The History of the World in Six glasses - Tom Standage

This is a delightful book from start to finish and for anyone seeking respectability while downing the coarsest of spirits , here's a book that provides an incredible amount of trivia for the accompanying conversations. To do complete justice to the book , there are 3 non-alcoholic drinks included, which by themselves have interesting histories to back them.

The book begins with a chapter on beer and its discovery. Its role as a drink which attained a centrality largely due to its uplifting effect, but also no less because the fermentation made the drink safer than what the water sources could afford. We move on to wine and its superiority over beer being established largely in the Mesopotamian civilization. Wine took on primacy in the Roman civilization and wine connoisseurs can take pride in tracing their art way back into history. The quality of wine was known to have been the cause of the demise of at least one Roman monarch directly. Wine marks the end of the age of discovery and we move on to the age of invention. The Arabs , their invasions and trades were the source of distillation which brought to fore a bunch of spirits like Rum , whisky and brandy. Rum was and brandy were key players in the slave trade, but an interesting anecdote was the first crude cocktail (grog) was a mixture of Rum, lemon juice , water and sugar and it provided a protection against scurvy for the British sailors which was in turn an advantage against the French navy which had Brandy as its official drink. Whisky took on a significant fan following with the invention of bourbon in the American south.

The chapters on coffee and tea also offer considerable nuggets of information. Coffee with its rather humble beginnings in Yemeni Sufi society soon took over Europe, esp England by storm and coffee houses were witnesses to scientific and political debates of the highest order. Tea on the other hand though innocuous in appearance had a hand in the ruin of the Chinese civilization, with the British seeking to compensate for their huge trading deficits with the illicit Opium trade. Both coffee and tea were healthy drinks because they needed the water to be boiled before the brew was consumed.

The last chapter is reserved for Coke which coincides with the ascendancy of American civilization. There are remarkable predecessors to the carbonated drink , with Joseph Priestley being one of the first to document a carbonated drink which soon took on the nomenclature of soda. Coca cola came about from the extract of cola leaves and the Koka nut (as simple as it gets). As with other invention stories, its largely a few iterations later that the drink became the rage of the nation. The World war established a world market for Coke and there was no looking back ever since.

This is pop history at its best. The erudition is all around , and its a breeze to read. I'd raise a toast to this one