emerge wildly curving branches that give it the madcap appearance of a tree from a Dr. Seuss drawing.

  A Scottish surgeon and naturalist named Archibald Menzies traveled the world as a ship’s doctor in the late eighteenth century; on one of these voyages, he was served the nuts of the monkey puzzle tree. He managed to save a few seeds and got them to grow, setting off a monkey puzzle craze in the United Kingdom. One of them lived at Kew Gardens for almost a century. There are no monkeys in the tree’s homeland; the name was given to it by the English, who thought that even their so-called poor relations—monkeys—would have a difficult time climbing it.

  The tree reaches over 150 feet in height and can live to be a thousand years old. A monkey puzzle takes twenty years to reach sexual maturity and is dioecious. The pollen travels from males to females on the wind, and once pollinated, the seed cones take two years to mature. By the time they do fall off the tree, they are the size of coconuts and contain about two hundred seeds, each larger than an almond.

  In the wild, rats and parakeets pick up the seeds and disperse them from the mother plant. But if there are people around—particularly the Pehuenche people who inhabit the tree’s native range in the Andes—the seeds will quickly be gathered up. They can be eaten raw or roasted, pounded into flour to make bread, or brewed into a mildly alcoholic ceremonial drink called mudai. To make mudai, the seeds are boiled and allowed to ferment naturally for a few days; to speed things up, they can be chewed and spit back into the mixture, which adds enzymes from the saliva to break down the starches. Once the mixture has stopped bubbling, it is poured into special wooden bowls or jars for the festivities.

  The Chilean government has declared the monkey puzzle tree a national monument, making mudai quite possibly the world’s only alcoholic beverage derived from a national monument.

  PARSNIP

  Pastinaca sativa

  apiaceae (carrot family)

  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 Johnson, 1630

  This historic ditty shows that colonists arriving in the New World were willing to try anything to get their hands on a drink—even if that meant turning parsnips into wine. Parsnips are a carrot relative native to the Mediterranean; they’ve been a staple food since at least Roman times. Before potatoes, a New World crop, were introduced to Europe, parsnips were the starchy, nutritious, winter root vegetable people turned to for a satisfying meal. It’s no wonder colonists made it a priority to plant parsnips when they arrived in New England.

  And surely the colonists were thinking not just of mashed parsnips and butter for their winter meal. They were also thinking of parsnip wine, a fine old English tradition. This is one of many “country wines” that were popular in rural England and throughout Europe. Anything with a little sugar or starch—from gooseberries to rhubarb to parsnips—was fair game for a home brew.

  Traditional parsnip wine was made by boiling parsnips to soften them and then combining them with sugar and water. Wild yeast would start the fermentation. The wine was then stored for six months to a year before drinking. It was light, sweet, and clear, although the best Cassell’s Dictionary of Cookery could say about it in 1883 was that it was “highly spoken of by those who are accustomed to home-made wines.”

  WARNING: DON’T TOUCH THAT

  Wild parsnip is a weed across much of North America and in Europe. Its foliage can cause serious, blistering rashes. The domesticated varieties taste better, but the leaves can still irritate, so always wear gloves around parsnip.

  PRICKLY PEAR CACTUS

  Opuntia spp.

  cactaceae (cactus family)

  The fruit of the prickly pear cactus, called the tuna in Mexico, is not easy to eat. The sharp prickles, or glochids, have to be scraped, burned, or boiled away. The flesh is then either scooped out of the peel and eaten fresh, or pressed into juice. All this effort is entirely worthwhile: the fruit has been an important source of vitamins and antioxidants for centuries. It has also been fermented into wine. The Chichimeca people of central Mexico, for example, traveled to follow the bloom cycle of the cactus and make their seasonal brew.

  Spanish explorers and missionaries realized that the prickly pear cactus was an important food source in the desert, and not just because of its fruit. The fleshy green pads could also be peeled, cut into strips, and eaten as a vegetable, called nopales. Soon the cacti were planted around missions and transported back to Spain, and from there they went around the world.

  The prickly pear cactus was once grouped together with the cholla, but botanists have recently separated them, putting prickly pears in their own genus. About twenty-five species of Opuntia have been identified, and some species, such as Opuntia humifusa, grow not just in the desert but throughout most of the eastern United States.

  Prickly pear juice, syrup, and jam are now widely available, and prickly pear mojitos and margaritas show up on cocktail menus throughout the Southwest. Distillers are working with it as well: a prickly pear liqueur called Bajtra is made in Malta; a distiller on St. Helena distills it into a spirit called Tungi; a prickly pear vodka comes from Arizona; and Voodoo Tiki sells a prickly-pear-infused tequila.

  PRICKLY PEAR SYRUP

  If you’re lucky enough to have access to fresh prickly pears, make a batch of syrup and keep it in the freezer. (Otherwise, prickly pear juice and syrup are available from specialty food retailers.) You can add a dollop to sparkling wine, mix it into a margarita recipe, or experiment with any cocktail that calls for fruit and sugar.

  10 to 12 prickly pear fruits

  1 cup water

  1 cup sugar

  1 ounce vodka (optional)

  Prickly pear fruits sold in markets generally have the spines removed. If you’ve harvested the fruit yourself, handle it with metal tongs, as gloves may not protect you. Use a vegetable scrubber to brush the spines off. Then cut off both ends of the fruit, and make one cut from top to bottom. The skin can then be easily sliced away.

  Chop the fruit roughly, combine with water and sugar, and bring to a boil. Use a strainer to separate the seeds and pulp from the syrup. Store the syrup in a glass jar in the freezer. Adding a little vodka keeps the syrup from freezing solid without significantly changing the character of the drink you make with it.

  PRICKLY PEAR SANGRIA

  Thin slices of fruit: lemon, lime, orange, prickly pear, mango, apple, and so on

  4 ounces brandy or vodka

  2 ounces triple sec or another orange liqueur

/>   1 bottle dry white wine, such as a white Spanish Rioja

  2 ounces prickly pear syrup (see p. 127)

  A 6-ounce split of Spanish cava or other sparkling wine (optional)

  Soak the fruit in the brandy and triple sec for at least 4 hours. Combine the wine and prickly pear syrup in a glass pitcher; stir vigorously and add more syrup if you’d like to deepen the color. Stir in the fruit mixture. Serve over ice; top with cava, if desired. Serves 6.

  THE SPIRITS of the CACTUS FRUIT

  Colonche

  A fermented drink made from the juice or pulp of the prickly pear cactus, Opuntia spp.

  Navai’t

  A fermented winelike drink made from the fruit of the majestic saguaro, Carnegiea gigantean.

  Pitahaya or Pitaya

  A wine made from the fruit of either the organ pipe cactus Stenocereus thurberi or various species of Hylocereus, also known as dragon fruit.

  BUGS in BOOZE: cochineal

  --- Dactylopius coccus ---

  The prickly pear cactus made another important contribution to the world of spirits and liqueurs: carmine dye. The white fuzzy pest found on Opuntia cacti is actually a scale called cochineal. Scale are sucking insects that latch onto a plant and feed off its sap, hiding under a waxy cover that makes them resemble a tick. The cochineal scale are particularly easy to spot because they cover themselves in a fuzzy white material to hide their offspring and protect them from drying out. Underneath that white fluff, the insects secrete carminic acid, a defensive chemical that deters ants and other predators and also happens to be bright red.