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[Niddhoger]

Germ theory didn't universally catch on until the late 1800s.  People knew rotting foods and foul smelling water were bad, but they didn't actually know WHY they were bad.  They had no concept of infections spreading between people, and simply thought the foul smell itself (Miasma) caused sickness.  So if it smells fine... it should be good! If you noticed, dwarves prefer using "water" and not "murky" water out of stagnant pools or "muddy" water from the bottom of lakes/shallow pools.  However, the idea for boiling water to make it safe for drinking didn't start until probably the same time (late 1800s).  Boiling and sand filtration have existed for thousands of years, but people just saw it as a gimmick to make water taste better and stop the sand from grinding your teeth.  It was a luxury, in other words. 

As I have also mentioned, water can be pressed out of plants.  Particularly drained from cacti, but during a siege or other FUN! in the caverns that cuts off your water supply, you could potentially toss fruits into a screw press for some drinkable water for injured dwarves (best to just let them drink brandy made from said fruits >.>)

[smeeprocket]

Hmm what was the name of the doctor that came up with the germ theory? I know he worked at a hospital, and the fatality rates for birthing women and infants was higher there than with midwives, and when he tried to explain to the doctors that washing their hands would help with this (they were going straight from corpse dissection to birthing infants) they did the exact opposite because it offended them, thereby upping the mortality rate
further for something like 50 years.

That's okay, doctors these days aren't much different. They are supposed to use a check list to make sure they go through every step and procedure, and many find this insulting and simply don't do it. This, of course, leads to things like surgical implements being left in patients.

Sorry for going off topic.

[Miuramir]

HOWEVER, water should need to be accounted for in the creation of that alcohol in the first place. Yes fine for fruit, it might be reasonable to not add water. Might be. For mushrooms and grains, etc. there should be a bucket of water in the reaction.

Cider, Perry, etc. traditionally are made without any added water; and further processing such as for calvados *removes* water.  To try and summarize how an elaborated DF version might go, apples would be used in a screw press to produce apple juice and apple press cake.  The press cake (technically a pomace, but people tend to assume that is grape-based) could be cooked or fed to animals, and the juice drunk as-is ("sweet cider", which would basically qualify as water - quenches thirst, but doesn't satisfy the need for alchohol), or used as input to a brewery.  Note that cider brewing does not require a source of heat, and proceeds naturally at temperatures similar to those found in caves.  The brewed result ("hard cider") would serve as a normal dwarven alcohol; or could be sent to a distillery to extract some of the water and produce calvados, applejack, etc.  Theoretically the water could be recovered from that process if you were in a sufficiently dry locale; e.g. hard cider + distillery (requires heat) = water + calvados. 

Now, if you *have* drinkable water, and possibly another source of some sugar (honey, dwarven syrup), you could take the apple press cake / pomace, add water *back* in plus optionally some sugar, put it into the brewery, and end up with ciderkin, aka water-cider.  This was a cheap, lower-flavor, lower-alcohol drink suitable for children, servants, or the poor; effectively "second pressing", although of worse implication.  In many places it wasn't worth making; you'd just feed the press cake to your pigs or whatever.  Of course, these days that's what a surprising number of Western people drink; cheap "apple juice" that is vaguely apple-flavored sugar water, and may only be 20% actual juice, is the modern equivalent (although not even fermented at all). 

For common real-world edible mushrooms, I've found numbers quoted as about 90% to 92% water; apples and pears are about 84%, with grapes around 81%.  So no added water should be needed to produce the equivalent of wine or cider from mushrooms; and in fact I'd guess that you'd want to concentrate it a bit if practical.  There are other issues; existing real-world mushrooms have varying (but fairly low) levels and several types of starches and sugars, many of which are not as easy to ferment as what we are accustomed to; one assumes that the DF plump helmet as we know it has been the result of considerable dwarven breeding and/or design by higher forces. 

[GavJ]

Yes I assume Toady is capable of researching a set of base examples for default alcohols and what they need, not too worried about that.

All combinations happen:
Cider needs neither heat nor water
Beer needs water but no heat
Vodka needs heat and water
Brandy needs heat but not water

etc.



Mushrooms are a whole separate problem for several reasons:
1) You can't make alcohol out of things with almost no sugar. Go on, try to find a real life mushroom beer (not just flavored or something, I mean a base of just mushrooms). Although a made up "this fantasy species is different!" solves that I guess.
2) I suspect mushrooms would compete with the yeast, since they are both fungi, they might not get along well and yeast wouldn't take hold... and you can't sterilize one out of a solution without killing the other as they're going to be susceptible to the same types of things.
3) All underground plants in DF suffer from lack of realism earlier in the production insofar as "where are they getting their water from to begin with?" If you want them to fit into realistic brewing, then you need to fix their unrealistic growing first. Requiring re-irrigation of underground plots at the very least every planting. OR within some max range of cavern pools etc.
4) Same as #2, but where do they get their sugars from, even if we assume they have some? Nutrient repletion seasonally would also have to be added for underground plants, if you don't want to break the whole realistic brewing system later on. Possible options for this could be things like those fruit pulp cakes, if you don't have animals to feed them to. Or dead goblins. Or seeds you don't want then mashed up, various organic waste products in your fort you can turn into more useful mushrooms.

(in real life, commercial mushroom growth media is usually composed of two things that are both abstracted out of this game -- manure + straw, though either could always be added!)

[Urist Tilaturist]

Manure and straw looks like a good way of growing mushrooms. I always thought it was far too easy to grow thousands of plump helmets. Proper irrigation would also be a good addition.

To brew from mushrooms, either these mushrooms must contain sugar, or sugar must be added to the mash before brewing.

[Niddhoger]

Miuramir.... In that quote you took from my post I very specifically said that fruits are an exception.  Yes, apples (which are a fruit, I might add) have all the water they need.  However, many things in DF that are brewable do NOT have enough water... namely the grains.  Rye, Oats, Wheat, Milet, etc would all require additional water to brew.  Also, as GavJ mentioned, mushrooms simply lack the sugar content to be brewed.  Fermented sugar leads to ethanol (what gets you drunk), but the only "sugar" in mushrooms is bound up in tough structural fibers (their version of cellulose).  While it is theoretically possible to brew a beverage out of them, you would need excessive amounts of mushrooms and far more energy than its worth to break down the chitin (to get at the glucose) is just not worth it.

Also, as GavJ mentioned, the underlying ecology of underground plants is just groundless (sorry, had to >.>) For plants to produce sugar, they need an energy source.  Typically, this is the sun.  Plants take in sunlight to bind other elements together and create glucose.  Fungus will leech nutrients out of other organic matter- but where would that other organic matter get its nutrients? Are we to believe the thriving underground ecosystem is piggybacking on the organic matter (ie nutrients) that stumbles down into it from the surface? It would simply not be enough.  There must be some sort of alternative energy source serving as the foundation.  The only solution I can remotely think of is thermo/chemophilic bacteria.  However, these types of bacteria typically thrive in environments that would kill most anything else on earth.  Therefore for this to work, there would need to be an intermediary that can eat the thermo-philes, but other creatures can then in turn eat.  Bacteria that live 1 mile down into the earth's crust have also been found feeding on background radiation, but these were -very- few in number.  They could barely eek out a living, yet alone provide a backbone for an entire food web.  Another problem, is that mineral/chemical eating bacteria would naturally pass their food source up the chain.  Something that eats arsenic would likely kill anything that tries to eat it. 

ofc, the most obvious answer would be to just say "something something MAGIC!" but DF aspires to be as realistic as it can.  However, as has been mentioned,  trying to make booze-making more realistic while ignoring how broken farming is seems silly.  Its not just that the underground plants grow without lack of nutrients, but ALL plants grow thusly.  Even above ground, there is no such thing as "soil depletion"  You can pull thousands of crops out of DESERT SAND without ever having to either irrigate or use fertilizer.  Several days ago I actually put up a suggestion to add compost heaps to the game.  Ideally you'd throw in all the food scraps (mostly butchering remains, but any spoiled food and vermin corpses) with fallen leaves/flowers (which serve no purpose) and wait a few months for them to turn into compost.  You'd then need to mix this compost into the soil to keep growing crops in the same spot (or underground). 

[GavJ]

An easier solution if you just want to make brewing realistic without all the other headaches would be to say "underground plants cannot be brewed." If you want a more specific reason, "because they have completely different [alien/magical/sulfur vent-based/whatever] chemistry than surface plants, and it doesn't work with brewing."

Boom! Done.

[Urist Tilaturist]

Making underground plants not brewable looks like an easy and sensible solution. Farming generally is not !!fun!! enough with no soil depletion and other things missing.

[Adrian]

Am i too late to the thread to suggest splitting booze production up into individual processes of fermentation, brewing and distillation?
Fermentation in vats for making sugary things into ciders and wines.
Brewing in a brewery for making starchy things into beers.
And distillation at a still for making low value booze into high value spirits.

Though the fermentation and brewing processes may need some kind of reaction on a timer. One that takes X days to produce output i mean, without glueing a dwarf to the workshop during that time.

And GOTY if the whole shazam gets revamped into a workshop zone.

[Niddhoger]

I really don't think we need two more workshops that just do what we already are doing now.  However, those jobs could be added to the still, or perhaps use the screwpress as Muiramis mentioned for fruits as the pre-fermentation liquid. 

[Urist Tilaturist]

Am i too late to the thread to suggest splitting booze production up into individual processes of fermentation, brewing and distillation?
Fermentation in vats for making sugary things into ciders and wines.
Brewing in a brewery for making starchy things into beers.
And distillation at a still for making low value booze into high value spirits.

Though the fermentation and brewing processes may need some kind of reaction on a timer. One that takes X days to produce output i mean, without glueing a dwarf to the workshop during that time.

And GOTY if the whole shazam gets revamped into a workshop zone.

The workshop zones sound like an excellent idea. The screw press should make the mash, then the drink should be left to brew for some time. The result can then be optionally distilled into strong drink at the still. The mash can be used as fertiliser.

[Niddhoger]

However... what would be the main point of distilliation? Would it simply be to add value at the expense of dwarf labor? (10 dwarven wine converted to 5 dwarven brandy, but tripling its price) Keep in mind distilliation will reduce the stock you are using (extract the alcohol out of 10% solutions to concentrate it all into a 20%+ solution) You can make a low-alcohol beer/wine out of damn near anything with sugar, but natural fermentation caps at around 15% I think.  To get the stronger drinks requires distilliation, but there is no reason you HAVE to distill, dwarven rum would just be another type of wine and so on. One more thing to keep in mind, is that distillerly is a skill and requires decent equipment.  A (very toxic) by-product of fermentation is methanol.  In small quantities its harmless, but if it is not safely removed in the distilling process it can very easily lead to permanent blindness/coma/death.

Or... do we want alcohol % to be a value in the game independent of value? Do we want to add drunk dwarves that tried to drink as much everclear as they did vodka? Use of high-level alcohol as a medical disinfectant? Fuel source? Again, distilling spirits would REDUCE the quantity, so its assumed the quality will need to go up at a higher rate to make the process worthwhile.  It seems odd that this increase in quality would not have any other affects.  At the very least dwarves should receive happier thoughts from higher alcohol percents.  IE Dwarves hate drinking water, are content with drinking low strength beer/wine (so long as they have a choice in beverages), but get happy if they have access to the GOOD stuff... high-strength moonshine, rums, whiskey, etc.  "Had a stiff drink lately" Quality of stress removed/increase in stress tolerance could be a related to the proof of the vintage.  High stress dwarves that would normally blow a gasket might can bide their time in a bottle of moonshine.  Instead of throwing a tantrum over trolls smashing his wife to pieces, Urist McBoozey can just reach for the strong stuff.  He won't be happy, but maybe he won't be knocking over an entire collection of masterwork statues either. 

[Urist Tilaturist]

I think that it would be very dwarven to increase the value of a drink with its strength. Strong drinks should be worth more in exports and make dwarves happier. They can also be used as disinfectants for wounds.

An unskilled brewer should have a small chance to leave some methanol in his distilled drinks, resulting in !!fun!! for the drinkers.

[SixOfSpades]

An easier solution if you just want to make brewing realistic without all the other headaches would be to say "underground plants cannot be brewed." If you want a more specific reason, "because they have completely different [alien/magical/sulfur vent-based/whatever] chemistry than surface plants, and it doesn't work with brewing."

If subterranean biochemistry doesn't mesh with alcohol, then why are underground plants edible at all?
If underground plants aren't edible at all, why did Toady bother putting them in the game and allow dwarves to eat them for so long?
If underground plants are inedible, then how the hell did dwarves even survive without elves & humans?

I find it perfectly acceptable, and even likely, that cavern plants would be almost completely alien to surface plants. But I do not find it acceptable that the two would have completely incompatible biochemistry, because Toady has taken such great pains to show that they don't. It is blatantly obvious that the earth has some energy source that grants the cavern biospheres chemical enrichment on a par with the sun. I don't know what that energy source might be, but its existence is flatly undeniable. Dwarves exist, dwarves can eat plants grown anywhere, therefore subterranean plants are nourishing, therefore subterranean plants are brewable. Boom! Done.

Am i too late to the thread to suggest splitting booze production up into individual processes of fermentation, brewing and distillation?

Yes, brewing <> vinting <> distillation. I feel that beer is far more dwarfy than wine or spirits, so in my Innovations plan, dwarves invent Brewing first, and only then branch out . . . if similar plans were implemented for other races, elves would start with wine & humans would go directly to vodka.

[Adrian]

Methanol is toxic.

It's my headcanon that dwarves have horse-sized livers, and that is why they have such a high tolerance for alcohol.

And i would expect that one of the great dwarven exports, besides mudstone figurines, would be booze.
[cough]artifact booze[/cough]