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[katana]

Well I believe the plan is to get magic and alchemy, and in more of a physical way than just the "wave your arms to fireball". Drinking seer drought to increase your chance of a mood, or eat something to become resistant to poison or heat, and work in an industry that require such resistance, possibly.

I guess the main thing you'd need to do with the more "basic" foods is sacrifice something that won't matter in the first year or two of your fortress, but will when migrants start coming in. Maybe your first few guys, hardened expeditioners, might be more tolerant of such things, but migrants would expect more civilization? Beyond your first seven getting some sort of bonuses to survival type things, maybe poor food could impair developing friendships? If dwarven friendships are important, and you assume that the first seven have all they need for the time being, developing new ones won't matter until you have more migrants than origionals.

Or, how about spices? If foods need to be made of several ingredients to produce happyness, spices could be an easily packed way to increase variety for a while, rather than pack five years of whole meals. They'd likely be expensive, but maybe since it would be seen as a necessity, there could be a discount on it for the first year or two of the fortress. It'd also start running dry a lot faster if you suddenly acquire twenty migrants, now all of a sudden getting four-ingredient food for everyone is a big deal, since the spices ran out four times faster than you'd been counting on.

For that matter, flavorings for booze? The alcohol for beer is barley, but the flavor comes from hops. Ale has a wider variety of flavorings. "Toss fermentable thing in pot" might be enough to get away from needing water, but proper booze takes more than that. Taking with a few units of lightweight hops can jumpstart your decent-beer industry, but that rapidly runs out if you don't get around to farming hops... of course, happiness-producing hops takes second seat compared to harvests that are required for your dwarves to not die.

Fermenting booze actually requites a fair amount of water.  to make beer you make a barley tea, wine is admittedly made just from juice, but if you get into distilling you again need water.  Mead also takes water in real life.  I'd like to see a bucket of water as a required reagent for drinks personally.

Problem with that is it makes it almost impossible to start without packing a lot of drinks, most areas don't have water.

[Bohandas]

It is unfortunate but in this world not everything has equal value to effort.

Well, I know that IRL the cheapest mead I can find is more expensive than the cheapest grape-based wine that i can find. A LOT more expensive if you don't count half-assed meads that have been watered down with white wine.

That is mostly because of both our ability to mass produce alcohol like never before as well as the increased relative price of honey.

Don't you think that the Dwarves would have relatively advanced booze making technology (compared to the average tech level of the game), considering how important it is to them both physically and culturally?

[G-Flex]

Sure, but not in the industrialized, modern sense of it.

Problem with that is it makes it almost impossible to start without packing a lot of drinks, most areas don't have water.

Most areas do have water. Most embark sites in the game have murky pools, and many have brooks and aquifers, not to mention underground water sources, rivers, and lakes.

[Neonivek]

Dwarves "Advanced" alcohol production would likely be like the "Advanced" cooking of the French at a certain time period.

It isn't advanced production in that they can produce a lot more. It is that they can improve the quality and range of flavors of alcohol.

So SURE Dwarves are probably the only Civilisation that would think of adding woodchips to an alcoholic cider to give it a hickery taste.

If anything Dwarves would produce alcohol more slowly especially seeing as they don't do things humans did around the time such as Water the alcohol down.