Both the ancient Greeks and Romans shared a hankering for chilled wine. In the absence of refrigeration, these civilized drinkers resorted to snow. Snow was collected during the winter, stored in pits, and eventually plopped into wine. Many different kinds of tools developed to help the ancients chill their wines such as the psykter and the colum nivarium. The Romans liked their wine hot too.
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.
We always work with coffee, but how does coffee work? Eating ripe coffee berries won’t give us the kick that a cup of joe does. We need to play chemist and transform the naturally occurring compounds in the coffee plant into water soluble, aromatic chemicals before we can drink it. Once we take a sip, those compounds will go to work on our nervous system, helping us stay awake and finish our work day.
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.
Heard of wood alcohol? Don’t drink it. Wood alcohol, or methanol, is poisonous. It is produced by heating wood in a sealed container until it breaks down, releasing trace amounts of methanol. This process, destructive distillation, has been practiced since ancient times. The last 100 years, however, have seen the rise of industrial production of methanol and an increase in methanol poisonings.
Hot chocolate and whipped cream is only the newest in a long line of drinks that originated in Central America. Since humans began using cacao to make chocolate drinks, they have whipped it up to form foamy heads that delighted the tastes. The Spanish adopted these drinks during Conquest. Many foamy drinks are still found in Mexico today, and include tejate, bu’pu, popo, and pozol.
In the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts, indigenous peoples have long used the fruit of various cactus species to make wine. The prickly pear cactus makes a wine called Colonche in the Mexican Altiplano. In the Sonoran desert, natives use saguaro cactus fruit and organ pipe cactus fruit to make nawait wine. The fruit is almost always peeled and crushed and then left to ferment. These wines are still made today in some communities, but have lost some of their traditional meanings.
Ancient Mayan enemas were real. Mayans used hollow tools to pour alcohol into their anuses. This has been an accepted fact in Mesoamerican scholarship since the 1970s. The Mayan may have done this for health reasons as the wine had probiotics. They also likely attributed religious significance to the act, considering that alcohol had spiritual importance to them. Finally, they have have performed alcoholic enemas simply to get drunk quicker.
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