The World in a Glass: Six Drinks That Changed History

Tom Standage urges drinkers to savor the history of their favorite beverages along with the taste.

The author of A History of the World in 6 Glasses (Walker & Company, June 2005), Standage lauds the libations that have helped shape our world from the Stone Age to the present day.

"The important drinks are still drinks that we enjoy today," said Standage, a technology editor at the London-based magazine the Economist. "They arc relics(纪念物) of different historical periods still found in our kitchens."

Take the six-pack, whose contents first fizzed at the dawn of civilization.

Beer

The ancient Sumerians, who built advanced city-states in the area of present-day Iraq, began fermenting(发酵) beer from barley at least 6,000 years ago.

"When people started agriculture the first crops they produced were barley or wheat. You consume those crops as bread and as beer," Standage noted. "It's the drink associated with the dawn of civilization. It's as simple as that."

Beer was popular with the masses from the beginning.

"Beer would have been something that a common person could have had in the house and made whenever they wanted," said Linda Bisson, a microbiologist at the Department of Viticulture and Enology at the University of California, Davis.

"The guys who built the pyramids were paid in beer and bread," Standage added. "It was the defining drink of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Everybody drank it. Today it's the drink of the working man, and it was then as well."

Wine

Wine may be as old or older than beer---though no one can be certain.

Paleolithic humans probably sampled the first "wine" as the juice of naturally fermented wild grapes. But producing and storing wine proved difficult for early cultures:

"To make wine you have to have fresh gropes," said Bisson, the UC Davis microbiologist. "For beer you can just store grain and add water to process it at any time."

Making wine also demanded pottery that could preserve the precious liquid.

"Wine may be easier to make [than beer], but it's harder to store," Bisson added. "For most ancient cultures it would have been hard to catch [fermenting grape juice] as wine on its way to [becoming] vinegar."

Such caveats and the expense of producing wine helped the beverage quickly gain more cachet (威望) than beer. Wine was originally associated with social elites and religious activities.

Wine snobbery may be nearly as old as wine itself. Greeks and Romans produced many grades of wine for various social classes.

The quest for quality became an economic engine and later drove cultural expansion.

"Once you had regions [like Greece and Rome] that could distinguish themselves as making good stuff, it gave them an economic boost," Bisson said. "Beer just wasn't as special."

Spirits

Hard liquor, particularly brandy and rum, placated (安抚) sailors during the long sea voyages of the Age of Exploration, when European powers plied the seas during the 15th, 16th, and early 17th centuries.

Rum played a crucial part of the triangular trade between Britain, Africa, and the North American colonies that once dominated the Atlantic economy.

Standage also suggests that rum may have been more responsible than tea for the independence movement in Britain's American colonies.

"Distilling molasses for rum was very important to the New England economy," he explained. "When the British tried to tax molasses it struck at the heart of the economy. The idea of 'no taxation without representation' originated with molasses and sugar. Only at the end did it refer to tea."

Great Britain's longtime superiority at sea may also owe a

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