Dangerous Drinking (Part 1)
Clever Primates Discover Distillation
One of the greatest foci of human ingenuity and concentrated effort over the past millennia has been the problem of how to get drunk. Even small-scale societies on the brink of starvation will set aside a good portion of their precious grain or fruit for alcohol production. In contemporary societies, people spend an alarming proportion of their household budgets on alcohol. This desire to get mentally altered has ancient roots, ones that can be traced to the very beginnings of civilization. And, although our taste for booze has typically been dismissed as an evolutionary accident, a closer look at history and the relevant science suggests that it actually helped catalyze the rise of civilization.
For most of our history, however, alcohol has come with two built-in safety features that have limited the danger it presents to both individuals and societies. Here I’ll discuss the first: natural limits to strength of fermented beverages.
Alcohol (or, properly speaking, the compound ethanol) is a natural by-product produced by yeast as they munch their way through the sugars contained in starches or fruit. Yeast are naturally resistant to alcohol, but even the hardiest yeast cannot tolerate much more than 16% ABV (alcohol by volume). This is why naturally fermented alcoholic beverages top out at this level. In practice, and for most of history, the beers and wines we have had at our disposal have been much weaker than this, with most beers, for instance, hovering around 2–3% ABV. The alcohol-tolerance of yeast has historically set an upper bound on the potency of brew available to us.
Very recently, however, this safety feature has been disabled.
Clever primates annoyed with wimpy yeast maxing out at 16% ABV came up with a workaround: distillation. Conceptually, distillation is elegant and simple. Take a beer or wine — essentially, a mixture of water and ethanol — and heat it. Ethanol is more volatile than water, which means it will boil off first. If you can figure out some way to capture that alcoholic vapor and cool it back down into a liquid, voilà, you’ve got yourself some more or less pure booze. Break out the shot glasses.
In practice, distillation is both fiendishly difficult to pull off and rather dangerous — exploding home stills and scalding liquids were Prohibition-era America’s equivalent of contemporary meth lab disasters. This is why, although the basic principles of alcoholic distillation were laid out as far back as Aristotle, humans did not gain widespread access to distilled liquors until around the thirteenth century in China and the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries in Europe.
For a species whose ability to consume and process alcohol can be traced back at least 10 million years up the evolutionary tree, this is basically yesterday, and represents an evolutionarily novel danger. Distillation is what makes it possible for almost anyone, anywhere in the industrialized world, to walk into a corner store and emerge a few minutes later with a truly insane quantity of alcohol tucked into a small brown paper bag. A couple bottles of vodka contain a dose of ethanol equivalent to an entire cartload of pre-modern beer.
The availability of such concentrated intoxicants is something our ancestors never had to deal with, and ethanol in this concentration something our bodies are ill-equipped to process. The take-home message should be: approach distilled spirits with extreme caution.
Edward Slingerland is Distinguished University Scholar and Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia, and the author of Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization.
