Alcohol Around the World

Absence makes the heart grow fonder, they say. Well, I’ve been absent so long you may think my heart has stopped working. Fortunately, it’s still beating strong and has propelled me across Europe in the month-plus since my last post. I haven’t been slacking with my passion for alcohol. On the contrary, I’ve branched beyond whisky to explore drinks that are rather unique to their countries of origin. In the next couple of weeks, I will go into detail about those drink experiences. For now, I have a few musings about alcohol around the world.

I shouldn’t be surprised, but I am unexpectedly reminded that throughout the world alcohol has an important place in society. Certainly, we can wiggle our fingers at people who have a drinking problem or hang our heads in disappointment when we make our own alcohol-hazed decisions. These individual decisions, for better or worse, distract from the important role alcohol plays in society and the collective identity.

Alcohol is often an extension of a local way of life: the fermented apple juice that becomes calvados in orchards of northern France; weaker beer that better served the industrializing working class around their heavy machines in Pilzen, Czech Republic and became the light-bodied Pilsner; and plum palinca from Transylvania, Romania that reveals the region’s long political and cultural connection with neighboring Hungary. People drink these regional alcohols as much out of pride and tradition as they do to forget the rough times in life. Poles have their grass-infused vodka that has stood the test of time and the push and pull of neighboring powers like Germany and Russia. It’s a touchstone that binds them through the dark and helps them to celebrate the light.

It’s not surprising that America, of all places, had a “successful” temperance movement. The country is a veritable baby in this deeply historic world of ours. America didn’t have an alcohol tradition beyond that of what people brought from their individual countries. And when some of those immigrant groups, such as the Puritans, brought with them not a national drink, but a religious disdain for something they didn’t understand or couldn’t tolerate, then they had as great a chance to charge the national current as the whisky producers did in Scotland.

I guess they forgot to read their own book:

Proverbs 31

6 Give beer to those who are perishing,
wine to those who are in anguish;

7 let them drink and forget their poverty
and remember their misery no more.