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Old vs. New World

TheOriginalHappyGoat

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Oct 4, 2010
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Margaritaville
Just saw a fascinating thing on TV, which I honestly had never thought of before. A quick Google search says it's already out there, but doesn't seem to be a major topic of discussion. It has to do with the age-old mystery of why the Old World (Europe and East Asia) civilizations developed so much faster than the New World (Americas, and perhaps sub-Saharan Africa). After all, civilization seems to have been relatively equally developed worldwide at one point, but then there was a major divergence.

Well, there are probably countless reasons, but this one reason they mentioned was so obvious, I can't believe I'd never heard it or thought of it. Basically, at the very earliest points in civilization, the development of society was driven almost entirely by the ability to make use of domesticate crops and animals. That was the height of technology. But, because they are living things, plants and animals migrate east-west much more easily than they do north-south, because climate and day-length changes are going to be much more mild. It's easier, therefore, to transplant an animal or crop from China to Europe than it is to transplant from Mexico to the Great Lakes (even to this day, your tomatoes in Indiana aren't going to grow very well if you don't start them in a greenhouse).

Well, Eurasia is situated east-to-west. The Americas, on the other hand, are laid out on a north-south axis. Crops developed in the Fertile Crescent can move rather easily into North Africa, Southern Europe and India. but crops developed in Mexico (say, corn), took many hundreds of years to be successfully adapted to the Great Plains.

No big lesson here. Just an interesting tidbit to think about.
 
Nah

The old world learned how ferment grapes and grain and drink the product. In the new world they cultivated tobacco and other stuff and smoked it. Civilizations in the old world got drunk and fought each other for wealth and power. Civilizations in the new world mellowed out and said "hey dude, that's good shit".
 
I'm pretty sure

The first distilled product was sugar into rum; which was done by Europeans, not corn liquor.

There's a book called "The History of The World in Six Glasses" that you might like.
 
Thanks for that tidbit of good general knowledge...

so what possessed anyone to walk across the ice bridge between russia and alaska? it had to be pretty darn cold for the bridge to exist in the first place... who in their right mind would take that journey intentionally?

want something else to look up? Find out where the oldest land is on earth... with all the plate techtonics... the earth eventually recycles itself... so where is the oldest piece of land that exists on the earth... and what does it date to...
 
CoH, I think you got it

I once told a friend that I never tried to do anything important after drinking. He responded, "That is probably why you never did anything important."
 
rum was most definitely not the first distilled alcohol nm

Nm
 
I have a theory on why it took hundreds of years to adapt the crops from Mexico to the plains.

The plant breeders were considered the ancient version of Monsanto, and the villagers (city folks) all thought that food had to be grown the same way it always has been, but the progressive plant breeders continued to look for more land to crop, their oxen and tools that they used continued to get bigger, and the everyone in the villages thought they wet evil. So the ritualistic societies sacrificed all of the plant breeders, and the process had to start over every generation or so. History repeats itself.
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Before I look it up, I'm going to guess beer was first alcoholic drink.

It's pretty easy to make alcohol and beer is way easy.
 
It was

But not the beer we'd recognize today. That came much later. Besides beer is fermented. I was talking about the first distilled alcohol.
 
Re: It was

First distilled beverage was wine, and it was done by Arabs, who brought it to Europe. Rum did not come about until later, in the Caribbean. It's all in the book you mentioned earlier. Beer was indeed the first alcoholic drink, predating wine by a couple thousand years by most accounts.
 
Re: land bridge

Actually, when there was a land bridge (probably 50 miles wide, as sea level had dropped over 200 ft during the maximum glaciation), the warm currents of the Pacific ocean would likely have kept an ice free zone along the shoreline. Hard to know exactly, as all of that has been under water for 10,000+ years.
 
Isn't wine fermented?

I think they do distill grape mash, is that considered wine?
 
brandy is one type of distilled wine

And some use it as the genetic term for any drink made by distilling wine. The first distilled beverages were made by distilling wine, which is what I was referring to in my earlier post. But I doubt those early beverages would have resembled brandy as we think of it today.
 
They probably would have resembled grappa.

However, it is appropriate to use "brandy" as a generic term for any distilled wine, including grappa, despite the fact that many Americans automatically think of brandy as being the particular type that is aged in casks.

goat
 
Re: Isn't wine fermented?

Not sure I understand your question. Before you distill anything it first has to ferment. Otherwise there is no alcohol to distill.
 
I'm pretty sure my cab is only fermented

And is not a product of distillation. Correct?
 
How to get drunk - a primer.

Man, you guys are some kind of amateurs when it comes to Devil Water. Here's your basics:

Fermented:
Beer - from malted barley mash, generally, but corn, wheat and rye are all possible.
Wine - from grapes.
Cider - from apples.
Mead - from honey water.
Sake - from rice mash.

Distilled:
Brandy - from wine. Some are made from finished wines, like Cognac, while others, like grappa, are made from the fermented mash.
Fruit Brandy and Schnaps - can be made from cider or from the fermented mash of any other non-grape fruit.
Vodka - usually made from fermented grain mashes (essentially flat beers), but can also be made from fermented potatoes.
Rum - made from fermented molasses (cheap) or fermented raw sugarcane (expensive)
All others - Whiskey, gin, etc., are almost always made from fermented grain mashes. Different types of whiskeys have specific rules about what they can be made from. Bourbon, for example, must be 51% corn. Scotch is generally made only from malted barley mash (and is called "malt whisky"), but it can also be made from other cereals or unmalted barley (but is then called "grain whisky").

All distilled alcohols are made from fermented liquids and/or mashes, as fermentation is the process necessary to create the alcohol in the first place. Distillation does not actually add alcohol, but instead removes water and other impurities.

Both:
Most fortified wines, such as vermouth and Sherry, are made by adding a distilled liquor - usually grape brandy - to fully fermented wine. Sweet examples (e.g., sweet vermouth, dessert Sherry) have sugar added after the process, either through the addition of caramel or of other sweet wines.
Others, notably port, are made by adding the brandy while the wine is still fermenting, which both raises the ABV, and also kills of the yeast, stopping the fermentation while the drink is still sweet.
 
LOL

Touche. I see that my grammar was less than precise. What I meant to say was that the first beverage to be distilled was wine. But wiNE itself predated that event by 4,000+ years, roughly.
 
Re: How to get drunk - a primer.

Um thanks, but I knew all of that.

Also, distillation technically does not remove water. It removes the alcohol and other components, leaving most (but not all) of the water behind. 190 proof is the highest concentration of alcohol you can get by regular distillation because water and ethanol form an azeotrope at around 95% ethanol.

Remember, I'm a chem eng. by training. I once blew hot ethanol and water out the top of a 20 foot distillation column back in undergrad, right as a bunch of high school students were touring the lab. They all got rained on with 190 proof hooch.
 
Eh.

I guess you're technically right. Which is the best kind of right.

What I should have said was, "The process of distillation does not create more alcohol; it merely increases the concentration of alcohol in the distillate."
 
Vintage goat

That's a compliment.

Me? Cab and IPA is all I need to know about alcohol. Oh, and salt rocks too.
 
I do love a good Cab.

Can't afford them anymore, though. Best wine I've ever had was the Stags' Leap Wine Cellars Fay, which is a single-vineyard offering that is ALMOST entirely SLD grapes (part of the Fay vineyard sits just on the wrong side of the border - not sure how that works). My wine guy used to bring me a sample bottle when they new vintage was released, and we'd sit at the bar and split it.
 
Re: I do love a good Cab.

Not sure if I have ever had the one you mentioned but Stags Leap is a great winery. Not that I can afford it either, however. Been a long time since I had it.
 
salt rocks?

you lost me with that one.

As for IPA, you're preaching to the choir there. So many great ones these days. At the moment, I dig just about any from Lagunitas, and Ranger from New Belgium.
 
Rocks is a noun

Think guac and chips.

Ranger is very good. That and 90 Schilling have beome staples for me.
 
It's their most affordable single-vineyard.

A step below S.L.V. and two steps below the famous Cask #23.

In a decent midwestern restaurant, it will run you between $120 and $200. You should be able to buy it for $100 from a wine shop. Maybe far less if you purchase at the right time of year (one year, they had too much stock in NW Ohio, and were unloading them at 3/$100 wholesale, which is essentially 50% off).

At any rate, it's so much better than the Artemis, which is their county-wide offering, that it's worth the extra money. If you're going to spend $80 on a bottle of wine with dinner, why not go $120?
 
Re: It's their most affordable single-vineyard.


If I'm going to spend $80 on a bottle of wine with dinner, I hope someone knocks me up side the head first so that I don't do it.
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just like you to change the subject ;)

start talking about IPAs and then you throw in a Scotch ale like 90 Schilling. I've never really been a fan of Scotch ales, but maybe I just haven't had a good one. That's always my outlook on beer, I suppose. Never liked smoked beers either until I had an aged Alaskan Smoked Porter at GABF about 10 years ago.

I listened to a podcast about IPAs while working in the yard yesterday. It was the Beersmith podcast (primarily geared towards homebrewing) and they had the brewmaster of Stone Brewing on. Stone released over 100 different beers in 2014, and over 40% of them were IPAs. He also talked a little bit about the history of IPAs, debunking the myth about how IPAs were developed to survive the long voyage to India. Really interesting stuff, if you're in to the history of beer.
 
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