Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
on
Thank you Lucinda. And save a little bit of that
special juice for me when I come over. Anyway, great to have you on the program
and now we're going to be turning our attention now to
more special juices. We're joined by Amy Stewart who is the author of many books
Welcome back, I should first say, to Central Texas Gardener.
It's always good to be back in Austin
We love having you, and your new project
"The Drunken Botanist" - and it's
loaded with lots of information about
plants and the ways that we imbibe them.
That's right, yes
What led to this project?
Like many great ideas it was born in a bar
...you may be surprised to learn
Uh, not too surprised given the subject matter
Right, right. Yeah I just got into a conversation about gin and all the plants
that go into gin, and pretty soon I was looking at everything behind the bar
saying, "there's barley, there's corn, there's sugar cane, there's agave"
Everything in every one of these bottles as a plant! Which is kind of
fascinating when you think about it
Well it is fascinating, but it shouldn't be too surprising, because
because, after all, we lived close to nature for hundreds of thousands of years
and the we've been drinking all that time I think
We have, we have. I interviewed an archaeologist who analyzes the
residue on pottery shards to see what people were drinking 10,000 years ago
and then recreates those so you can sip them
Mead
Right, exactly
Lot's of mead
Well let's just dive in and start talking about some of these fascinating
relationships between the plants and the drinks
There are a lot of very common plants
agriculturally common plants like barley that are
certainly used. I understand barley has a particularly rich history when it comes
to its relationship with alcoholic beverages
Interestingly, yes
So the way we make grains into alcohol in the first place is that we take the
starch in the grain. So grain is just a seed,
right? That's all it is. But the plant puts all the starch in there so
that when the grain falls to the ground and gets wet
there are these enzymes inside the grain that bust the starch into sugar so
that the little baby plant has something to eat before can make its own food
Well it turns out that barley is uniquely good at that process
a breaking starch into sugar. So you get barley wet
and it starts to germinate. The Brewers call this malting
So that's what malted barley is. They are little seeds that are just starting to sprout
And if you put a little bit of barley in with corn or wheat or rye or
any other grain,
those enzymes will leave the barley and go to work on the corn and the wheat and
everything else
So a little bit a barley ends up in a lot of different drinks because it's
so good at releasing the sugar
Fascinating, so it
plays a role in many alcoholic beverages
It does, but in scotch in particular barley has this
interesting role. So they get it wet, it starts to put out little roots
and little green shoots, and then they have to stop that process or they'll end up
with the room full plants instead of whiskey
So how do you stop it? You dry it out. What do you dry it out with? Well in
Scotland they would make a fire out of
peat logs, they'd go out and cut some peat from the peat bog
because that's all they had to make fire with. And that's where that smoky flavor in scotch
comes from
It's from the smoke that has to go through to stop the germination process
so you don't end up with these big plants that,
you know, you can't make Whiskey of out of
Well fascinating, so it's dependent on peat,
one of the humblest of all plants , and barley
Right, and today the Scotch industry is
more refined and so they use
the smallest amount of peat they need and they put it through
pipes so that they use as little of it as possible to get that flavor
There's only so much peat in Scotland after all
And they use very
little of it, but get a lot of flavor
Well I think that's fascinating
Another very common plant, the one that every American is
familiar with is - corn - has an interesting relationship to alcohol
as well, and an ancient one.
Right, so here's the thing with corn.
It's a new-world plant
and native people in South America have been making *** with it for
thousands and thousands of years, but not from the ears
They were actually not from the ears?
Not from the ears, from the sugar in the stock
So they were growing it like sugar cane, which is another big grass. They're both
grasses and they were cultivating for the sugar in the stock
and we know this because
you can look at archaeological sites and see the remnants of people
chewing little bits of the stock just to get
a source of sugar, and you can still find those little - they call them quids, little
chewed up bits of stock. But they made wine. They would press
the sweet juice out of the stalk and make corn stalk wine
Ferment the corn stalk... fascinating.
Even the colonists did a little corn stalk wine
before they figured out, "Oh wait, we know a better way to do this"
"We come from Scotland and Ireland. We know what to do with this grain"
And they have since turned corn into something else
altogether, right?
Right. Well so you know
the great American spirit, bourbon, was born. It has to be
51% corn if you're going to call it bourbon, that's the law
So that's where our great American whiskey comes from
And also even ***! Tito's ***, as an example. A great Austin spirit
Absolutely, it's conquering the nation
even some gins are based in corn
So you see it a lot
Interesting, gin and corn...
Who knew, right?
Well the book is divided into thirds. The first deals with the kind of subject
we're talking about right now, which is
different things that are turned
into alcoholic beverages, but the the middle section deals with
the things that are added to, to add distinctive flavoring
But many of these started as medicines, correct?
Right. The original reason we added plants to alcohol
was to create medicine. There were no pills, so what you would do is you'd take plants
and soak them in alcohol and extract the active ingredients,
put it on the shelf, and give that to somebody when they were sick
So for instance, the bark of the cinchona tree is very high
in quinine, which
is a malaria treatment - very important. Well we also put it in tonic
water so there's your gin and tonic
and there's all kinds a bitter European herbal liquors that have a
little bit quiine in them
So you start out soaking it in alcohol, and then you think to yourself
"If I put a little sugar in this my patients might actually drink it"
And then it's a very short step from that to putting a little of your
"medicine"
into a cocktail, putting it into your brandy.
Grandpa's special medicine
Right, so we're still drinking these very medicinal plants, but I have to warn you
Do not let yourself think that your cocktail is a health drink, just because...
It doesn't work that way. The doses are much too small
Okay, well quinine is one. Some other plants...
anise, or what we think of as a licorice flavor
Right, it gets used in all kinds of spirits. I think it was originally
put into alcohol as something to sort of settle the stomach
So you go to Europe, and in France you can get a pastis
And in Greece you can get ouzo
Throughout many European countries you can get absinthe
you go to New Orleans...
Wait, back up to absent here for a minute now
Isn't danger stuff?
No! It's another one of these licorice-flavored
herbal... meant to be an after dinner drink that settles the stomach
Absinthe has wormwood in it, artemisia absinthium
Which at ridiculously high doses could cause
seizures and other problems. But so could ordinary garden sage, and we don't shy
away from putting sage in our
Thanksgiving stuffing. So, absolutely
no reason to fear wormwood, but but absinthe happens we very high in alcohol
So it's almost eighty percent alcohol usually, which is twice as much as jin or ***
So people were getting alcohol poisoning, is what was going on
That would explain...
You add a lot of water to absinth before you drink it
Well, not many of us are going to be growing wormwood in our gardens
It's a pretty plant. Artemesia, a mediterranean herb
Drought tolerant, and probably will take over the universe
like most artemisias
Yes exactly
But we do want to spend a little bit of time talking about the third part of the book
which has to do with plants we can use in our gardens
And again, things that
are used in the context of your book here, of drinks...
Lavender. I'm trying to imagine a lavender drink
Oh... you should've been with us a couple days ago when I was making lavender
cocktails for everybody
So I think that lavender and some of these other
floral herbs like scented geraniums
that maybe smell like a roses, are great in cocktails. You can do a
simple syrup - just equal parts sugar and water and you heat it up til the sugar
melts and throw a bunch a lavender in and let steep for an hour or two
That lavender flavor in gin, for instance, or in a *** drink
is really just bright and floral and interesting and it tastes just like the
plant smells but in a really wonderful way
So I love using floral stuff in cocktails
Well the thought of a summer cocktail with a lavender
taste to it sounds really good to me
yeah I make a lavender
version of gin and tonic, so a fizzy gin drink that tastes like lavender
Sounds great, well again our guest is Amy Stewart
The book is The Drunken Botanist
You're doing very well for a drunken botanist
Remarkably sober, huh? For you
Thank you so much, and on behalf of all
of our viewers, thanks so much for
stopping back by. It's a real pleasure to have you with us
Thanks!
Coming up next, it's our friend Daphne