Alcohol is a gift from God

July 29, 3:24 PMChicago Drinks ExaminerCharles Cowdery

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Guido Reni, Drinking Bacchus, c. 1623.

Beverage alcohol occurs in nature. That is how humans found out about it. It is why alcoholic beverages occur so early in antiquity.

Some scientists speculate that beverage alcohol made civilization possible, because without modern sanitation it was the only way large numbers of people could share the same water supply.

We have no idea when humans first drank alcohol because when the first evidence of civilization appears in places such as Mesopotamia and Egypt, alcohol is already there.

It probably went like this.

Early humans first learned, by observation, the conditions that produced alcohol, then duplicated and, ultimately, improved them. If you bring together fruit and water in conditions that allow the water to dissolve the fruit sugar, roving yeast will soon find it and make alcohol.

In the Pacific islands where sugar cane is native, the challenge was learning how to harvest and use the cane’s sweet juice before it fermented naturally.

Even in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the Caribbean Sugar Islands were developing, one of the biggest challenges there was preventing fermentation until the most valuable crystallized sugar could be drawn off.

A slightly bigger leap was discovering that you could do the same thing with grain, if enough of it was in the earliest stage of germination, i.e., malting. There again, mix malted grain with water and you will soon have alcohol. Not much intervention is required.

The rest of it was figuring out how to make the resulting beverages taste good. The most recent development was learning how to concentrate the alcohol through distillation.

Today, because most beverage alcohol is produced using massive industrial processes, it is easy to think of it as something unnatural, but it’s not. Beverage alcohol is older than the wheel. Humans may even have started to drink it before we were recognizable as humans.

There are many good reasons to avoid alcohol consumption, especially for some people, but “humans were never intended to drink” is not one of them. Nature gave drink to us and all but put it in our mouths.

Thank you.