Tag: what are you drinking?

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The best thing I have ever read about alcohol – and possibly anything else

I hate the patronising language of social media clickbait because it debases what were once perfectly good terms and insults the intelligence of its audience. But just for once, I wish I was writing for one of those wanky clickbait sites because my headline could only be ‘This fruit fly drank some booze. You will not BELIEVE what happened next!’

I seem to be writing three new books simultaneously. I’ll explain how, why and what in a later post. But two of these books – one of them being What Are You Drinking, my new crowdfunded book with ace publishers Unbound – are taking me onto a bit of nature writing. It’s quite the thing right now, just like travel writing was around the time I did Three Sheets to the Wind. That’s the thing about beer – write about it, and you can turn it into writing about whatever you want. You can be a comedian or a stocktaker, a philosopher or a troll.

Leavening a bit of nature writing into my work feels like a nice thing to do at this point. I was never big on science at school. I feel like a deeper analysis of the way things like yeast and malting work is the next step in my own personal education about beer. And if I can write about it in a non-nerdy, not-too-technical way, it might also appeal to a broader, mainstream, curious beer audience.

On top of that, there’s also the personal journey that accompanies and dictates any book. Right now, as I spend most of my waking hours looking at screens, I find myself increasingly drawn to the natural world as some kind of counter-balancing weight to keep my sanity level. I just spent the whole weekend gardening and baking bread, and slept better, and felt happier, than I have in months working at the screen.

Both the personal and professional have led me to this book, by my new favourite author:

I seriously believe this may be one of the most important food and drink books of the last fifty years. Its treasures are too many for me to go into here. I’m boring everyone I speak to about how it has changed my life – or at least, endorsed and spurred on many of the changes I was already trying to make to my life. You like beer, right? And proper barbecue? And sourdough bread? And good cheese? Of course you do. And it’s like he looked into your mind and conceived this book to appeal to you, and only you – and, of course, everyone else like you.

But anyway, never mind the life-changing lessons, the astonishing insights and inspiration. What I want to write about here is a footnote on page 374 that took me ten minutes to find when I went back to check it. That’s how good this book is: the most astonishing fact it contains can be thrown away in a hidden footnote.

It’s in a section where Pollan is writing in praise of alcohol and its effects. He does so in a calm and rational, yet warm and engaging manner, and succeeds in making it seem obvious that alcohol is – on balance – an overwhelming boon to society in a way I wish I could but can’t stay calm enough to do.

He talks about the many species of animal that actively seek out alcohol and enjoy the benefits of intoxication. The footnote concerns Drosophila Melanogasta, otherwise known as the common fruit fly, or vinegar fly.

I’ve been reading more about it, and the male Drosphila Melanogasta has an endearing (to an extent) quirk. When it reaches maturity, it tries to mate with anything it can. It tries to court other completely incompatible species of insect, other males of its own species, even, rather dodgily, sexually immature female fruit flies. It reminds me of a hapless insect Sid the Sexist from Viz magazine, with absolutely no idea of how to pull.

But as it gets rebuffed, it seemingly learns. Progressively, it figures out what is and is not compatible, and spends less and less time on lost causes, smartening up its act, until it finally succeeds with an appropriate partner. Scientists studying fruit flies are very excited by what seems like evidence of learning and modifying behaviour in this tiny animal rather than simple blind instinct.

But that’s not the brilliant bit that Michael Pollan wrote about.

Again, like Sid the Sexist, fruit flies also love alcohol. as you will appreciate if you’ve ever had a glass of beer outdoors. Do they think it helps their pulling technique? Scientists have yet to determine that.

But it does help keep them alive.

Drosophila Melanogasta suffers from having a tiny parasitic wasp that lives in its stomach. Yes, you read that correctly. I know a fruit fly is tiny. But it has an even tinier wasp that can get into its stomach.

If it stays there, the wasp will kill the fruit fly. So the fruit fly drinks alcohol, which it enjoys, and finds non-fatal. But it’s a different story for the tiny parasitic wasp. It can’t cope with its drink at all. When the fruit fly drinks, the booze kills the tiny wasp in its gut… by making it violently shit out its insides through its arse.

This incredible discovery – which surely ranks alongside the discovery of penicillin or the the atom – was made by Neil F Milan et al, and written up in a paper called “Alcohol Consumption as Self-Medication against Blood-Borne Parasites in the Fruit Fly,” published in a journal called Current Biology, vol 22 no.6, published in 2012.

Congratulations sir. The drinking world salutes you. And bravo, Drosophila Melanogasta. I will never swat you away from my pint again.

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Announcing my next beer book: “What are you drinking?” No really, do you know?

Following my announcement last night about my new crowdfunded beer book project, we go live today – and here’s the idea I’m working on.

Beer is many things.

It’s often cold, always wet, usually refreshing. It’s democratic, straightforward and accessible, but can also be complex and challenging. It can be blond, brown, red or black, strong or weak, light and spritzy, creamy and zesty, rich and fruity, chocolatey, coffee-like, spicy, piney, citrusy, caramelised, sour, or even salty.

Beer’s unique balance of exciting diversity and easy-going approachability have made it the most widely drunk alcoholic beverage on the planet. Only water and tea are more popular. In the twenty-first century, the global craft beer revolution is spreading beer’s astonishing palate of flavours and styles to people who previously thought it could only be fizzy and tasteless.

But behind all the excitement around the renaissance of the world’s most popular alcoholic drink lies an extraordinary fact: very few beer drinkers have much of an idea of what their beverage is made of.

Do you?

We all know that wine is made by fermenting pressed juice from grapes, and cider comes from doing something similar to apples. But what creates the flavour and texture of beer? Do you know what makes it that colour, or where the alcohol comes from? What creates that inimitable heady rush on the nose or that crisp, dry finish at the back of the throat?

For all its straightforwardness, beer is a complex drink. The typical drinker might mumble vaguely about hops without having any clear idea of what hops are, or they may even talk about ‘chemicals’.

And that’s a shame, because each of the four main ingredients of beer has an incredible story. 


‘What Are You Drinking?’* is a journey into the four main ingredients of beer. The book will tell their stories and uncover the little miracles in malted barley, hops, yeast and water, and how each of these contributes to the massive miracle that is beer. 
Mixing travel writing, nature writing, history and memoir, this book picks up four natural ingredients that are usually only ever discussed in technical brewing manuals and takes them for a spin through time and across continents.
From the lambic breweries of Belgium, where beer is fermented with wild yeasts drawn down from the air around the brewery, to the aquifers below Burton-on-Trent, where the brewing water is rumoured to contain life-giving qualities, this book won’t just describe what each ingredient is; it will tell the full story behind how and why it came to be in beer and why that matters. 
It’s a story that’s aimed at the general reader and curious drinker, but even brewers and hardcore beer fans will find facts and stories they didn’t know, or at least have them presenting in a refreshing new light.
‘What Are You Drinking’ will explain why hops grown in different parts of the world have such dramatically different flavours; it will give an eye-witness account of how the process of malting changes a humble barley grain into so much more, and will explain as much about the behaviour of yeast as you can handle without a degree in biochemistry.
We’ll travel from the surreal madness of drink-sodden hop-blessings in the Czech Republic, to Bamberg in the heart of Bavaria, where malt smoked over an open flame creates beer that tastes like liquid bacon, and to the hop harvest in the Yakima Valley in the Pacific North West of the United States. We’ll explore the history of our understanding of fermentation, the lost age of hallucinogenic gruit beers, and the evolution of modern hop varieties that now challenge grapes in terms of how they are discussed and revered.

Along the way, we’ll meet and drink with a cast of characters who reveal the magic of beer, and celebrate the joy of drinking it. And, almost without noticing, we’ll learn the naked truth about the world’s greatest beverage.

The ‘Brewing Elements’ series of books published by the US Brewers’ Association does cover these four ingredients, but they are strictly only for brewers and the most hardcore beer enthusiasts. (The one on water even comes with a health warning discouraging you from reading it unless you from reading it unless you are a trained brewer with at least a high school level of education in chemistry.) This will be the first time a whole book has been written about the components of beer in a way that will be interesting, educational and entertaining to the general reader who enjoys drinking beer, but had no idea how special it was – until now.
The book is now open for pledging at Unbound.co.uk. The book has its own page, where there’s a video from me talking more about the ideas in the book, and an exclusive excerpt from one of the chapters I’ve already written, about a visit to the hop farms of Slovenia where I learned about the effects of terroir on hop aroma, and the effects of salami on the human body and soul. There you’ll also see a range of different pledging options if you’d like to get involved. There’s also a Q&A section where I’ll answer any questions you have.
We need around 750 pledges in total. If you like the sound of this book, if you would like your name printed in the back of the book, and if you’d like a special edition of it that is unique to subscribers and will never be available anywhere else, pledge now. The quicker we meet the target, the sooner it will be published!
If you want to find out more about Unbound and how their hybrid model of crowdfunding and mainstream publishing works, see my previous blog post here. 
This is going to be an exciting adventure. Hope you’ll hop onboard!
* The title is a work in progress. It might change if we can think of a better one.

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