Drinking In Your World: Avoiding Alcohol Abuse For Writers

This originally appeared as a post on 11/28/10.

NOTE: The full text originally ran through three articles on my web site, each about a thousand words long. Since that’s just not practical for a blog, I’ve distilled (ahem) the most important points below.

It’s very easy to take a great deal for granted when writing a scene involving alcohol, but as with any other subject, generic assumptions are generally wrong. For example, a sailor swaggering into a generic tavern and ordering a glass of rum seems perfectly reasonable. However, in our world, rum was only developed fairly recently (seventeenth century); it did not exist during the Middle Ages or in medieval times. Even more important, rum is based on sugar cane syrup. If there aren’t any sugar cane plantations in your fictional world, there isn’t any rum. And if there are sugar cane plantations in a low-technology world, there probably ought to be slaves to run them; otherwise the price of rum will be so high as to make exporting it impractical, and it would only be a local drink, not one bought hundreds of miles away on another continent by a rough sailor.

And speaking of sailors, assuming that your world is advanced enough to have rum and unethical enough to have slaves, almost anything liquid imported from overseas was expensive enough to make further transport overland even more impractical (it’s a matter of load weight and limited space), so a generic tavern set in the middle of a continent, far from any ocean, wouldn’t stock rum–or, probably, most imported drinks–either.What would a generic Middle Ages tavern stock, then? Probably ale (not lager!) and wine. Beer and wine also served for a time as a currency. Keeping track of how much beer and bread workers received in return for their labor led to the development of writing; and the messy nature of a liquid currency led to the development of more stable trade methods.

Beer and wine both spoiled quickly, especially in hot climates; hops, which act as a preservative, may have been used by the early Mesopotamians, but the developing European beer industry did not really begin using hops in beer until around the 1400s. A mixture of spices called grut, which included leaves of bog myrtle or sweet gale, was more commonly used as a preservative instead. To preserve wine, a candle whose wick or body was primarily sulfur was burned in the empty barrel prior to the wine being decanted into it; before sulfur, resin or pitch were used, which must have given wine a really odd flavor.

In a fictional medieval world, then, beer and wine should commonly be sour and quick to spoil (corks were also invented much closer to modern times), and flavored with a wide range of ingredients; even used as a base to deliver unpleasant-tasting medicinal herbs.

Why did people drink beer and wine, if they tasted so nasty? Because it was safer than drinking water. Beer also helped with nutrition; the first beers retained a lot more yeast in the liquid, which added protein and vitamins to the drinker’s diet. Wine was a status symbol; much more expensive to produce, what it tasted like didn’t matter as much as the fact that one could afford to serve it in the first place.

Both beer and wine, in our world, were heavily developed and refined by monasteries. Much of the steady increase in quality over the centuries can be laid directly at their doors. A fictional culture without monasteries needs an alternate group dedicated to creating the highest quality out of simple ingredients, unless the writer wants his or her characters to eternally suffer in sour misery under inferior beverages.

Treating alcohol as a respected and vital ingredient in a fictional world’s development adds depth and believability, and can easily provide multiple story lines: a city which surrendered rather than lose its crop of wine grapes might secretly plan to rebel and crush the invaders from within. Fictional monasteries could set up a Monk’s Beer-Tasting Day to determine the best brewers in the land; what if someone gets poisoned at such an event?

The possibilities are endless, and I hope I’ve gotten you excited about trying out some new notions in your world-building sessions.

  

Suggested Resources: 

 

“The Story of Wine–New Illustrated Edition”, Hugh Johnson (Mitchell Beazley/Octopus Publishing Group, 2004) 

 

“A History of the World in 6 Glasses”, by Tom Standage (Walker & Company, 2005)

 

“Life in a Medieval Castle”, Joseph and Frances Gies (Harper & Row, 1974)

 

“Encyclopedia of Food and Culture, Vol. 1: Acceptance to Food Politics”, Scribner Library of Daily Life, Solomon H. Katz and Willaim Woys Weaver, Eds. (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2003)