I was sitting around thinking of Dwarf Fortress and idle watching TV, and got into a conversation about all the different types of alcohol in the world. I though I'd try putting together a list of every source there is, and seeing how many I could add in. No real point or plan to this, just more alcohol. And I thought it'd be an interesting way to discuss booze, since I know this forum has a very international crowd. It helps that I'm a little drunk right now.
A few hours with Google and Wikipedia taught me a lot, but I wanted to see if anybody else has some ideas. This will be kind of long. I'm no chemist or botanist, but I've understood the basic principle for a while. Technically, anything that will ferment (basically a controlled rot) will produce alcohol, but there seem to be a lot of candidates with no corresponding liquor, at least to my knowledge.
Pretty much every cereal in the world is brewed into something - Wheat-Ale; Barley-Beer; Rice-Sake; Corn-Whiskey; Oats-English Beer; Rye-another Whiskey; then an endless variety non-European grains that produce boozes with local names I can't pronounce. And potatoes of course make vodka.
Any source of molasses ergo natural sugar can be fermented - sugarcane is the most well known, making rum. Then there's tree sap, hence things like Maple rum. Sugar beets also fall in here - beet vodka is not actually a vodka at all (though vile enough that you'd never know it). I assume animal produced sugars could be fermented as well, but I wouldn't know where to start with something like that, and you'd need a lot of it. Drinkable cheese, maybe?
Any liquor made of fruit is a wine, and theoretically any fruit (or vegetable) can be brewed into booze. Since grapes are the only one anyone's heard of, I imagine most fruits, if they can be fermented without turning to rotten mush, produce something not worth drinking. I swear I've heard of wines made from apples or cherries or something. According to Wikipedia, real German schnapps is made of any rotting fruit handy - everything else is just flavored whiskey.
Legumes are definately frementable - Kahlua is fermented coffee beans (and you thought it was a brand name). But I've been looking for years and I've never heard of any other drink made of beans. Given that the flavor of an alcohol comes from the other chemicals in the source, I'd guess that, in all seriousness, bean liquor would taste quite literally like ass.
Then there's some oddballs out there. Tequila, real tequila, is made of cacti meat, or cacti fruit, or some part of a particular species of cactus. Gin is made from the improperly named juniper berries, with are actually radically adapted pine cones. Perhaps other cones could be brewed? Amaretto is made of things like fruit pits and almonds - why no other nuts?
For completeness, it's worth mentioning that wood is fermentable. It produces methanol, which only a desperate drinker with nothing to live for would gamble his life with. Though since the dwarven metabolism depends on it, I wouldn't be surprised if chugging a keg of furniture varnish was a famous test of dwarfliness. Brewable logs, anyone?
It should also be noted that it's possible, if only just, to brew fungi into alcohol, producing octylene or some such gobledygook. Since the only reference to it I can find lists it as an ingredient in perfume, I imagine it's something no creature that enjoys living would want to ingest, though I'm aware Russia has several brands of big-bottle perfumes designed to be drank. Of course, plump helmet wine is such a staple of the dwarven diet and DF that I'd never remove it. Maybe I'll track down a bottle of octenol, stick an approriately dwarven label on it, and send it to Toady as a tribute.
Again, no real point to this. Just hoping for some comments and ideas.
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Topic: General Ideas on Alcohol (Read 1787 times)