The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks by Amy Stewart Read Free Book Online

of congeners. Fortunately, each of these compounds has a different boiling point, so the secret is to heat the mixture and separate out the unwanted molecules as they boil away.
    Light a fire under a vat of beer or wine, and toxic fusel oils vaporize first. Distillers call this the “head” of the distillation. It smells like nail polish remover. At the Plymouth gin distillery, they recycle it as an industrial cleaner. Next, as the temperature continues to climb, comes the “heart,” the ethyl alcohol that is the goal of distillation. At the end of the run come the heavier molecules that contain additional toxins, but also some of the more flavorful compounds that make whiskey and brandy taste so good. This section, the “tail,” must be cut off as well, but distillers may leave a little in to flavor their spirit.
    Knowing where to cut the heads and tails is the mark of a good distiller. Homemade moonshine, bathtub gin, and other such amateurish attempts at distillation can be fatal because those dangerous compounds might not be extracted properly. Cheaper, mass-produced spirits may also produce worse hangovers if those toxins were not properly extracted or filtered out. Some liquors are double-or triple-distilled, meaning the heart is run back through the still to extract more heads or tails, and some, like vodka, are filtered through charcoal to remove the slightest impurity, leaving a clear and mostly odorless and tasteless spirit that is as close as possible to pure ethyl alcohol.

BUGS in BOOZE: a six-legged yeast delivery system
    Bugs in the brew? It is an age-old problem. Fermentation takes place in open tanks by necessity; otherwise, the pressure from the carbon dioxide would build to dangerous levels. But when a vat of fruit juice or grain mash is left to brew in an old barn or warehouse, bugs will surely find their way in. This is not always such a bad thing: lambic brewers in Brussels realize that some of their best strains of yeast come from insects falling from the rafters. In fact, yeast produce esters in order to attract insects, hoping they will pick up the yeast and move it around. This makes bugs unwitting accomplices in the dance between sugar and yeast.
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    HOW DID THEY GET THAT PEAR IN THE BOTTLE?
    PEAR
    Pyrus communis
rosaceae (rose family)
    Pear cider, or perry, is delightful when you can get it. The pears best suited to cider (called perry pears) tend to be small, bitter, dry, and more tannic than dessert pears. Pear cider is less common in part because pear trees are susceptible to a bacterial infection called fire blight, which is difficult to control; the disease has wiped out many old orchards. Pear trees also grow slowly and bear fruit later in life, making them a long-term investment rather than a quick crop, which is why farmers say, “Plant pears for your heirs.”
    Another issue is that once pears are picked they must be fermented immediately; they can’t be stored like cider apples can. Pears also contain a nonfermentable sugar called sorbitol, which adds sweetness but has one drawback: for people with sensitive systems, it acts as a laxative. One popular English pear variety, Blakeney Red, is also called Lightning Pear for the way it shoots through the system. This quirk has earned cider pears yet another folk saying: “Perry goes down like velvet, round like thunder and out like lightning.”
    Having said that, real pear cider—as opposed to apple cider with pear flavoring added—is well worth seeking out. It is sweet but not cloyingly so, and it has none of the tartness and acidity that some apple ciders possess.
    Pear brandy and eau-de-vie de poire are made in much the same way that apple brandy is, by distilling fermented pear mash or juice. Poire Williams is a popular French brandy made from Williams pears, which are known in the United States as Bartlett. It takes about thirty pounds of pears to create one bottle—and if that