ALCOHOL

One of the most frequently repeated details from Caesar — the Germans who banned wine — turns out, on inspection, to be inaccurate. More precisely, it is only half true, and that half changes the whol...

Every other beer on the planet is a lager. And until 2011, nobody knew where the organism that makes it had come from.

In the summer of 1952, Helsinki was preparing to do something Finns had never done before: welcome the whole world at once. The solution to one practical problem—how to give tens of thousands of forei...

One hunt, one argument, one book — and for seventy years now humanity has been measuring itself against a yardstick invented by a brewery.

A Japanese chemist came to America to reinvent whiskey. America answered him with fire — perhaps literally.

Brazil built the world’s largest ethanol car market—and for decades hid a tiny gasoline tank beneath their hoods, without which the engine refused to start on a cold morning.

In 1795, one document, signed in the name of the Spanish king, legalized something that had existed without it for decades. This is the story of how a bureaucratic paper turned a regional trade into t...

One of the most famous figures in the history of alcohol — 40 degrees — acquired its author retroactively, half a century after it came into being.

There is one legal detail that, if you stop to think about it, sounds like the beginning of a joke: in the world’s largest country, beer was officially not considered an alcoholic product for a decade...

One beer can is too small a thing to change the world. But sometimes a small thing slips into the right gap between technology and an era, and then a chain reaction begins.

There is no mustachioed villain in this story ordering someone else’s beer removed from the shelves. There is something subtler — a system of points, prizes, and discounts designed so delicately that ...

The U.S. federal government has never banned eighteen-year-olds from drinking. It simply made it so that no state could afford to allow it.

“It came at a very important time for the industry”—and behind that restrained phrase lie four years in which an entire industry learned to live again.

Every sip of lager you take today owes its consistency to a decision made at a Danish brewery one hundred and forty years ago—and to a generosity that still seems unusual in business.

In the spring of 1986, a brewing empire decided beer was not enough and reached for whisky. The consequences of that move stretched across a decade and a half, brought four people to court, and foreve...

Two bottles—one dark, carbonated, with a red-white-and-blue label; the other clear, strong, with a Cyrillic inscription—did what diplomats had failed to do over twenty years of negotiations. They pass...

The same label—five arrows on the Rothschild coat of arms—has meant entirely different things in different years: membership in Moscow’s club of the chosen, an investment asset for a Hong Kong trader,...

February 1972: at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, the American delegation samples 53-proof Maotai, while Richard Nixon tries to understand why this particular drink—not cognac, not whisky—has...

An evening Formula 1 report brought a number: after Baku, Mercedes power units had overtaken Ferrari in championship wins, and a record that had belonged to Maranello for decades had moved to the Brit...

In 1928, Henry Ford set about clearing forest in Amazonia on a plot the size of a third of Belgium — to grow independence from British rubber and, at the same time, a model American worker. He got a r...

Imagine an empire stretching across deserts, mountains, and jungles for thousands of kilometers, but one that had no concept of coinage. In it, power was measured by your ability to feed, clothe, and ...

In April 2017, thousands of bars, restaurants, and liquor stores across India woke up outlaws—not because they'd broken trading rules, but because they found themselves on the wrong side of a ruler.

In 1863, a Corsican named Angelo Mariani infused South American coca leaves in Bordeaux wine and created a product that for the next half-century would simultaneously be medicine, tonic, stimulant, an...

One of the most recognizable kits in football history—Liverpool's red shirt with white Carlsberg lettering—vanished every time the team crossed the English Channel. A law written by a health minister ...

In 1985, Swedish vodka began turning into art. In 2008, it accidentally redrew borders on a map and discovered that historical truth does not equal political safety.

The American craft beer boom is not a story about how small brewers beat the system. It's a story about how they found a crack in it and turned that crack into the foundation of a new market. The crac...

This is a story about how a young republic taught its army to drink—and then taught it to stop. About why whiskey was issued alongside gunpowder, and why in 1832 Washington decided that gunpowder matt...

Scandinavian mead is a rare case where sources treat an ordinary fermented drink as a technical system: with a production line, theft chain, and usage protocol. This longread is a defect analysis of t...

In July 2010, two Scottish breweries simultaneously announced the release of the world's strongest beer — and the one actually brewing beer lost.

On the Giza plateau in 2580-2560 BCE, tens of thousands of workers received wages in a beverage with 2-5% alcohol content, and the result was a structure with a deviation from a perfect square of just...

In 1916, when the British Empire threw the Indian Army into the inferno of Mesopotamia, Muslim soldiers began going blind and dying not from Turkish bullets but from what stood in crates labeled "For ...

In 1982, British brewery Bass shipped a batch of non-alcoholic malt beverage Barbican to the Middle East — not out of altruism, but because Sharia law prohibits alcohol and a market of 57 million peop...

Jasper Newton "Jack" Daniel survived the Civil War, built an empire from corn and water, won gold at the World's Fair — and died from kicking a fireproof box that refused to open.

The Balkans have turned illegal distillation into a budget item, cultural code, and battlefield for European quality certificates.

In 1920, the United States pulled off a legal trick that would forever enter the textbooks as an exemplary legislator's error: they banned the production and sale of alcohol, but forgot to ban drinkin...

In 1979, a strange suspect appeared on the American market: vodka in pharmaceutical packaging without a label, with a name printed in black type directly on the glass. No golden crests, no double-head...

When America's two largest breweries decided to prove who was cleaner, they accidentally proved the opposite — that their entire product is brewed with industrial sweeteners consumers knew nothing abo...

January 2003. Smoke from bushfires blanketed the vineyards of Victoria and South Australia. Winemakers harvested their grapes, unaware that in a few months their wines would start coming back with com...

The Dutch invented cognac by accident — trying to solve a logistics problem with wine going sour. The French turned an engineering workaround into a luxury good. A story about how distillation technol...

The Great Pyramid has stood for 4500 years, and its foundation isn't just limestone. It's 17 thousand liters of beer per day.

This is a story about how a technology created for the hardest mineral on the planet became the last hope for the most volatile substance — alcohol in a glass bottle.

In 1966, an immigrant winemaker from Germany decided that a prestigious Australian competition would be won by wine aged in cheap American barrels. Seven years later he was proven right—and the indust...

When the Spanish stormed into Tenochtitlan, they encountered a paradox: a civilization that could build floating cities and perform astronomical calculations executed its citizens for public intoxicat...

There are products sold in two versions in different parts of the planet not because of marketing, but because two corporations simultaneously own the same name — and both are right.

May 7, 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev signed a document that would destroy a third of Soviet winemaking, crash the budget by 50+ billion rubles, and turn millions of citizens into underground chemists. The an...

Indian dark rum Old Monk is the only drink in history to break into the world's top three bestsellers without a single advertising campaign. It was created in 1954 by a retired military officer, and d...

For two hundred years, Europeans read someone else's edits to the diaries of a man who risked his head for notes on fermented rice.

In Australia’s history, there’s only ever been one successful military coup—and its driving force wasn’t gunpowder, but rum, transformed into a tool of financial and political pressure with the precis...

A state that declared war on alcohol to save the nation turned industrial spirits into a weapon of mass destruction—and kept strengthening the poison even after the first thousands of Americans died i...