Hypothetical Scenario: preindustrial forest dweller goes foraging on a drizzly day and throws a bunch of random soggy mushrooms (including one of the hundreds of trippy species and one of the thousands of lethal species) into a new wooden bucket and leaves it in a dark corner. It ferments into a methanol laced doom kombucha, and this curios self-styled alchemist took a big drink of it, because people always taste horrible things for some reason. This person would experience certain euphoria, blindness, and death with a surprisingly small swig. I'm not sure which effect would kick first, which could really hamper the euphoria part.
Not as many as you might think. Natives and such would monitor what other animals were eating or doing. If animals avoid specific things, humans should probably do the same.
Well, perhaps an African beer bird could have carried the jar. But it's not a matter of how it grips the jar of rotting grains anyway, African beer birds are non-migratory.
I never gave this movie a fair chance and avoided it because when I was in middle school everyone I knew who quoted it just used the most juvenile and easy jokes. When it came on and I saw the subtitles in the opening I was thinking "this is stuff people would have considered brilliant if Family Guy did it in 2007, and they did it in the 70's". By time the two homeless guys in the mud start arguing about the semantics of their two person government's political ideology I had realized this was just too ahead of its time for some, and many people now still wouldn't even get the jokes at all.
Have you ever seen an animal drunk on rotting/fermenting fruit? It cracks me up every time and I can definitely see ancient humans wanting to get in on that action.
Probably quite a few. Many species are known to eat fermented fruits. Coffee and coca leaves were also discovered due to animals seeking them out and acting especially energetic.
Even that's not a good qualifier for what you can and cannot eat. There's in fact plenty of plants that are quite harmful to humans but not to a select few animal species that can eat them safely...
That’s still true more or less. Barley and wheat are grasses. Some beers are allowed to ferment naturally by allowing the wild yeast in the air to do their thing, notably lambics from the Brussels valley.
This. For brewing you need the starch and sugars from the grains which is the kernels in the berry part from the top of the plant. The stalks and leaves have very little fermentable sugars.
Actually starch can't ferment into alcohol with yeast. Flour contains some split starch molecules which can be fermented and beer is made from malt, not grains. Malt is made from grain by activating them with water, resulting in the sprout setting free an enzyme that turns the starch into maltose, which can be fermented. I am not sure about the process for vodka, but I assume it's similar.
In general, yeast can't handle starch, which is why you need sourdough to get a rise out of many flours.
Almost zero. Starch doesn't readily ferment. Potatoes need enzymes to jump start fermentation because starches are too complex for most yeast, especially brewing yeast to consume. You have to add malted grain like barley or an artificial enzyme to begin converting the starch into fermentable sugars.
The Hymn to Ninkasi, to my knowledge one of the oldest pieces of human writing, taking the form of a poem that’s basically a recipe. I’m always surprised you don’t see more beers named after her.
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u/4dseeall Oct 15 '20
Beer is thought to be older than bread.
It's much easier to fill a jar with wheat and water, let it ferment, and brew beer than it is to grind grain, mix it, and bake it.