Mankinds relationship with alcohol

1. Mankind's relationship with
alcohol through the ages
Following mankind's taste for alcohol from eating
fermented fruit through the development of wine and up
the present time of craft beers and botanical gins.

3. Alcohol Through the Ages

4. Drunken monkey
To our fruit-eating primate ancestors swinging
through the trees started eating fermented fruits on
the forest floor.
The ethanol in rotting fruit would have had three
appealing characteristics.
1. First, it has a strong, distinctive smell that makes
the fruit easy to locate.
2. Second, it’s easier to digest, allowing animals to
get more of a commodity that was precious back
then: calories.
3. Third, its antiseptic qualities deterring infectious
microbes that may have made the primates sick.

5. Habituation to alcohol
• Alcohol makes fruit easier to digest, so animals
could eat more of them.
• Our ape ancestors eventually started eating
fermented fruit, and this helped humans adapt to
drinking alcohol.
• However there is not much evidence to suggest our
ape ancestors every got very drunk, as this would
have made them more vulnerable to predators.
• It seems that the feeling of an alcohol buzz might
be unique to humans - and its in our genes.
• Ten million years ago, a gene in the last common
ancestor of ours and apes mutated, allowed us to
digest ethanol up to 40 times faster.

6. Process to produce alcohol
• All alcoholic drinks are made by yeasts - tiny single-
celled life forms that consume sugar and break it
down into carbon dioxide and ethanol.
• There are many different types of yeast, and
they've probably been fermenting fruit for 120
million years - when fruits first arose on Earth.
• Yeasts produce ethanol as a form of chemical
warfare—it’s toxic to other microbes that compete
with them for sugar inside a fruit.
• It explains why beer, wine, and other fermented
beverages were, at least until the rise of modern
sanitation, often healthier to drink than water.

7. Benefits? of alcohol - Arts
• Throughout history, the consumption of alcohol
may have helped people become more creative,
advancing the development of language, art and
religion.
• This is because alcohol lowers inhibitions and
makes people feel more spiritual.
• Many human enjoy drinking alcohol because it
makes us feel good - it releases serotonin and
dopamine in the brain which reduces anxiety and
make us feel happy.

8. Benefits? of alcohol - Nutritional
• During the fermenting of sugar, yeasts make more
than ethanol.
• They produce all kinds of nutrients, including such
B vitamins as folic acid, niacin, thiamine, and
riboflavin.
• Those nutrients would have been more present in
ancient brews than in our modern filtered and
pasteurized varieties.
• In the ancient Near East at least, beer was a sort of
enriched liquid bread, providing calories, hydration,
and essential vitamins.

9. Bread and Beer
• In early civilizations, fermented beverages
were made from whatever wild plants were
available locally and later from
domesticated plants.
• Beer, rather than bread, may have been the
inspiration for our hunter-gatherer
ancestors to domesticate grains.
• Eventually, simply harvesting wild grasses to
brew into beer wouldn’t have been enough.
• Demand for reliable supplies pushed
humans first to plant the wild grasses and
then over time to selectively breed them
into the high-yielding barley, wheat, and
other grains we know today.
Model Depicting the Preparation
of Bread and Beer

10. Chinese wine
• The oldest firm evidence of
an alcoholic beverage comes
from Jiahu, China, where by
7000 B.C. farmers were
fermenting a mix of rice,
grapes, hawthorn berries,
and honey in clay jars.
• Early Chinese emperors had
bronze drinking vessels like
this one, from 1100 B.C.
(right), for sipping rice wine.
• It’s still a popular drink in
China.

11. Chinese rice wine
• A Chinese newlywed toasts
her guests with a
traditional cup of rice wine.
• The drink has been
consumed in China for at
least 9,000 years
• A chemical residue found in
a jar of that age is the
oldest proof of a
deliberately fermented
beverage using rice, honey
and fruit.

12. Ancient beer
• In 4,500 BC, central Asian nomads didn't
have access to crops, so they used
fermented milk from a horse to make a
mild alcoholic beverage.
• Around 3,150 BC, ancient Egyptians used
industrial-scale breweries that the used
to provide beer for the worked who built
the pyramids of Giza.
• In AD 500, Europeans made a fruit beer
from native fruits, barley, honey, wine,
herbs and tree sap.
• In AD 600 Peru made Pepper berry wine
from a red fruit that grows on the
Peruvian pepper tree.

13. Grape wine
• Grapes were one of the earliest fruits
to be domesticated. in Georgia, which
has more than 500 indigenous
varieties.
• The origin of wine grapes can be
traced back to 6,000 BC in the
Caucasus mountains in Georgia and
the Zagros Mountains of Iran.
• Some Georgian white wines look
golden because they're fermented
with the whole grape, including the
skin and stems - which is how red wine
is fermented
• Today, some families in Georgia still
make their own wine.
• They ferment wine in clay jars lined
with beeswax, and the jars are buried
underground up till the neck for
fermentation.
Hollowed out logs called satsnakheli

14. Greek wine at symposiums
• in ancient Greece
symposiums were an all-
male, after-dinner
drinking party.
• Guests drank wine from a
cup called a kylix.
• A drinking master diluted
the wine with water and
filled each cup.
• If he did his job
judiciously, a symposium
might well include
learned conversation.
• Ancient Greek warriors
even grated goat cheese
onto their beer.
kylix from the fifth century B.C

15. Greek wine
Ancient Greek hosts used to serve wine mixed
with water.
1. They served their (only male) guests a
first bowl for health,
2. a second for pleasure
3. the third for sleep. 'When this bowl is
drunk up, wise guests go home,' the
comic poet Eubulus warned in 400 BC.
4. the fourth bowl is ours no longer, but
belongs to violence
5. the fifth to uproar
6. the sixth to drunken revel
7. the seventh to black eyes
8. the eighth is the policeman’s
9. the ninth belongs to biliousness
10. the 10th to madness and the hurling of
furniture.

16. Roman wine
• Winemaking technology
improved considerably during
the time of the Roman Empire.
• Many grape varieties and
cultivation techniques were
developed.
• Following the Greek invention of
the screw, wine presses became
common in Roman villas.
• Grapes are picked by hand and
pressed with a massive oak-tree
trunk.
• The juice was then fermented in
open clay jars

17. Roman wine
• Barrels (invented by the Gauls) and glass bottles
(invented by the Syrians) began to compete with
terracotta amphoras for storing and shipping
wine.
• Wine, perhaps mixed with herbs and minerals,
was assumed to serve medicinal purposes. During
Roman times, the upper classes might
dissolve pearls in wine for better health.
• The Romans flavored it with surprising
ingredients: One of Durand’s wines contains
fenugreek, iris, and seawater.
• Roman warriors drank heavily before battle and
went into battle drunk

18. French wine making
• Massalia (Marseilles) was
founded around 5,500 BC by
Greek immigrants from Phocae
in Asia Minor bringing grape
vines with them.
• By the 2nd century BC, came
under Roman influence as a vital
trading port. Eventually the area
became a Roman province first
known as Provincia (Provence)
• Between100 BC and 100 AD
viticulture started to spread to
other areas of Gaul
• Expansion continued in 300 AD
to places such as Bordeaux in
Aquitania and Burgundy

19. Spread of wine
• In the 1500's the Spanish conquistadors brought Vitis vinifera vines with
them to Chile.
• In 1659, The first vineyard in South Africa was established near Cape
Town
• in the 1700's the Spanish planted vineyards with each mission they
established in California.
• Vine cuttings from the Cape of Good Hope were brought to the penal
colony of New South Wales in 1788.
• In 1836, New Zealand first attempted to produce wine

20. Prohibition
• Throughout history, alcohol has also raised
concerns about its effect on people's behaviour.
• Prohibition in the United States was a
nationwide constitutional ban on the
production, importation, transportation, and
sale of alcoholic beverages that lasted beween
1920 and 1933.
• In the 1920s the laws were widely disregarded,
and tax revenues were lost.
• Very well organized criminal gangs took control
of the beer and liquor supply for many cities,
unleashing a crime wave that shocked the
nation. By the late 1920s a new opposition
mobilized nationwide.
• Prohibition ended in 1933 but some states
continued statewide prohibition.
• Although popular opinion believes that
Prohibition failed, it succeeded in cutting overall
alcohol consumption in half during the 1920s.
• Consumption remained below pre-Prohibition
levels until the 1940s.

21. English Gin
• The first confirmed date for the production of gin is
the early 17th century in Holland. It was produced as
a medicine and sold in chemist shops to treat
stomach complaints, gout and gallstones.
• To make it more palatable, the Dutch started to
flavour it with juniper, which had medicinal
properties of its own.
• British troops fighting in the Low Countries during
the Thirty Years' War were given 'Dutch Courage'
during the long campaigns in the damp weather
through the warming properties of gin.
• Eventually they started bringing it back home with
them, where already it was often sold in chemists'
shops.
• Distillation was taking place in a small way in
England, but it now began on a greater scale, though
the quality was often very dubious. Nevertheless,
the new drink became a firm favourite with the
poor.

22. English Gin
• In 1720's London had over 7,000 shops that sold only
spirits.
• In 1729, an excise licence of £20 was introduced (two
shillings per gallon). In addition, retailers now required a
licence. This almost suppressed good gin, but the quantity
consumed of bad spirits continued to rise.
• The Gin Act was introduced in1736, which made gin
prohibitively expensive. Riots broke out and the law was
widely and openly broken.
• Gin had been known as 'Mother's Milk' from the 1820s
but later in the century it became known as 'Mother's
Ruin'
• In the 1830's the 'gin palaces' appeared about 1830 and
were designed to be an escape from home. As home for
the poor (who continued to be gin's main supporters) was
often a sordid slum, the gin palace was large, imposing
and handsome and even luxuriously furnished.
• By the 1850s there were about 5,000 such palaces in
London.

23. Beer consumption
Munich's Oktoberfest beer festival began in 1810 as
a wedding celebration for the Bavarian crown price.
Today, it's one of the largest festivals with more than
six million visitors per year

24. Alcohol consumption
People in wealthy regions with long drinking traditions, such
as Europe, tend to drink the most. Abstainers are more often
found in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, where laws or
tradition limit consumption.

26. Alcohol consumption (liters/year)

28. Per capita alcohol consumption

30. Further reading