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[Urist Tilaturist]

Mushroom brewing, if these accounts are true, should be possible, but require added sugar.

[Niddhoger]

That abstract said they used various fungi to FERMENT other substances.  The results were a higher alcohol content or a cancer-fighting substance.  As for your other link... re-read it.  The "mushroom wine" directions tell you to boil down 1 kg of mushrooms and then "follow the basic recipe"  What is in this "basic recipe?" Why 1200g of sugar and 4 litre of fruit juice... aka "what is actually becoming ehtanol" The "mushroom wine" is just mushroom-FLAVORED wine.  I am assuming the same is the case for those Korean wines. 

Now, there are some usable sugars in mushrooms.  However, they are in the ballpark of ~2g per 100g of mushrooms (compared to 15g per 100g of grapes).  So... you could potentially ferment mushrooms alone... but you'd have to distill massive amounts of it to approach the same alcohol content of grape wine.  So Plump helmet [7] would be used in place of grapes [1] The kicker? 2g of sugar per mushroom is the high end of the spectrum- most have practically none.  Again, for typically mushrooms the gross majority of their carbs are bound up in chitin.  Chitin CAN be used to make ehtanol, but this is a recent process involving the bio-engineering an existing enzyme to strip the nitrogen out of chitin and soften it up.

Back to the last point we were making, even if plump helmets are super-sugar rich (and they are supposed to be very hard... aka thick chitin)... WHERE IS THIS SUGAR COMING FROM!? Mushrooms gain nutrients by breaking down other organic matter.  For mushrooms to gain sugar, they steal it from something else that has it.  So where are the other organisms gaining energy?

[Urist Tilaturist]

Or they could just not contain much sugar, and dwarves have to add it. Trade for it, grow it, get it from beet or cane.

[Niddhoger]

Or they could just not contain much sugar, and dwarves have to add it. Trade for it, grow it, get it from beet or cane.

yes, but then you arne't turning "plump helment [5]" into "plump helmet wine 25" directly like we have been.  Instead it would be "dwarven sugar 5+ plump helmet [5]= dwarven wine 25"  In which case you ask... why did I sacrifice dwarven sugar for low grade booze? I could make dwarven rum directly or save the sweet pods for dwarven syrup cooking.

[Urist Tilaturist]

...except if some dwarves liked that particular type of drink, or it became more valuable since the mushrooms added flavour.

[GavJ]

...except if some dwarves liked that particular type of drink, or it became more valuable since the mushrooms added flavour.

That's not a reason to consider a feature one way or another. Because if you simply removed the mushroom wine etc. as a thing for technical reasons, then no dwarves would ever like it in the first place, because... it wouldn't exist. So you never would have to worry about failing to satisfy non-existent dwarves who like mushroom wine.

Even in terms of the storyline that wouldn't make sense either. They wouldn't invent something because dwarves somehow liked it ahead of time. They would only invent useful things, and then later, some dwarves would grow to like those things.

Pretty much everything in game has an actual or reasonable implied (like ladles) usage, or is a naturally occurring material (different kinds of rocks aren't very useful more than another, but they don't have to be invented so that's okay). And to the extent that a couple of exceptions might exist, they should probably be re-examined themselves, not given more company.

[Urist Tilaturist]

Mushroom wine could have been discovered by experimentation. No one wanted normal wine before ot was invented, either.