by Robert Evans
The Curious History of Palm Trees and Alcohol
Palm trees are almost enough to make one believe in the existence of a booze-loving God. The bertam palm, favored by the pen-tailed tree shrew, is essentially a living bar. It secretes a constant flow of nectar into hundreds of little flowers during the month and a half when its pollen is ripening. These flowers are colonized by a special sort of yeast, which ferments the nectar immediately. Small animals, like the tree shrew, are drawn by the smell of sugar and the irresistible allure of an open bar.
Visits to the bertam palm tavern benefit both the fuzzy little alcoholics and the tree itself. The tree shrews get open taps to binge on, and the palm gets a small, drunken army to help spread its pollen far and wide. The arrangement is dizzyingly complex: Yeasts feed off sugars in the nectar, and the brewery-like aroma of those fermenting sugars draws in tree shrews, sloths, and other animals. While each bertam palm gives off nectar for only a short time each year, individual members of the species are all fertile at different times throughout the year, ensuring a regular supply of free sugar beer for the sundry lushes of Malaysia.
The bertam palm isn’t the only species of palm tree with a penchant for providing hooch to primates. Phoenix dactylifera, the date palm tree, is believed to be one of humankind’s earliest sources of alcohol. The syrup produced by palm trees is so high in sugar, and the plants themselves so friendly to yeast, that each plant is basically its own self-contained brewery.
Fermenting beer of any worthwhile strength can take two to three weeks, and usually a fair bit longer. Once tapped and exposed to the air, palm syrup can reach 4 percent alcohol by volume (ABV) in just two hours. In parts of Sri Lanka and Malaysia, a lot of “wine” is still prepared this way today. It’s not uncommon for people to drink upward of a liter in a day. This palm wine is nearly always consumed within a day or so of being fermented (evidently the taste doesn’t age well).
I spoke to Dr. Brian Hayden, an archaeologist who’s dedicated much of his life to the noble pursuit of studying ancient humans’ drinking habits. He pointed out that the ease with which palm sap ferments makes it a perfect solution for Muslims who want to drink and still maintain plausible deniability.
“I was working in Northern Africa for a while, and the palm sap they used to sell in the markets . . . well, Muslims aren’t supposed to drink alcohol but this stuff was fermenting as you bought it. Just bubbling away.”
Palm syrup is like the opposite of honey. Humans have used both to make alcoholic beverages since time immemorial. But honey takes a very long time to ferment: Most meads (honey-based wines) take many months to properly prepare. Even modern quick mead, loaded with other fruits to provide the yeast with more easily fermentable sugars, takes a good six weeks to brew. Meanwhile, palm syrup turns into booze almost immediately, but gets only worse with time.
Palm trees clearly want us to get drunk, fast. On the opposite side of things, I imagine bees would be pretty pissed at us if they knew we were turning their precious honey into bad-decision fuel. But the relative difficulty of fermenting honey, and the dangers involved in acquiring it, made honey wine far more prized by ancient drinkers. Palm wine never really took off on a global scale, but you can probably stroll down the aisles of your local liquor store and find mead today.
I can’t help but feel a little sad at that. We’ve forgotten our roots. Primates weren’t introduced to the wonders and terrors of alcohol by honeybees. The bertam palm didn’t exist ten million years ago, but the odds are good that something very much like the date palm tree was one of the earth’s first bartenders.
And just how would its drinks have tasted? Well . . .
HOW TO: Brew Ur-Booze
I’m going to answer the question right now, before we get to a recipe. Ur-booze tastes fucking awful. Unless you’ve got an absolutely unquenchable sweet tooth or a borderline sexual obsession with the flavor of cough syrup, you will not enjoy ur-booze. You’ll struggle to finish a cup of the stuff. But if what I’ve described sounds good, or if you just hate your taste buds, here’s what you’ll need . . .
Ingredients
24 ounces pure organic palm syrup
12 ounces water (optional)
1 packet yeast
1 one-gallon brew bucket and airlock
Finding palm syrup is a little easier said than done. I had hoped to use sugar from a date palm tree, since that seems to have been the first sugar-bearing palm that human beings would’ve hung out around. It was easy to find syrup made from dates, but not from the sap of the tree itself. Part of that has to do with the fact that countries like Bangladesh have banned the sale (or export) of date palm sap due to its tendency to get infected with horrific bat-borne illnesses.
Date palm syrup is harvested in the simplest manner imaginable: Some dude hacks a hole in a tree with a machete, and then hangs a bucket under it to collect the sap overnight. Bats come out at night, and, thanks to rampant deforestation, buckets of free sap are one of the few reliable food sources left to them. So they sup on date syrup and leave some of their own fluids behind in the process. Unfortunately for the sap lovers of the world, those fluids sometimes contain the deadly Nipah virus.
Without going into too much detail, Nipah kills the heck out of people. There’s no vaccine or cure, and local governments have turned to banning palm sap rather than risk deadly outbreaks. So yeah, no date palm sap for us. Thankfully, the date palm and the bertam palm aren’t the only sugariffic species of palm tree on the planet. Southeast Asia and India are home to Caryota urens, which has a very similar and supersugary sap that’s sold as syrup in parts of Oregon and California. You can buy some yourself by Googling “Kandy Mountain.”
Directions
The goal here is to re-create the first, accidentally alcoholic sip a primate ever took. It won’t pay to be fancy. Simply take your palm syrup, pour it into your brew bucket, and add the yeast. I added water to my brew, mainly to wash the extra couple of ounces of syrup out of my bottles. Kandy Mountain’s stuff is expensive, and I didn’t want to waste a drop.
Fermentation should start almost immediately. My batch grew a fizzy, white foamy head within a couple of hours. By that night, the airlock was bubbling like crazy. The yeast did its
work gleefully. Twenty-four hours later, I poured about a half pint of ur-booze into my cup and steeled myself to try it. Even watered down it tasted thick and incredibly sweet, like a lukewarm shot of melted Skittles.
There was alcohol in it, yes, but a very mild amount, 2 to 3 percent. Drinking that half pint made my teeth feel like I’d just chug-chewed a half gallon of OJ mixed with scraps of aluminum foil. It was almost unbearable. Getting drunk off ur-booze would’ve required an act of titanic willpower. But that’s not to say it lacked any positive aspects. The sugar rush was wonderful. I had my first sip late at night, at the end of a tiring day, and within a few minutes of finishing the cup I was up and about, cleaning and organizing my room at a twitchy, manic pace more reminiscent of Adderall than alcohol. (The subsequent sugar crash was as awful as you’d expect.)
I shared the ur-booze with my fiancée, Magenta. She’s got a mighty sweet tooth, and I wanted to make sure this stuff wasn’t disgusting just to my palate. She also found it much too sweet, and couldn’t even drink enough to get that sugar high. I elected to wait and let it ferment for two more days before sharing it with a group of friends.
That didn’t work, either. Out of the six people I convinced to try ur-booze, only one person thought it was palatable, comparing it to a liqueur like Kahlúa. The reaction of my friend and coworker David Bell was more typical:
“I dare you to try and get drunk on this. It has the consistency of what I imagine sperm tastes like, and just a little fizziness. It’s garbage.”
He’s almost right. Straight ur-booze is undrinkable. But there is one delicious use for the stuff, and I’d like to introduce you all to a new cock
tail with a very old ingredient.
The Ur-Ish Coffee
The only test subject who liked ur-booze suggested pouring a shot of it into a cup of hot black coffee. I poured a shot’s worth of ur-booze into a mug of coffee, stirred vigorously, and sipped. Now it was delicious. I don’t prefer my coffee with sugar, but the ur-booze added a pleasant amount of sweetness to a very bitter cup of coffee. It set off the coffee’s natural flavor nicely, and while the alcohol content wasn’t particularly noticeable, the surge of sugar-induced energy mixed well with the caffeine.
Ur-ish coffee isn’t the right drink to start your day with. Alcohol isn’t an early morning thing for most people, and if you are a dawn drinker you’ll get much more buzz for your buck out of a bloody Mary or a traditional Irish coffee. I recommend ur-ish coffee as an early evening drink. Break out a few mugs for you and your friends before heading out to a concert or a bar or any other weekend activity at which you plan on drinking. It gives enough energy to push you through that late-afternoon slump.
Try this recipe for yourself, mix it with coffee for palatability, and take it at the start of a long night of (responsible) drinking. Let the cloying, fizzy sweetness connect you to the first primates who started us down a long and winding road that led, millions of years later, to every glass of craft beer, wine, or fine liquor you’ve ever sipped.
Is music a drug?
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a drug is any substance “which has a physiological effect when ingested or otherwise introduced into the body.” Classifying sound as a “substance” seems sort of iffy at first. But sound waves consist of atoms, which do have mass.
An easier question to answer is: Does sound have a physiological effect on the human body? The short answer is yes. The long answer is everything you read after this point, and it starts with a doctor at Columbia University named Oliver Sacks. He was a pioneer in the field of Musical Drugification. Before his death in 2015, Dr. Sacks used music to treat a variety of patients, including people paralyzed by Parkinson’s disease and kids suffering from ADHD. His work with the latter group is particularly relevant to this book, because the way music actually helps ADHD sufferers makes it seem pretty mind altering.
People with ADHD often have a genetic variant of the normal dopamine receptor in the brain. We’ll read more about this fun little mutation, DRD4-7R, in a later chapter. But for now it’s important you know that DRD4-7R is associated with the sort of people who indulge in more novelty-seeking behavior than most. They’re motivated to try new experiences because their brains don’t reward them with as much dopamine for sitting around and focusing as the brains of people with normal receptors do.
Dopamine is our brain’s carrot on a stick. It’s the neurotransmitter responsible for every feeling of satisfaction in your life. It’s the chemical that brings us the famous rush of victory. People with ADHD can benefit from therapy that trains their brains to release more dopamine when they’re, say, sitting and reading quietly. And, as it happens, music is one way to artificially open up the floodgates of our brain’s dopamine vault.
Two scientists, Valorie Salimpoor and Mitchel Benovoy, headed up a 2011 study published in Nature Neuroscience, which used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machines to confirm that music does trigger dopamine release in people. They noted that subjects experienced intense pleasure and even, occasionally, feelings of craving for their preferred music. How much dopamine are we talking about here? Salimpoor and Benovoy saw increases of around 6 to 9 percent when most participants listened to their favorite jams, which is roughly in line with eating a delicious meal. One participant saw a 21 percent increase in dopamine levels, which is on par with what you’d get from taking a bump of cocaine.
You may not think of listening to your favorite band as getting a fix, but in a physiological sense it very much is. And music isn’t only a drug in the sense that it gets your brain to give up the happy chemicals. In 2004 two scientists with the University of Tsukuba, Japan, Den’etsu Sutoo and Kayo Akiyama, found that Mozart’s music lowered blood pressure in rats with hypertension.
I’m going to guess that those rats weren’t already big fans of Mozart before the study started. Certain rhythms simply interact with the brain in ways that produce measurable physical changes, whether or not the brain in question considers itself a fan of those rhythms. The case for music as a drug is rather strong, even if the effects of a blistering guitar solo on the brain aren’t always quite as pronounced as, say, a needleful of China white.
Whether or not you buy that music is a drug, there’s no arguing with the fact that the right rhythm can alter human consciousness. This means that music would’ve been one of the very first, if not the very first method of intoxication available to early humans. The oldest musical instruments we’ve ever found are around forty thousand years old. Beer brewing, the oldest known form of human intoxicant manufacture, goes back only to about 12,000 to 13,000 BCE. The earliest psychedelic use by humans was either San Pedro cactus or Psilocybe mushrooms back in 8000 or 9000 BCE.
So human beings have been getting high on sound for a very, very long time. And there’s even some evidence that prehistoric people figured out how to build the Stone Age equivalent of a kick-ass sound system to up their dose . . .
Stonehenge: Built for Raves?
Guessing the date of any human construction built by people who didn’t have writing is kind of a crapshoot. Scientists are pretty damn sure Stonehenge was begun sometime between 3000 and 2200 BCE. Eight hundred years is almost a three-United-States-long gap, but that’s downright precise compared with our understanding of exactly why the ’Henge was built in the first place.
The popular theories range from plausible (monument to the ancestors, giant astronomical calendar) to “alien landing pad.” The theory you probably haven’t heard is that Stonehenge was built as a giant sound system. It’s the ancient equivalent of a massive concert hall or, more appropriately for England, a DJ booth in a derelict London warehouse.
Research by scientists from the universities of Salford, Bristol, and Huddersfield suggests that the placement of the rocks within the original Stonehenge would’ve had an acoustic effect easily noticeable to human ears, and thus to the prehistoric Britons who spent their lives slowly hauling it into place. Dr. Bruno Fazenda, a scientist who’s dedicated years of his life to studying Stonehenge’s acoustics, is appropriately cautious about these findings. And when I contacted him, he warned me away from assuming that Stonehenge had any single purpose.
We should assume that Stonehenge was built with Swiss Army pragmatism and the best minds of an ancient people. The resources required to feed and care for the workers hauling those stones would’ve been significant. Five thousand years ago, human society on most of the planet still hadn’t perfected the art of not being eaten by wolves. These practical ancients probably had more than one use in mind for the ’Henge they spent generations constructing.
But if Stonehenge was built, in part, to act as a venue for music, it would explain one of the great mysteries of the monument’s construction. All the smaller rocks at Stonehenge are made of bluestones, or spotted dolerite, which most archaeologists believe were hauled in from nearly two hundred miles away (although one theory gives a glacier credit for most of the moving). There were plenty of big stones much closer than the bluestones. Why would the builders have spent so much effort to seek out those specific stones?
Well, modern acoustic science is starting to unravel what Paleolithic musicians knew from experience. Researchers from the Royal College of Art in London found that many of the bluestones in the Preseli Hills in Wales (the probable origin of the Stonehenge bluestones) have a tendency to ring when hit. The bluestones were even tested by actual percussionists, who were able to use them like glockenspiels. (A glockenspiel is like a xylophone, but German.)
One difficulty in testing any of these theories comes from the fac
t that Stonehenge is a precious cultural artifact, and not something people are generally allowed to hit with sticks. Current law even forbids the use of many kinds of electronics within Stonehenge. Fortunately, there exists in this world a full-scale model of Stonehenge in the United States. It lives at a museum in Maryhill, Washington, and was built at the behest of a millionaire.
Sam Hill—the man, not the old-timey euphemism for hell—spent his career building roads across the Pacific Northwest. He didn’t actually build them; huge teams of laborers did that. But Sam owned the company they worked for, and he got rich enough off the profits that he was able to commission his own damn Stonehenge as a monument. That’s a bellwether of human progress: What was once the labor of generations can now be built at the whimsy of a rich man.
In fairness to Sam, his motivations for building a fake Stonehenge were rather nobler than “upstage those shiftless cavemen.” He wanted to create a monument to the millions of young men who died fighting in World War I. At that point, the prevailing belief was that Stonehenge had been built as a sacrificial altar. In Hill’s mind, World War I was an altar upon which millions had been sacrificed, pointlessly. A full-scale replica of history’s most famous pagan murder shrine seemed a fitting tribute.
Hill’s monument was actually the first memorial to the dead of World War I built in the United States. In reality, there’s very little evidence that Stonehenge was used for human sacrifice. Many people have been buried around the area over the centuries, but only a few show signs of having been executed and perhaps sacrificed. A lot of shit has happened at Stonehenge over the ages, but we can be fairly confident that it wasn’t built with the express intent of acting as a Murdertorium.
