Cows have lots of stomachs. You would too if you ate grass all day. One of those stomachs is actually a rumen, a special digestive organ that allows them to regurgitate and remasticate their food. For this reason, cows and animals like them are called ruminants. Sheep, deer, and even giraffes all swallow their food, only to spit it back up out of their special rumen stomachs to be chewed again. They can chew and swallow the same food 50-70 times before it passes to the next stomach for more traditional digestion (ruminantdigestivesystem.com). In doing this, the animals break down the fiber of their rough food sources with mechanical and chemical digestion. Once the fibers in grass or leaves are broken down, they will ferment in the rumen with the help of a diverse microbial population that make more biologically useful compounds which the animals can use as energy. In this process, the animal creates volatile fatty acids for energy and burps out the by-product gases produced during fermentation (ruminantdigestivesystem.com). Unexpectedly, this process is remarkably similar to the earliest human efforts to make booze out of complex starches.
These animals chew to survive and rely on fermentation to produce their energy. If we tweak this process slightly, we arrive at some of the earliest human forays into fermenting complex starches as well. We chewed to brew. In the human context, the rumen organ becomes an earthen vat, the microbial population is airborne yeast, and the end product is alcohol. Humans chewed (some still do) cereals and other starches repetitively and spit them into communal vats where salivary amylase could perform saccharification and thus enable fermentation to occur. Starches must be broken down into simple sugars for yeast to digest them into alcohol and carbon dioxide. It just so happens that our saliva can make that happen.
In Brazil, traditional beverages known generally as cauim (pronounced kawi) are made from a wide range of source materials including cassava, pumpkin, cotton seeds, and corn (Ramos). The drink is a nutritional staple and is typically consumed in a non-alcoholic form. During harvest season, a time of celebration, the drink is fermented. Women oversee this process and stimulate the fermentation by providing the source yeast and bacteria. They do this by chewing sweet potato and spitting the pulp into the boiled vat of non-alcoholic cauim (Ramos). The mixture is fermented in an open vat for 1-2 days. The chewing provides the microculture or yeast and bacteria necessary to trigger this fermentation and help break down complex molecules into simple sugars.
On the other side of the world, Japanese have been making kuchikamizake since ancient times. This rice wine is the ancestor of today’s sake. Translated as “mouth-chewed sake,” it is traditionally made from rice chewed by young, virginal women. Allegedly, the microbial population of younger people’s mouths is more conducive to a tasty final product (Vice). It was not until later that the Japanese found lactic acid bacteria could facilitate the saccharification process more efficiently than female saliva could. The young Japanese women who chew this rice are no different from the Tapirapé of Brazil. The complex starches in rice or cassava need salivary amylase to transform them into simple sugars that yeast can digest. The end result in either case is alcohol.
Contradicting the distinguished book Alcohol in Ancient Mexico by Henry J Bruman, the native people who lived along the Colorado River made a chew-brew from the pods of the mesquite tree. He had proposed that indigenous American populations only used chewing methods south of the Yucatan peninsula. These people in today’s South Western America took mesquite pods and soaked them in a vat. Individuals would take them out to chew them and suck out all the liquor, only to spit the remains back into the vat. It is reported that one mesquite pod could be chewed over 20 times (Cherrington, 7). This same drink could be made without the chewing, “Sometimes the Indians soaked the flour in water to make atole, a gruel-like sweet drink. If the infusion was allowed to ferment it resulted in an intoxicating drink of considerable alcohol content.” (McNamee, 32) Chewing operates mechanically just like pounding the pods into a flour to be used for food or drink.
Saliva may well be the inspiration for many of our alcoholic drinks today. Simple sugars from fruit juices can spontaneously ferment without the addition of anything thanks to natural yeasts in the air. Starchier foods that we produce in much larger quantities, however, will not ferment without some help. Before specific yeasts and bacteria were isolated and reproduced in fermentations that were able to break down starches into simple sugars, saliva was our only option. Societies that did not know about malting or sprouting as a process which converted starch to sugar, typically resorted to mastication. To our modern sensibilities, a vat full of spit and booze is revolting. More ancient cultures were not so hung up on this salivary repulsion. Perhaps, they even worked around it by allocating the role of chewing to a specific group or time period. Now, if you make your bartender mad and she spits in your drink, consider it as just another mouth contributing to the long tradition of making alcoholic drinks with saliva.
Bruman, Henry J., and Peter T. Furst. Alcohol in Ancient Mexico. Univ. of Utah Pr., 2001.
Cherrington, Ernest H. Standard Encyclopedia of the Alcohol Problem. Westerville, OH, American Issue Publishing Company, 1925-1927, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001743985. Accessed on 5/19/2020.
McNamee, Gregory. Tortillas Tiswin & T-Bones: A Food History of the Southwest. University of New Mexico Press, 2017.
Nile, Shivraj Hariram. “The Nutritional, Biochemical and Health Effects of Makgeolli – a Traditional Korean Fermented Cereal Beverage.” Journal of the Institute of Brewing, vol. 121, no. 4, 2015, pp. 457–463., doi:10.1002/jib.264.
Ramos, Cíntia Lacerda, et al. “Determination of Dynamic Characteristics of Microbiota in a Fermented Beverage Produced by Brazilian Amerindians Using Culture-Dependent and Culture-Independent Methods.” International Journal of Food Microbiology, vol. 140, no. 2-3, 2010, pp. 225–231., doi:10.1016/j.ijfoodmicro.2010.03.029.
“Rumen Fermentation.” Rumen Microorganisms, 15 June 2017,
ruminantdigestivesystem.com/rumen-environment/rumen-fermentation/.
“Stanford University Students Try Their Hand at Making Beer Using an Ancient Chinese Recipe.” Study International, 8 Feb. 2017, www.studyinternational.com/news/stanford-university-students-try-their-hand-at-making-beer-using-an-ancient-chinese-recipe/.
“Why Sake Used to Be Made with the Spit of Japanese Virgins.” VICE, www.vice.com/en/article/vvkz8a/why-sake-used-to-be-made-with-the-spit-of-japanese-virgins.
Every year, in the kingdom of Eswatini, women come together to express their loyalty to the Royal Family. The occasion is called the Buganu Festival, and is named after a traditional wine made from the marula fruit. Swazi women are the traditional brewers of the wine, and come together at the festival with a sense of pride and empowerment.
Beef Tea. Perhaps an idea that has never crossed your mind, but also a familiar pantry item. Doctors during the 1800s regularly gave patients beef tea, an infusion of water, beef, and salt. The drink was supposed to help sick patients recover and eventually opened the market to a variety of “meat extract” products for the health. In reality, it was just a kind of beef broth.
A review of cook books and culinary histories in Savannah and Charleston reveals a variety of herbal teas, complex punches, and foraged fermentable. While sweet tea appears in these texts, it seems that the drinks of the Low Country past were far more colorful.
Pittsburgh Brewing Co. is now opening a distillery, Iron City Distilling, guided by the expertise of distiller Matt Strickland. The new distillery will produce rye, single malt, and bourbon, contributing to the region’s long history of whiskey making. Strickland talks innovation in whiskey, the globalization of distillation, and what it means to distill with regional heritage in mind.
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