So. . . how did it taste? Served warm or cold? What kind of vessel is it consumed in? What was the buzz like?
Were there, in fact, any alcoholic beverages produced in North America, say north of Texas? I’ve never been able to find any evidence that there were. Pulque and a few other rarer drinks were consumed throughout Mexico and Central America, Chicha was popular in the Andean region, apparently Cauim, fermented from manioc root or maize, was enjoyed by indigenous peoples in Brazil. I can’t find anything about alcoholic beverages in the southern cone, but from what I know about them, the Mapuche and Tehuelche, they were largely hunter gatherers and had little or no agriculture.
I do know that in the case of the Mesoamerican civilisations, public intoxication was as mentioned above a serious offence; in addition I believe that the use of alcholic beverages was generally legally restricted to the nobility.
Apparently there were also Tiswin, Tepache, and Coyol wine, from the same general area, made from saguaro fruit, pineapple, and coyol sap respectively.
No. It was just pithier than explaining about the leaf-chewing.
I was going to ask the same when I noticed that every cite in the thread references Central/South American cultures.
I’m guessing that North American natives didn’t give their berries a chance to ferment - they were harvesting them and immediately drying them to stock up for winter.
Kind of sour. Not particularly appetizing.
In an Indian village in the Darien? Since they didn’t have electricity, the only option was air temperature (about 85 degrees). The kids in the village had probably never seen an ice cube.
I don’t recall, but it was probably either half a coconut or a plastic cup (the usual Embera beverage containers).
I only had one cup, out of curiosity/courtesy. Since it was pretty weak, and didn’t taste very good, I wouldn’t have wanted to drink enough to get a buzz out of it. But I assume it’s pretty much like weak beer.
I think there’s evidence that plenty of cultures have discovered that bubbly berry juice might have some nice properties. But outside of Europe how much development beyond basic fermented drinks was there?
Well, for one thing, distillation technology generally requires some decent glass or metal technology. Indians did not have much of that. So it was weak beer/wine/whatever fermented for them for the most part.
How does wine get to 15% and above alcohol? Is it special yeast or enough sugar in the juice or both?
I’ve never heard of alcohol north of the Southwes desert, which I’ve always found peculiar. The native american grapes, of which the Concord grape is one descendant, can nbe used to make wine (and such wine is made by several upstate New York vintners). The yeast necessary to make the wine grows on the skins of such grapes, in fact. You can also make “wine” from a variety of fruits and berries that grow there. Yet I’ve never heard of any alcoholic beverages in, say, the northeast.
It can’t be a matter of technology – you don’t need complex technology to make fermented beverages. You don’t need a large concentration of people and “civilized” institutions – wines and beers were made on household scales in Europe. (And there certainly were large centers of “civilization”, like Cahokia)
it seems to me inevitable that American Indians who lived near fruit capable of fermentation would have discovered alcoholic drinks. I don’t have a good reason why this was not used more as a resource. The only explanation I can suggest is that its use was curtailed by custom and taboo (although I know of no records of such), and can only offer as a weak support for this the historical difficulties that the Indians had with alcohol. There have been some suggestions that this could have a genetic basis, but there is nothing like solid evidence to back this up, and the uggestion comes perilously close to cultural libel.
In the early 20th century Arthur Parker claimed that the Iroquois occasionally fermented sugar maple sap as an intoxicant. But whether his observations represent pre-Colombian traditions carried on or post-contact adaptation is probably an open question.
The latter. Some wine makers use whatever yeast happens to land in the vat.
Rule of thumb is that you get 1/2 the alcohol for whatever brix (sugar content by wieght) there is. Wine grapes are typically picked at about 26 brix +/-, getting you about 13% alcohol. Some winemakers will add sugar if there isn’t enough.
For some varieties, which may not be considered wine anymore, they add alcohol. That’s way the high strength Port is made. I think they use something distilled from crappy wine. If I understand it correctly, at some concentration the alcohol kills the yeast and fermentation can’t continue.
The Aztec are a North American culture. Mexico is in North America.
Right but to be fair he was responding to my question about North America north of Texas, as we’ve seen that they had cactus fruit-fermented beverages as far north as the American Southwest, but apparently none of the cultures in North America past that point had any tradition of alcohol. As far as I can find this is one of the only regions of the world that never developed alcoholic beverages. Precolonial New Zealand being the other. And maybe Australia, though there are some claims that Indigenous Australians occasionally drank fermented honey drinks.
I will admit my flip description is not forthcoming on the agriculture practiced–but even in the ‘urban’ areas it is not my understanding there was a sufficient division of labor to support an individual or communal living circumstance much above the attributes of a Muir-like hunting lodge. (Pls note: I’m not learned in this subject.)
Also, pls note I was talking “Native Americans in what became the US…” But in any event I went a tad OT in my attempt to amplify my question about the question.
They’re not supposed to add straight alcohol, though. In theory, it’s aguardiente (lit. “burning water”, a kind of liquor obtained by distillation of wine, which may be mixed with herbs prior to distillation).
There was a period c. 1980 when some wine houses in Bordeaux were adding alcohol to their wine to make up for the low sugar content of those years’ grapes; eventually a smart guy in the appropriate Ministry figured out that he could carbon-date the wine to check whether it had alcohol added. 1983 was the year that the family of one of my classmates went without wine (the family patriarch was the only one having any, and that with soda to make it last) because they’d sold all their wine to French wineries who’d come to pick it up in an extreme hurry, figuring out that mixing the decent wine or alcohol distilled from actual wine with theirs wouldn’t ping the carbon dating. Anybody who knew that family back then gets into fits of giggles when people talk about the great quality of Bourdeaux wines.
Yeah, I did make it sound like they added straight alcohol. I was trying to think of the stuff they use around here (there’s a large Portuguese population that makes Port locally). But I couldn’t remember the name and then I ended up just saying alcohol. I was told they take the stuff left over after squeezing the grapes, add water, and make wine from that. Then it’s distilled to make the name I can’t remember, but it’s sometimes called grape spirits or wine spirits. They add that to the basic Port wine to kick it up. Some of them claim ridiculous numbers for the alcohol concentration of the added spirits, but if it’s distilled like liquors it’s probably no more than 50% alcohol (100 proof). It’s kind of an old guys thing to make the stuff and talk about their techniques. And it sure does liven up their parties 
Curious do you have the sources for this?
A quick search for cazalla and orujo (two kinds of aguardiente made in Spain which are the strongest and roughest traditional liquors we have) brings up results with up to 49%. Getting more would require redistillation.
I think they may confusing proof (which is used only in some countries, and I’ve never seen it used in Hispanic or Portuguese-speaking ones) with the actual alcohol content. I’ve had to explain the difference to many people who couldn’t understand labels listing proof and who thought their US-bought drinks had twice as much alcohol as they did.