Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Niddhoger]

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

Methanol toxicity has nothing to do with alcohol tolerance.  Your liver doesn't filter it out, but instead is ironically the source of the problem.  Methanol isn't so bad on its own rights (it is a weaker version of ethanol), however its only when its brought to the liver that it becomes truly toxic.  Your liver actually takes the slightly-toxic methanol and converts it to the much more toxic formaldehyde and formic acid (formic acid is the main ingredient in ant venom, btw).  These chemicals are much more directly toxic to your nervous system and your optic nerves are particularly vulnerable.  If the formic acid builds up too much, it can cause the pH of your blood to drop dangerously low (just as bad as it sounds- your blood begins to burn your veins/organs).  Hilariously, one method of curing methanol poisoning is to simply drink more (pure) ethanol.  Essentially your liver is so busy breaking down the ethanol that it has no time to break down the methanol (and thus produce even worse toxins).  Eventually your kidneys will catch the methanol and you'll pee it out before it gets converted to formaldehyde/formic acid. 

[Urist Tilaturist]

I agree with Niddhoger. Even dwarves would be poisoned by methanol.

[Reelya]

You only needed to boil wine due to it being chronically dilute compared to what we are used to.

Wine that's been boiled will have have lower alcohol though, not higher. Ethanol's boiling point is 22 degrees lower than water. You need to distill the vapors that come off it to get it stronger. Did the Romans have distillation technology? The first clear evidence of distillation techniques is from Greeks in the 1st Century AD, so pretty late in the picture, and no direct evidence of it's use in medicine at the time. The boiling in fact was probably to kill bacteria, not strengthen the alcohol content. They might not have known about bacteria, but through trial and error they knew that boiling the wine first made it effective for cleaning wounds, even though technically they were further diluting the alcohol content by doing so.

[Niddhoger]

No one said they boiled the wine to make it stronger- they only knew that wine had a better chance of treating wounds than water and that boiling seemed to help.  The diluted remark was to simply say the wine was far too low of a proof to qualify as a medical-grade antiseptic on its own (although in general pouring ethanol on wounds isn't the best idea, but it can be used to clean surfaces and sterilize tools) If anything, salt water would be best.  Salt tends to kill bacteria via osmosis dehydration pretty quickly.  Your body can handle it, they can't.  However, salt was a rare and precious commodity throughout most of human history.  It was even used as a currency for a few kingdoms.  People treasured it for preserving meats and flavoring food- they weren't going to "waste" it on experimenting in medicine (anymore than we'd try using gold-cloth bandages). 

To your other comment.. yes the greeks were able to reach distillation of neutral grain spirits (95%+), but it was just one of many curiosities to them (like magnets, steam power, and clock-work mechanisms) Distillation for the purpose of consumption didn't really catch on till the 1400/1500s, however.  Distillation was mostly considered a process of alchemy (and later chemistry).  It took people several hundred years (various dates for the advent of distillation never go earlier than the first century AD) to consider using distillation to make things like rum, vodka, and brandy. 

[Reelya]

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.

The guy who suggested the hand-washing thing wasn't the guy who invented germ theory:

Some doctors were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands and Semmelweis could offer no acceptable scientific explanation for his findings.

"no acceptable scientific explanation", i.e. he didn't know jack all about germs. He just knew washing hands worked. And there was no spike in mortality rates. Some clinics used his hand washing system and saw reductions, whilst others ignored them and the same mortality rate persisted. Their reaction was "I'll keep doing what I've always done, the way they taught me at medical school", rather than "do the exact opposite". What would the exact opposite of washing your hands even be like? Soaking your hands in a bucket of shit before the operation or something?

[Metalax]

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.

And the Kobolds got it right the first time and went straight to Cider.

[Reelya]

Whisky is pretty dwarfy.

[GavJ]

However... what would be the main point of distilliation?

This is easy to answer:
The dwarven work efficiency (not getting slow etc. from being sober) could be a result of amount of alcohol consumed. ACTUAL alcohol, as in taking proof into consideration.

Whereas not dying of thirst could be just any drink. Thus, if you give your dwarves small beer all the time, they'll not get enough alcohol to be fully efficient in the amount of time it takes to slake their thirst. Either they stay inefficient, or they have to drink extra units of booze to reach their alcohol threshold (which is also essentially just being inefficient since it takes time to drink more)

Whereas hard liquor could quench their thirst and make them maximally efficient until their next drink in one drink.

So distilling maximizes the efficiency of your non-brewer labor. You want that armorsmith to work as fast as possible? Then invest more of your less-valuable brewer time in distilling in exchange for making sure your more-valuable armorsmith is getting super efficient rocket fuel and not drinking too much or being too sober.  Or do you not have any especially important dwarves? Then just go with beer, because it's not worth spending extra brewer labor just to save not-any-more-important farming labor, etc.

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?

Yeast making alcohol is not the same thing as mammals metabolizing fats and sugars. They are two completely different processes, and it's entirely possible that something could be chemically incapable of doing one but not the other. In fact, this is already the case with fats for example... we can gain energy from fats as animals, but you cannot make alcohol out of them. Same goes for proteins.

If it's convenient to the game design, why not claim that exactly that possibility is the case on the scale of the entire undergroud plant? I.e. they are entirely made of fats and proteins and [possible some unknown other chemical(s) that act similarly].

Your other two points follow from underground plants being inedible, which as I just explained, is not necessarily true just from them being unbrewable.

[Urist Tilaturist]

Mushrooms are edible, but not brewable. Underground plants are presumably similar.

[GoblinCookie]

Mushrooms are edible, but not brewable. Underground plants are presumably similar.

We have no reason to think that underground plants are being brewed for actual alchohol.  They may well simply be extracting narcotic substances from the mushrooms that have a generally similar effect to alchohol. 

[Urist Tilaturist]

We all know of narcotic substances found in mushrooms, but they do not have the same effect...

Imagine dwarves tripping on magic mushrooms. They could have good or bad trips, and react accordingly, causing potential !!fun!!...

[GavJ]

We have no reason to think that underground plants are being brewed for actual alchohol.

It being called "wine" is "a reason to think that underground plants are being brewed for alcohol."
The alternative of equally-attractive-non-alcoholic-narcotics, however, DOES have no reasons to think it.

That's a potential explanation to change to, but it would definitely need to be made fairly explicit for it to work to satisfy players.

[Reelya]

Mushrooms are edible, but not brewable. Underground plants are presumably similar.

You should always check:
http://elwood5566.net/2011/02/21/would-you-believe-it-mushroom-wine/
^ A lot of these seem to come from Korea. Dwarves are fantasy underground Koreans apparently.

http://duramecho.com/Food/NoveltyWines.html

Mushroom Wine

    What? A mushroom wine. Brilliant clear yellow. It tastes almost like a conventional white wine made from grapes.
    How? Cook & liquidise 1 kg of normal edible mushrooms until they are rendered down to a blackish slimy mass. Put it in the demijohn, add water & follow the basic recipe.
    Why? After finding some people unexpectedly liked the chocolate wine, I was determined to make a really outrageous wine. Mushrooms were selling very cheap in the local market so I made a mushroom wine expecting it to be foul black in colour and musty tasting. I was surprised when it came out a clear elegant yellow and not very bad flavoured. I've even had a friend who did not notice this wine was not a normal white grape wine until told.

Yeah, so it's do-able from just mushrooms and tastes pretty good too. But it definitely requires you to add water.

[GavJ]

According to wikipedia, the cost of those pine duff mushrooms (Matsutake) is $90 a kilo on average.
The whole bottle of "mushroom wine" is 1 euro...

Arithmetic tells us that this wine is almost certainly not actually made out of mushrooms as it's primary alcohol source, but rather just slightly flavored with mushrooms.

The second link sounds like it's just straight up mushrooms, but I dare say I'm a bit skeptical of this random dude's paragraph long treatment of the topic with no images on his like early 90's-looking text adventure style website.

[Reelya]

It took some googling but I found an actual published scientific study on mushroom fermentation from Japan. Presumably this is what the Koreans also do:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11515544

It seems that the mushrooms are used instead of other biological agents to cause the fermentation. They do use another source of sugars with this, but the mushrooms aren't some "flavor" or gimmick, they're central to the brewing process. Since plump helmets are fictional, we have no way of knowing their nutritional make up, a starchy mushroom would actually be brewable by itself.

As for the second link, actually it looks like sugar is added to his process if you read the summary.