Worldbuilding Beverages: Liquor
This is part three of my "Worldbuilding Beverages" series. Click here to see the whole series!
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This week, we're continuing our exploration of how you can use Tom Standage's History of the World in Six Glasses to inform your worldbuilding. Standage's book, for those of you just joining, takes on a broad overview of the arc of human history from Ancient Mesopotamia to the modern, globalized world, through the lens of six important drinks that impacted human civilization over time. The book is great and very informative, and I strongly recommend that you pick up the book for all the juicy history tidbits that we don't have time for on the blog. The links to the book in this article are affiliate looks for Bookshop.org – every purchase will give me a small cut (at no extra cost to anyone) AND will help support independent bookstores. You can also pick up the book at Amazon or Barnes & Noble or wherever else you get your books.
This week's article will focus on the third section of Standage's book, focusing on the creation of global trade networks with the advent of distilled liquors like rum. We'll talk about what Standage defines as the drink and its associated historical connection, and then we'll delve into how to use liquor as a part of your worldbuilding. I'll also give some examples from my homebrew world as to how I'm using what I've learned from the book.
History: Proto-Globalization
Liquor is our first historical, rather than pre-historical, invented beverage that we're focusing on in the book. Wine and beer were accidental creations, byproducts of storage; distillation is a technique that requires active invention. In Standage's account, even this invention is a form of globalization, at least from the perspective of Europeans. The practice of distillation as applied to alcoholic beverages was an invention of the Islamic world, imported into Europe. Originally seen as a medicinal cocktail, it became widespread as a beverage for simple amusement as the invention of the printing press allowed for the wider distribution of the method.
The earliest liquors were "burnt wines"--distilled wine, as befits the highest prestige drink--which was called brandy-wine, which is where we get the term brandy.
Much of Standage's account of the history of liquors focuses on the role that slavery plays in the development of distillation. Lucrative sugar plantations in Spain and off the Spanish coast were taken from Muslims, but without knowledge of the advanced irrigation practices of the Muslim population, the Christian population turned to enslaving Africans to make the plantations more profitable. Their main commodity, sold to Africans in exchange for slaves, was brandy. As sugar cultivation expanded into the Caribbean, rum became a drink made from the waste products of sugar processing--giving it an even higher profit margin than brandy. Rum also would be sold and consumed locally, as beer and wine would often spoil during the trans-Atlantic voyage. Hardier distilled spirits could better survive the crossing.
So, just as wine is more durable than beer, demonstrating the growth of regional trade networks connecting wine country to other regions, hardier spirits demonstrate a truly global sort of trade that requires alcohol that will not spoil in long crossings.
Rum was also popular in the American colonies for the same reasons. It was more easily transported than wine or beer that might spoil. The relative coldness of America compared to the same latitude in Europe meant that neither wine nor most beer cereal grains could really flourish. What did become popular, after the American Revolution, was bourbon--distilled corn alcohol, because corn could grow well in the Americas after the Revolution.
Non-European Spirit Drinking
Standage returns to talking about non-European consumption patterns, as he did when writing about beer. In Spanish colonies, mescal was created by distilling Aztec pulque--a staple drink of Aztec commoners that Standage wrote more about in the section on beer.
While Native Americans had no pre-contact method of distillation, there was an acknowledgement of the way that many Europeans would manipulate local indigenous populations by getting them addicted to the stronger, more potent liquor. Standage notes that one theory for this susceptibility to alcoholic behavior was that many Native American groups had long traditions of consuming hallucinogenic plants and believed that these allowed the intoxicated individual to access supernatural powers. Europeans, even in their drinking of wine, had a tradition of straddling the line between drunkenness and sobriety (which many people certainly crossed... but these people were seen as "drunkards" and were sometimes socially ostracized, or at least looked down upon at the time). If Europeans tried to straddle the line, while American peoples leapt into drunkenness to access the supernatural, then this cultural difference helps explain why drinking liquor together was so beneficial to Europeans and so detrimental to natives, especially during periods of treaty-making.
In this case as well, however, it is a demonstration of globalization. Mescal, rum, and bourbon are all drinks that grew out of European expansion during the Age of Exploration.
Worldbuilding
Distilled liquor is a drink that we can easily imagine a fantasy world without. I'd argue that most classical pseudo-medieval fantasy worlds should not have liquor.
Could a technologically savvy culture have invented distilled liquor without the whole Muslim world-Christian world connection? Sure. You can do what you want in your own worldbuilding, and Standage's work is not the be-all-end-all of history on beverage development.
But for this series and the purposes of using Standage's work for our worldbuilding, liquor means globalization. You need to have global trade, the printing press, and the combination of those things needs to have been around for enough time for distillation to spread if you want a variety of different liquors. Globalization is the allegory. If you only have one continent, or your largest trade routes are regional--looking at you, D&D 4e's Nentir Vale campaign setting--and if we want to use Standage's framing, then we should not have liquor.
If your world has reached a point of globalized trade networks and the printing press, then you have to decide what beverages exist:
Rum needs sugar, and making sugar sucks. Seriously, sugar cultivation and processing is one of the worst agricultural products to make, which is part of why Europeans were so insistent on slave labor... and why even after the end of slavery in the Haitian Revolution, for example, Toussaint Louverture (the leader of independent Haiti and a former slave himself) still set up compulsory labor practices to force people to work the sugar fields and processing equipment. Producing sugar at the technology level of the pre-industrial world without some sort of oppressive labor practices is hard. So if you don't want to explore those themes (it certainly doesn't have to be slavery, but there's either oppression or magic going on if you have widespread sugar accessible to people beyond the elite), maybe steer clear of rum too.
Brandy? That's safe if you have wine, which we discussed last week.
Whisky? You can essentially have whisky if you're going to have beer because both are made from cereal grains. Corn makes bourbon, rye makes rye, and malted barley (like beer) can make scotch or Irish whiskey. Corn whisky/bourbon is my personal favorite, and so yes I absolutely know who makes bourbon in my world.
Potatoes let you have vodka, another safe grain staple option that can grow in cold regions where bread and beer might not be as available.
If you have agave, you can have pulque for a beer equivalent and mescal and/or tequila as a liquor.
And gin? That's just a mix of grapes (wine), grains like wheat (beer), and herbal elements, most particularly juniper berries (from which gin gets the name).
My World: The Development of Liquor
I've always liked the image of Gnomes as tinkerers. My ancient Gnome civilization, which came before my slowly crumbling imperial Rome parallel, were also masters of water. So I can easily imagine them as the ones to invent primitive distillation, a technique that is then mostly lost as their civilization collapsed after humans (Rome) conquered them, back in ancient times. I have them drinking mostly a sort of cranberry wine, but I think I can extend that to brandy.
Liquor can have its re-establishment a few centuries later, then, with the revitalization of that region, as half-elves migrate northwards and start mixing with the region's gnomes. Maybe around 100 or 200 years after this reunification of the region, liquor also comes back--representing the hybridization of half-elf/half-human culture with gnomish culture.
These people would probably mostly be drinking mead--the drink of the human empire--and distilled mead doesn't officially have a name. Some reddit posts called it "honeyshine", but there's a whole etymology there around moonshine that I don't want to copy over, so I'll probably need to make a new name for it. Whatever it's called, distilled mead is most likely to be my world's brandy equivalent--the first sort of distilled, widespread drink. It'll be deemed medicinal at first, but quickly be consumed as a more shelf-stable form of mead for longer-distance trade.
Brandy, whisky, and vodka all are likely to develop. All the ingredients are there, even before intercontinental trade develops. Still, I think vodka is rare--the most likely culture to cultivate potatoes is the one that also produces the distilled mead, and so I think I'll leave them mostly with that. Vodka would be an eccentric liquor, not a common one. But whiskey and brandy certainly take hold broadly.
My World: Globalization
A few centuries after this distilled mead came around, my world truly began to globalize. Intercontinental trade networks begin to develop. My world does have an exploitative sugar industry, and having rum totally makes sense as a sort of byproduct of this.
But I've also talked in previous weeks about two unique beverages. I want to think through how these might be impacted by globalization and distillation.
Last week, I wrote about how my Orcs make loquat wine. This is a beverage shared communally, and drinking it is a key part of the decision-making process. My orcs try to straddle the line of drunkenness when consuming it, like the ancient Greeks. As a result, I don't think that they would be "taken in" by overconsumption as a negotiating tactic in the way that real Native American groups were--at least in Standage's framework.
That said, I do think that my orcs take to distilling as a reaction to globalization. Specifically, my orcs have several subcultures that have varied in how they've responded to intercontinental contact. I think whether loquat wine is distilled becomes a key element of resistance here. Those who have opted for more aggressive reactions persist in drinking loquat wine, while those who do more trade take to distillation. They just water their loquat brandy down heavily, in keeping with the whole "straddling the line of drunkenness" thing, but in its concentrated form, it is easily transported and becomes a popular orcish export.
I also made an insect paste-based beer for my obligate carnivore gnolls as part of the worldbuilding section in the article about beer. That beer was pretty weak because of the lack of sugars to be converted to alcohol, which makes it a perfect candidate for distillation. While I don't think it is universally adopted, I do think there are likely some gnollish populations/towns that certainly adopt distillation. This insect beer was meant as a sort of tax revenue good, an important social function that we established for beer; distilled insect gruel stabilizes it to serve as a comparable thing for longer-distance taxes and trade. It's economic.
My gnolls, having mostly just exposure to this weak beer, are more likely to be clobbered by the strength that liquor can have. While I don't think they're going to be "taken advantage of", I do think that the liquor form of their beverage is going to be a source of internal social ill due to drunkenness causing social unrest. But I don't think it's going to catch on super globally as an export good, given the whole "chewed up insects" base thing that we talked about two weeks ago.
Conclusion
I hope everyone enjoyed this section on liquor and the development of global trade. Does your world have globalization and distillation? Please share YOUR liquor-equivalent beverage worldbuilding in the comments of the post.
Remember that you can follow along with the series by subscribing to get the blog delivered weekly to your inbox (or get a roundup at the end of the month), and you can follow along with the actual book that I'm drawing this from by picking up Tom Standage's History of the World in Six Glasses on Bookshop.org (all while supporting independent bookstores and the blog!)
Next week, we move away from alcohol, as Standage focuses on caffeine. We'll be combining Standage's sections 4 and 5. Next week will be the LAST post in the series, as I don't intend on tackling his 6th section on Coca-Cola; that feels too American and too modern for the focus of this blog. So come back next week for the final part of the series, as we talk about coffee and tea, and the way that they radically reshape the world.