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

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

1 " Gardeners are the ultimate mixologists. "

― Amy Stewart , The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create the World's Great Drinks

2 " Drunken botanists? Given the role they play in creating the world’s great drinks, it’s a wonder there are any sober botanists at all. "

― Amy Stewart , The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create the World's Great Drinks

3 " Perfume makers know that, owing to genetic differences in how we experience fragrances, about half the people who inhale jasmine will think of honey, and the other half, unfortunately, will think of urine. They’re both right. "

― Amy Stewart , The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create the World's Great Drinks

4 " In 1897, a Scientific American reporter wrote that “mezcal is described as tasting like a mixture of gasoline, gin and electricity. Tequila is even worse, and is said to incite murder, riot and revolution. "

― Amy Stewart , The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create the World's Great Drinks

5 " Angels’ Share: In storage, a small amount of alcohol escapes the barrel through evaporation. Distillers call this lost alcohol the angels’ share. Whiskey and brandy makers estimate that the angels get about 2 percent of the alcohol in a barrel each year, although that can vary depending on humidity and temperature. Fortunately, they can afford to lose some, as most spirits are aged at a higher proof than the final bottling. "

― Amy Stewart , The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create the World's Great Drinks

6 " Even today, we tend to think of sake as a miserable hot, sour, yeasty drink we once tasted at the urging of an aunt who took us to a Japanese restaurant in Kansas City. "

― Amy Stewart , The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create the World's Great Drinks

7 " The vanilla bean is the fruit of a species of orchid native to southeastern Mexico, and it is unusually difficult to cultivate. Like most orchids, it is an epiphyte, meaning that its roots need to be exposed to air, not soil. It climbs the trunks of trees, thriving in limbs a hundred feet aboveground, and unfurls just one flower per day over a two-month period, awaiting pollination by a single species of tiny stingless bee, Melipona beecheii. If the flower is pollinated, a pod develops over the next six to eight months. And although the pods contain thousands of tiny seeds, they are incapable of germinating unless they are in the presence of a particular mycorrhizal fungus. "

― Amy Stewart , The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create the World's Great Drinks

8 " During Prohibition, enterprising California grape growers kept themselves in business by selling “fruit bricks”—blocks of dried, compressed grapes that were packaged with wine-making yeast. A label warned purchasers not to dissolve the fruit brick in warm water and add the yeast packet, as this would result in fermentation and the creation of alcohol, which was illegal. "

― Amy Stewart , The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create the World's Great Drinks

9 " American farmers were still trying to figure out how to make good wine from native American grapes. The difficulty had to do with the genetics of the grape itself. While the European V. vinifera enjoyed almost ten thousand years of selection by humans, who chose larger, tastier fruit and favored hermaphrodite vines over dioecious vines, very little human selection seems to have taken place in North America. Instead, the birds did it. They selectively picked blue-skinned varieties, an unattractive color for wine, because they could see them better—and they chose small fruit over large because they could eat it in one bite. "

― Amy Stewart , The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create the World's Great Drinks

10 " Wapsie Valley, known for producing red kernels. (The legend behind Wapsie Valley is that at corn shuckings, any man who found a red kernel could kiss the girl of his choice, and Wapsie Valley could turn an innocent gathering into a free-for-all.) "

― Amy Stewart , The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create the World's Great Drinks

11 " Even today, chocolate is made by fermenting the beans for several days to allow richer and more complex flavors to emerge. They are then dried, roasted, and cracked open so that the nibs—the meaty part of the bean—can be extracted. The nibs are ground into a powder or paste that, along with a little sugar, becomes dark chocolate. If milk is added, it becomes milk chocolate. And if the fat, called cacao butter, is extracted by itself and mixed with sugar, that is white chocolate. "

― Amy Stewart , The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create the World's Great Drinks

12 " As the tree matures, the older vessels become plugged with crystalline structures called tyloses, and as a result, the center of the tree—the heartwood—doesn’t conduct water at all, making it well suited for use as a watertight barrel. American oaks are particularly rich in tylose as compared to European oaks. In fact, the European trees have to be carefully split along the grain, rather than cut, in order to avoid rupturing vessels and creating a leaky barrel. The trees also happen to produce an astonishing array of flavor compounds that break free from the wood in the presence of alcohol. European oak, Quercus robur in particular, is high in tannins, which give wine a certain roundness and full-bodied quality. American white oak, on the other hand, releases the same flavor molecules found in vanilla, coconut, peach, apricot, and cloves. "

― Amy Stewart , The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create the World's Great Drinks

13 " Freshly cut oak is given time to dry, which not only makes it easier to work with but also concentrates those important flavors. The staves are also lightly cooked to make them more pliable as they are shaped, and fire causes some of those flavors to caramelize, so that caramel, butterscotch, almond, toast, and warm, woodsy, smoke essences emerge. "

― Amy Stewart , The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create the World's Great Drinks

14 " the layer of charcoal filters and flavors the whiskey, "

― Amy Stewart , The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create the World's Great Drinks

15 " new laws regulating the now-legal liquor industry, they helped ensure that bourbon (and other whiskey) would, as of July 1, 1936, have to be stored in charred new oak containers in order to claim the name. "

― Amy Stewart , The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create the World's Great Drinks

16 " (Botanists who study “twining handedness” have discovered that hops are unusual in their proclivity to twine in a clockwise direction; 90 percent of all climbing plants prefer to go counterclockwise.) "

― Amy Stewart , The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create the World's Great Drinks

17 " solera system for aging. The barrels are stacked four high, with finished sherry coming only from the bottom barrel. It is refilled by sherry from a barrel above it, which is then "

― Amy Stewart , The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create the World's Great Drinks

18 " freshly picked hops heat up the way a compost pile does and have been known to catch fire. "

― Amy Stewart , The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create the World's Great Drinks

19 " Dogfish Head makes a cacao beer called Theobroma that is intended to be a modern recreation of an ancient Olmec recipe. "

― Amy Stewart , The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create the World's Great Drinks

20 " loopholes in some United States liquor laws allow it to be served in restaurants with only a beer and wine license. This has led to shochu’s use as a mixer in Asian-inspired cocktails—think lemongrass martinis— "

― Amy Stewart , The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create the World's Great Drinks