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

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

Author: Visit Amazon's Amy Stewart Page | Language: English | ISBN: 1616200464 | Format: EPUB

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

Amazon.com Review

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, March 2013: Peppered with fascinating facts and well-chosen anecdotes, Amy Stewart’s brisk tour of the origin of spirits acquaints the curious cocktail fan with every conceivable ingredient. Starting with the classics (from agave to wheat), she touches on obscure sources--including a tree that dates to the dinosaur age--before delving into the herbs, spices, flowers, trees, fruits, and nuts that give the world’s greatest drinks distinctive flavors. Along the way, you’ll enjoy sidebars on bugs in booze and inspired drink recipes with backstories that make lively cocktail party conversation. Like Wicked Plants, this delightfully informative, handsome volume isn’t intended as a complete reference or DIY guide, but it will demystify and heighten your appreciation of every intoxicating plant you imbibe. --Mari Malcolm

Review

"Amy Stewart has a way of making gardening seem exciting, even a little dangerous." —The New York Times

"Many boozy books have been published over the years, spilling over with fun facts about absinthe, grog and bathtub gin. What makes Stewart's book different is her infectious enthusiasm for the plants, their uses, their history, and the botanists who roamed the earth finding them. The result is intoxicating but in a fresh, happy, healthy way." —USA Today

"The Drunken Botanist is a sipping book, not a quaffing book, best enjoyed in moderation...Part Ripley’s Believe It or Not, part compendium on the order of 'Schott’s Original Miscellany' and part botanical garden tour, albeit with a curated cocktail party at the end.... a companionable reference and whimsical recitation of historical-botanical trivia, with a little tart debunking." —The Washington Post

"Sipping an evening cocktail while flipping through this fine volume, I discovered that Ms. Stewart knew how to change a run-of-the-mill cocktail into an intriguing one." —The Wall Street Journal

"A book that makes familiar drinks seem new again…Through this horticultural lens, a mixed drink becomes a cornucopia of plants." —NPR's Morning Edition

"Fascinating, well researched and instructive — with appealing recipes too." —Rosie Schaap, New York Times

"Gardening can be an intoxicating hobby, especially if the botany is booze-related." —The Associated Press

(Review)

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Product Details
Table of Contents
Reviews

Hardcover: 400 pages
Publisher: Algonquin Books; 1 edition (March 19, 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1616200464
ISBN-13: 978-1616200466
Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 6.1 x 0.9 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)

Plants soak up CO2 and sunlight and convert it to sugar and exhale oxygen. When sugar is combined with yeast, alcohol is born. So alcohol is very a very close cousin to the substances that make life possible. Yeast is plentiful in the air, which I didnt know, so many staple foods will turn to alcohol with time. I am not a drinker, but I am a gardener, and I am nosey. So I found this encyclodedic book to be delightful reading.

Stewart does a thorough job of describing the the various plants that form the basis of the alcoholic drinks in the world. She adds a few myth busters such as the fact that a worm in mescal actually just means a marketing tool for cheap mescal and is not remotely hallucinogenic. Good cider is made from apples so sour they are called spitters. Gin is actually flavored vodka. These are not spoilers, there are many such facts. In addition, she feeds my garden soul with the history of how these plants were found, mutated, grown, etc. And she points out which plants have very toxic relatives which look remarkably like the good cultivers so these you should not pick in the wild.

She addresses the taste of each type of drink, how they taste, and how to make a cocktail with each type. And for us clueless types, she describes the "top shelf" specimens and what makes them premium. SHe also explicates the appropriate mixers and herb additives and how these came into popular use. The drink recipes seem intriguing as well. I especially enjoyed the nuggets of social history that accompany the text, for example the extreme creation of the slave trade to harvest the sugar so vital for rum.

I enjoyed reading this book. It is more a collection of essays or entries than one narrative.

Oh, Amy Stewart, you've done it again!! Previously, in Wicked Plants and Wicked Bugs, we learned how potentially benign gifts of nature can be our deadly undoing. That made us all much more cautious and caused all sorts of stress and worry. And, how did we cope and calm down? We had a simple and refreshing libation. Now, in The Drunken Botanist, we learn that our basic alcohol over ice with a dash of whatever and a splash of something and a sprig for a picturesque finish is not so simple after all. It's wrought with geography and history and botany and chemistry and politics and enough complexity to make one wish for simpler days of temperance and Prohibition. Well, that may be taking it too far, but it's at least enough to cause one to quickly sit down, pour oneself a drink, grab this book, and ponder what to do next!

It's always best in arenas of the unknown to start at the beginning and that is exactly what The Drunken Botanist does. To understand and appreciate the book is just like making a cocktail. Part I enumerates the plants that are used to make the basic varieties of alcohol. You quickly learn that there are almost an unlimited number of results of fermentation or distillation. What you get usually is dependent upon plant availability, geography, or tradition. What you do with your basic alcohol (aging, etc.) can then produce the next range of products.

Moving on to Part II, we now start adding various herbs and spices, flowers, trees, fruit, and nuts and seeds to our "basic" alcohol. This is how we get to that whole range of liqueurs, crèmes, fruit-this and nut-that. I'm particularly intrigued by the origins and history and varieties of gin. I've long said that there should be a museum of gin.

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