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[Khegit]

Alright...what is it with Dwarves and alcohol? They drink large mugs of it every day, three times a day, twenty-four seven. They do this from the moment they're birthed until the day they die.  If any other race, humans, elves, goblins, drank like this, they would die of a shot liver before they turned twenty. Even then, they would never be able to get anything done, drunkenly stumbling around, in a constant state of ecstasy. Dwarves cannot only walk in a straight line, they can build, construct, craft, forge, cook, fight, speak coherently, and especially, brew more alcohol.  I wanna know everybody's thoughts on this. Is it biological, like, do all dwarves have supercharged livers? Or is it magic, as in, some sort of magical affinity that only the dwarves possess?

[Silfarion]

http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Beards

[itg]

They actually do have super-charged livers, in a sense. The dwarven liver is 50% bigger than the standard humanoid liver relative to body size, according to the raws.

[Khegit]

That actually explains a lot.

[LMeire]

They're not really immune to alcohol so much as they depend on it to live, it's a key component to their metabolic processes. See for non-dwarves alcohol is indeed a mild toxin, but for them it's more like a vitamin. Without it they can't digest food properly and so start to slow down and get irritable. Kinda like caffeine addicts before they get their morning fix, only much worse since dwarves typically spend their entire lives with some amount of booze in their systems. I bet expectant mothers are advised to drink more often than normal so ensure the baby gets enough to develop properly.

[Sutremaine]

It could be that the booze is fairly weak and drunk as an alternative to potentially nasty water.

Perhaps the dwarven body is so adapted to alcohol that they can't handle the microfauna in water, and the slowness caused by alcohol withdrawal is actually sickness caused by water too dirty for them to handle.

[Khegit]

Screw pumps purify water though.....besides, there's no way someone could drink that much booze every day of his life, especially as an infant, without being wasted all the time, then later, dying.

[choppy]

ahhh you are right about someone. but what about somedwarf?

[MrWillsauce]

It's almost as if the game isn't 100% realistic.

[Repseki]

Screw pumps purify water though.....besides, there's no way someone could drink that much booze every day of his life, especially as an infant, without being wasted all the time, then later, dying.

Infants would most likely be fed by their mother. And seeing as Mead was pretty much all anyone drank in some areas of the for world for a quite a while, as water was definitely not clean enough and could easily sicken or kill, I think Dwarves with super-livers would do just fine.

[PrimusRibbus]

Screw pumps purify water though.....besides, there's no way someone could drink that much booze every day of his life, especially as an infant, without being wasted all the time, then later, dying.

"Small beer" was an everyday beverage for everyone, even children. Its alcohol content was around 2.5% (or perhaps lower). Per the link, those involved in manual labor might drink up to 5.7 liters of small beer during a work day to stay hydrated.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_beer

[Khegit]

Somehow, I doubt this is the beer the dwarves are brewing....besides, they make all kinds of booze, including strong stuff, like whiskey.

[Sutremaine]

Screw pumps purify water though.....

If you think that aspect of DF is an intended part of the simulation, sure. If you think it's a side effect of the way that pumps handle water, or a side effect of the way the game handles contaminants, not so much.

[BoredVirulence]

Somehow, I doubt this is the beer the dwarves are brewing....besides, they make all kinds of booze, including strong stuff, like whiskey.

Yes, but here I have to link back to the larger livers.
Besides, dwarven wine is a staple, and that can't be that strong.

[CaptainArchmage]

Its a placeholder. The general idea is that dwarves need alcohol to be functional, whereas other species get drunk drinking alcohol, which should lower productivity and cause other undesirable results.

In other news, any creature belonging to your fortress that needs to drink will prefer alcohol over water. I found this one out from playing modded humans and other races a long time ago. The [ALCOHOL_DEPENDENT] tag only means work slows down after being without drinking alcohol for a long period of time.