Washington DC, home to the President of the USA and a lot of Ethiopian folks. Accordingly, the city is packed with restaurants that serve delicious Ethiopian food…and beverages. If you are looking for a culinary and cultural change from your normal bar, you can sample the beers, wines, and liquors of Ethiopia right here in America’s capital.
All civilizations must develop methods of storing water. Tribes across the American Southwest used baskets for the purpose. Using local materials, native peoples would weave baskets with long necks and then coat the inside with pitch from asphalt or tree resin. These water bottle baskets have been used for thousands of years.
Thomas Jefferson did so many great things in his life that they often cloud his alcoholic accomplishments. Jefferson was the greatest wine lover of his time! He also became a locally renowned brewer of ale. While he did not drink hard liquor, America’s first book on distillation was even dedicated to the President. His love of these drinks came from an understanding that they were farm products.
Hooch is a name for moonshine. The term comes from hoochenoo, the name of a native Alaskan tribe. The history of Western settlement in Alaska is underlined by a policy of prohibition for native peoples. Thanks to these restrictions, natives learned to smuggle and later distill their own spirits. Hoochenoo was the name of molasses moonshine, and was later adopted by the rest of America as ‘hooch’.
Modern soda was made possible by the discovery of an Englishman named Joseph Priestley. A close friend of Benjamin Franklin, the chemist discovered how to artificially introduce carbon dioxide into water. While early scientists thought the drink had medicinal benefits, the discovery heralded the start of the soda industry including the founding of Schweppe’s in 1783. Surprisingly, carbonated drinks had close ties with the founding fathers.
Germans developed lager style beer by fermenting in cellars for long periods of time. When immigrants arrived to America in the 1800s from Germany, they found brew-worthy caves in St. Louis. Thanks to its geography, Missouri became home to America’s lager industry, eventually producing beer giant Anheuser-Busch, which was founded out of a cave. St. Louis owes its early development to lager beer.
The Aztec strictly controlled the consumption of their choice alcohol, pulque. Only warriors, the elite, and the elderly were allowed to get drunk. One group south of Tenochtitlan, however, may have celebrated a festival known as the Pillahuana or Drunkenness of the Children. During this festival, children aged 9 and 10 became drunk on pulque for the first time. The celebration likely acted as a coming-of-age ceremony as well as a fertility rite.
Rather than just getting drunk, many native Mexican peoples liked to cut their booze with other intoxicating substances. Among them, peyote, morning glory seeds, mushrooms, and even a poisonous toad. These additions could influence the fermentation of alcohol, but also heightened the religious experience of drinking.
Even though many readily fermentable crops existed throughout North America, alcoholic beverages were almost entirely absent from the indigenous diet north of Mexico. A few reports, all of specious character, tell of weakly alcoholic drinks made from staples such as corn or maple sap. It was not until the arrival of Europeans that widespread fermentation of native crops began.
The Maya have long made a mead out of sacred cenote water, the honey of stingless bees, and the bark of the balché tree. The resulting drink, named balché, was used as a medicine, a social lubricant, and a religious intoxicant. When Spanish conquerors arrived, they attempted to eliminate the drink by killing the tree. In spite of them, the Maya continued and still continue to make balché today.
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