We are all mad scientists when it comes to our favorite beverages. We mix portions of liquids, we add pinches of powders, we infuse the ineffable essences of choice plants into our cups. In our bar-caddy laboratories, we aim to control certain qualities: flavor, temperature, shelf-life, consistency, color, bioactivity, among others. Some of these changes have wonderful, even historically important, effects. Sugar sweetens coffee enough to have convinced the early workers of industrialization to drink it. Hops make beer shelf stable enough to allow brewers to store it rather than binge. While cultures around the world have their signature additives and mixers, the indigenous peoples of Mexico had some particularly bizarre ones.
From modern day Guatemala, all the way up to the mountains of Arizona and New Mexico, indigenous Americans have been fermenting alcohol for thousands of years. The source materials for native drinks were many: honey, palm sap, cactus fruit, agave sap, corn, and mesquite pods to name a few. Most of these sources of sugar were fermented on their own into basic beers and wines, but sometimes the brewer would add a little something to change the process. Many of these additives focused on increasing the intoxicating qualities of a beverage.
The native people in the northern reaches of this range tended to rely on intoxicants other than alcohol. Generally, these were hallucinogens. The buttons of peyote cactus, the seeds of the morning glory, and the leaves of nightshade all acted as ritual and spiritual entheogens for a wide variety of peoples. As it turns out, these substances were also put into alcoholic fermentations to infuse the resulting beer with the plants’ hallucinogenic properties.
The White Mountain Apache and the Tarahumara of the Chihuahua Desert both put the nightshade, datura innoxia, into brews. The Apache would make infusions of the Texas Mountain Lily, dematophyllum secundiflorum. The Tarahumara and the nomadic Otomi people used peyote buttons as fermentation additives.
Further south in Mexico, people were doing the same thing with other hallucinogens. Mexica people likely infused their agave spirits with psilocybin mushrooms while the Zapotec used morning glory seeds for the same purpose. As far south as Honduras, the Sumu people mixed alcohol with the leaves of tobacco–not a hallucinogen, but an intoxicant nonetheless.
These plants are well known today as ‘drugs’ and are consumed almost entirely for their intoxicating properties. Their presence in alcoholic beverages might easily be understood by modern sensibilities. Indeed, some drinks are still made like this such as piule with the seeds of Rivea corymbosa. Other additives to Mesoamerican alcohol, however, push the envelope.
In his comprehensive ethnology of ancient Mexican alcohols, Henry Bruman recorded several bizarre additions to otherwise normal brews. Pulque, fermented from agave sap, was usually cut with the roots of the agave to thicken the drink and promote fermentation. Bruman reports that sometimes the plant known by the Aztecs as tepopotl or little broom (because it was brushy and used to make brooms) was put into pulque. This was actually the plant baccharis which is poisonous to animals. Livestock would die after eating it.
Such a poisonous addition is only topped in bizarreness by an additive reported by an English friar, Thomas Gage, traveling in 17th century Guatemala. The Cakchiquel people, he wrote, added a live poisonous toad to their fermenting vats which they then closed and left to ferment for several weeks. The Englishman wrote, “This drink they call Chicha, which stinketh most filthily, and certainly is the cause of many Indians deaths, especially where they use the toads poyson with it.” It is one thing to put a snake in a bottle of strong spirits. It is entirely another to throw a live animal into a non-alcoholic drink and expect the human stomach to drink of it without dying of botulism.
Poison in alcohol, on purpose! Any brewer today would advise against adding poison to a fermenting vat of beer, but such things were sometimes practiced. Even the agave root that was added to all pulque fermentations may have had some chemicals that could cause heart attacks in stronger concentrations. So why would native Mexicans add these poisons to their booze?
Bruman presents the most likely answer to this question. After surveying all of the whacky and trippy plants that ancient Mexican people added to their alcohol, he notices that some have a common trait; they are all cardiac poisons. He writes:
Although definite information is lacking, it is dangerous to generalize, but what evidence there is leads one to suspect that heart poisons are the main physiologically active substances introduced into fermenting mixture through the addition of pulque roots and related products. According to Fieser, these heart poisons, like digitalis extract, act as excitants in small quantities and raise the pulse rate. Artificially heightened stimulation in ritual drunkenness, leading to extreme exhaustion when the frenzy is over, must intensify the ceremonial significance of the act.
While the hallucinogens are easy to explain (the drinkers just wanted to trip), these cardiac poisons are a bit harder. It is necessary to consider how and why these special infusions were consumed to understand why a human would want to drink something that would literally make her heart flutter on and off. These drinks were ritualistic. Alcoholic intoxication, and even the rush of trace amounts of cardiac poisons, enhanced religious activity and helped worshippers feel closer to their gods. The plants were additives to the alcohols, but the resulting admixtures were also additives, only this time to religion itself!
Bruman, Henry J., and Peter T. Furst. Alcohol in Ancient Mexico. Univ. of Utah Pr., 2001.
http://entheology.com/plants/turbina-corymbosa-ololiuqui/
Joyce, Rosemary A., and John S. Henderson. “Forming Mesoamerican taste: cacao consumption in formative period contexts.” Pre-Columbian Foodways. Springer, New York, NY, 2010. 157-173.
Smet, Peter De, and Jennifer A Loughmiller-Cardinal. “4P-9a: Drink/Enema Rituals in Ancient Maya Art. Part One: Text.” Ancient Maya drink/enema rituals (2020): n. pag. Print.
No one blinks an eye at the thought of scooping sugar into a cup of tea, but what of the other common pantry powder? Salt was the original addition to tea during China’s Tang Dynasty. The flavoring is even mentioned in the world’s first book on tea. Today, salt is still added to tea in Tibet and Kashmir.
Yet for something so uniquely American, the native succulent has been given a very Greek name. Agave was the mother of the king of Thebes who famously killed her own son, King Pentheus. In her defense, she only killed her son because she was blinded by a divine madness brought upon by the worship of the god of wine, Dionysos. That means your tequila is made from a plant named after a woman who got a little too crazy off the god of wine. So how did this Greek name end up on a Mexican bottle?
In Lancaster County, the Pennsylvania Dutch have a long heritage of making tea from foraged wild mint. Typically, “meadow tea” is made during the early months of summer when the mint is just growing. It was served as a refreshment in the fields at one time.
Figure out what kind of still you think you can build with your god-given abilities and resources. If you can weld, you can make pretty much anything. If you can solder, you can piece together a still as well. If you can’t do either of these things, call a friend who can. Consider, as well, what kind of alcohol you want to produce. Vodka? Make a reflux still. Gin? Maybe stick to a pot still.
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