Growing Money: The Alcohol Economy

I ended the previous segment of this series by commenting that alcohol has had a tremendous impact on human development throughout history. This article, part 2 of a planned 3-part set, looks at the economic side of that influence.

 Alcohol has been used to pay workers and buy slaves; it’s started wars and been used to celebrate the end of wars; it’s created and destroyed empires (the Roman Empire, for instance, went downhill partially because the lead in their winecups was dissolving into their drinks–and those folks really liked to drink). To this day, alcohol stands as an enduring, driving force behind countless enterprises (for example, ethanol is really just moonshine denatured with some gasoline) and an ever-evolving influence on nearly every aspect of the worldwide economic landscape.

Let’s go back to the beginning. Long before beer was put into those ubiquitous brown and green glass bottles, beer was used to pay workers in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt. Both those places were, according to Tom Standage (“A History of the World in 6 Glasses“), “founded on a surplus of cereal grains produced by organized agriculture on a massive scale.” In other words, they had more barley and wheat than they needed for bread, so they started turning it into beer. The early beers, as I noted in Part One, were more for nutrition than intoxication; they were probably more like a fermented gruel than a tasty drink. 

But when beer and wine finally moved beyond gruel and fruit juice into drinks with a kick, everything changed. Hugh Johnson, in “The Story of Wine,” comments that “the Greeks were able to trade wine for precious meals, the Romans for slaves, with a success that has a sinister echo in the activities of modern drug pushers–except that there is nothing remotely sinister about wine.” Egyptian tombs were built for important officials and craftsmen involved in wine making; in ancient Rome, amphoras of wine were practically mass-produced; Johnson notes that “even today in trading centres such as Delos . . . entire beaches consist of nothing but a mixture of white marble from ruined monuments and the red, sea-smoothed shards of broken wine containers.”

To give that last quote a certain perspective, the Romans also considered a slave to be worth one amphora of wine. Draw what conclusions you like.

For fiction writers: which cultures, in your world, honored alcohol highly in the beginning of their various histories? What did they use as a source material–i.e., did they use wheat, barley, rye, millet, grapes, apples, agave, or something else? Fermented drinks are nearly inevitable in any civilized world, but there have been a fair amount of alternative intoxicants floating around through the years; which segments of your world turned away from fermentation to more heavily explore mushrooms, marijuana, and opium? This is as essential a piece of information when building your world as knowing whether horses and camels developed as opposed to giant lizards and dragons.

Returning to our own history, wine arguably had a greater economic impact than beer; for example, Pompeii was the main source of wine for Rome, so when Vesuvius blew in AD 79, the industry in that area took a major hit. Rome recovered by planting vines everywhere they could, frantically replacing corn with grapes to ensure they could keep their vino flowing. Eventually Emperor Domitian had to step in and stop the overenthusiastic planting; not only were they running low on corn, they were overloaded with wine. Domitian “banned the planting of any new vineyards in Italy, and ordered the grubbing up of half the vines in Rome’s overseas provinces. In a separate edict he also banned the planting of small vineyards. . . .” (Johnson, “The Story of Wine”)

An even larger shock to the wine industry was the advent of Phylloxera; and unfortunately, the blame for that has to be laid more or less at America’s door. When America was settled, colonists naturally brought along their taste for wine; finding that the native grapes, while hardy, made lousy wine, they tried importing European vines. Unfortunately the imports died, even in conditions that should have been perfect for the most finicky vine; naturally, the colonists sent samples of their vines back over to Europe for the successful vintners to study what was going wrong.

Big mistake. Turned out the problem was a tiny bug that loved eating grapevine roots–and by sending the samples over to Europe, America also sent the bugs. European vines had no defense against the bug, and Europe’s wine industry hit the skids as vineyards died en masse; they only recovered by grafting European vines onto the tougher American grapevine roots. Today, only a handful of ungrafted wines are available from places such as Chile, where the Phylloxera never reached; if you enjoy wine, it’s worth tracking a couple versions down and doing a taste test to see if you detect a difference. If nothing else, you’ll be paying homage to a significant period in the history of wine.

Beer, on the other hand, has always been the common man’s drink; easily made from easily grown crops, so a volcano blowing up or a nasty little root-eating bug never decimated the industry as a whole. It has gone through some significant refinements (the backgrounds of which are really, truly, interesting), such as the introduction of hops as a preservative, which was mightily challenged by entrenched interests (big surprise).

Here’s an overview of that battle: The usual additive to beer was a mixture of herbs called grut. The folks who sold those herbs tended to be powerful men (often Church officials) who held a monopoly on the local grut production (as well as most breweries), and they didn’t want to give up that income. They lost out in the end only because they were trumped by economic reality: adding hops meant brewers could use less malt, which meant they could produce a lot more beer for a lot less money. Prohibitive laws and monopolies didn’t stand a chance against that kind of incentive, and by the early 1400s, even King Henry VI was on board in favor of hopped beer.

Hops did bring more vulnerability to the beer industry, unfortunately, as this plant is very susceptible to a variety of bugs, diseases, and molds. So the introduction of hops, while a blessing for shippers and merchants who needed beer that wouldn’t spoil in a week, did bring a fair amount of speculation and bust-boom-bust to the overall beer market from time to time.

For writers: what would happen if the main source of your culture’s favorite booze went under from something like Phylloxera, or if a favorite additive was no longer available? Who would profit? Who would be bankrupt if they couldn’t adapt fast enough? How would that change the economic landscape of your world?

Favorite drinks are like any other fashion in their fluctuations, but generally there’s a reason behind the change that has nothing to do with some behind the scenes maven dictating the Taste of the Year. When one industry bottoms out, another always rises to take its place; so when wine almost went under (including brandy, which is just distilled wine), public attention in Europe switched over to distilled liquors such as whiskey and gin.

And gin almost killed England in the eighteenth century. A combination of factors was involved: a war that introduced English soldiers to Dutch gin, uneven taxes that made beer more expensive than gin, and a Dutchman sitting on the English throne set it all in motion, but the end result was that gin became the lowest-price bottle on the shelf. Or in the bathtub, for that matter, since one of the laws allowed home distillation; and if that wasn’t enough incentive, distillers were exempt from having soldiers billeted on their household.

In “Alcoholica Esoterica,” Ian Lendler notes: “In 1689, all of England produced about half a million gallons of gin. By 1733, London alone produced and consumed about 6 million gallons. In 1750, London consumed 11 million gallons. And here’s the real kicker–at that point, London had a population of just over 600,000 people.” He also points out that these numbers do not take into account the private, untraceable sales of gin from home stills around the city.

That population dropped sharply; three out of four children died before the age of five. Trying to impose taxes to restrict the consumption of gin resulted in riots. Banning gin caused riots and a flourishing black market trade. What would have happened if a drought hadn’t intervened we can only imagine–and writers can gleefully play with. But a drought did come in, and with the main ingredients of gin (corn and barley), in scarce supply, gin scaled back to being popular but no longer a mad epidemic.

For writers: Addictions and addictive behaviors are a fact of human history and culture. What is the current intoxicant craze in your main fictional society? What is the government doing about it? Who is profiting by it? What started it, and what, if anything, will stop it? What addictive cycles have shaped your cultures? There will quite possibly always be tension between the descendants of rum-trade slavery and those of pre-Revolution American heritage; what sort of centuries-long tensions exist in your fictional world, and are any efforts being made to address them?

Once again, I find myself coming up against my self-imposed word limit with pages of information yet to cover. The sheer volume of information about the history of alcohol boggles the mind, and a 1500-word attempt to create an overview of any one aspect is doomed to be woefully inadequate. I can only hope that I’ve given some readers cause to look further into the excellent resources listed below, that I’ve given writers some ideas that help develop a robust fictional world, and that all my faithful readers come back for the next part of the series, which will look at the mythology and legends of alcohol.

Some suggested resources for further reading on this topic in the meanwhile:

“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 William Woys Weaver, Eds. (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2003)

“Alcoholica Esoterica“, Ian Lendler (Penguin Books, 2005)

“Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge: A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution”, Terence McKenna (Bantam, 1992)