I just read “Nation” from Terry Pratchett, and one plot point is that the natives (kinda South Pacific Islanders) brew beer by mashing roots, covering with water, letting it ferment … and then spitting into it and waiting for five minutes while singing the beer song. This turns the brew from poisonus to harmless. Daphne deduces that human spit contains something - an enzyme? - that neutralizes the poison.
However, the name of the root is never given. While I know that in real life, other sources beside barley can and have been used to make beer
, none of them sound like the description.
Closest would be Cassava, which is poisonus and needs careful processing, but that
a) is a South American, not Polynesian plant
b) doesn’t work as described: it’s not saliva that removes the cyanide, but boiling, fermenting or washing and drying
Yet in the afterword, Prachett says he based some of his stuff (the last five minutes of the Sweet Judy, the beer brewing) on the real world.
So does anybody know what beer brewing process he’s refering to?
Or did he mean that he took only the general idea of “a plant that’s poisonous unless correctly prepared” from Cassava and adopted it into “beer-brewing with spitting and singing” to fit the plot better?
(After all, early in the story, Mau finds the tree from the boy’s island and can’t free the axe because the wood is swollen; later during the duel, he happens upon the same trunk and wrenches the axe out - after being dumb enough to loose his knife during a crucial fight! So obviously Terry took some license to make the story work).
I don’t know anything about that particular beverage, but there are a number of traditional fermented beverages, including chicha, which (traditionally) relied on the enzymes in salive to convert starches in the grain into fermentable sugars.
ETA: However, this process is different than the one stated in your OP (where the spit comes after the fermentation and only takes 5 minutes). So I can’t imagine what that could possibly be or how it could possibly work.
That’s what I wondered about, too. I guess Pratchett handwaves it with the 5- minute -waiting period - but that seems too short for me for an enzyme to work on a whole bowl full of liquid, esp. since one spit is a small amount to start with.
If i had to guess Terry Prattchet probably research old brewing techniques. Thought the using of spit in brewing would fit with his the people of the Nation, and then put his own imaginary spin on it to add a little bit of magic to it. So no the way they brew beer in his book Nation. Probably isnt real. Just inspired by an old real way of brewing beer.
I’m thinking a method of brewing beer in a fantasy world filled with magic and strange creatures, in the form of a disk on top of 4 elephants on top of Great A’tuin; doesn’t necessarily have to be realistic.
I was racing into this thread so that I could mention how kava is made by chewing up plants and spitting them out. Obviously there wasn’t any need to rush, though.
The beer is a device to allow the girl to show her embrace of the scientific method (trying to understand what was the important part of the ritual–was the time important even if you sang nothing, for example) and to be a Chekhov’s Gun to go off later in the book. It was a plot element for character development and resolving a conflict.