Why alcohol

People were fermenting drinks before anyone wrote a sentence down. The earliest evidence is chemical, left in the clay. In the Levant, residue in stone mortars from roughly thirteen thousand years ago has been read as a beer-like brew, and scholars still argue about how sure that reading is. At Jiahu, in China, jars from about nine thousand years ago held a mixed ferment of rice, honey, and fruit. In the Caucasus, jars from about eight thousand years ago held grape wine. Distilling comes much later. For most of the human story, alcohol meant a fermented drink: beer, wine, cider, palm wine, pulque. Weaker than a spirit, taken with food, and ordinary.

What the oldest writing actually says

When writing arrives, the drink is already a craft and a goddess. A Sumerian hymn to Ninkasi, from about four thousand years ago, praises the goddess of beer and, along the way, tells you how to brew it. In Egypt, beer was wages, a meal, and an offering. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the wild man Enkidu drinks beer, becomes cheerful, and “becomes human.” The story’s point is not that he got drunk. It is that the shared drink is one of the things that brings him into company.

A libation is older than the cocktail and simpler. You pour a little out — to a god, an ancestor, the ground — before anyone drinks. Greece and Rome did this as a matter of course. So did the cultures those empires met, and many still do. The drink was not only refreshment. It was a way to include someone who was not at the table.

The Greeks also had a god, Dionysus, for the part of wine that moves a person off their ordinary track: talkative, musical, briefly less defended. They did not admire drinking it straight. At a symposium the wine went into a krater and was cut with water, and someone decided the strength for the evening. The altered hour had a container and a ratio. That is the serious version of the story people tell, about a drink that lets you speak toward something larger than yourself. It was done in a room, with other people, at a strength that had been chosen. It was not a dare.

Why it feels good

This course is interested in the pleasurable dose, not in the person who kept going. At that first dose, ethanol does a few plain things, and they are why the glass has lasted.

• The shoulders drop. Alcohol increases the effect of GABA, the neurotransmitter that quiets the nervous system, and it softens glutamate, which is the one that keeps you keyed up. Conversation gets easier. That is the relaxation people mean.
• It feels worth doing. A modest pour raises dopamine and the body’s own opioids, which is the warmth and the “yes” before you have swallowed twice. The same system is why another drink asks for another. The pleasure and the pull are not separate mechanisms.
• The skin warms. Blood moves outward. You feel the glow even though the feeling is not quite the same thing as being warmer.
• Aroma opens. Ethanol carries smells that water holds back, which is why a spirit has a perfume at all, and why a few drops of water often make a whiskey more itself. The pleasure is in the nose as much as in the effect.
• Food and company get better. A bitter or an acid drink before a meal wakes the appetite. A shared pour gives the table a pace. Most cultures that kept alcohol kept it next to food and next to other people, which is a clue about the dose they meant.

Past that dose the same chemistry stops being pleasure. Speech thickens, the palate goes numb, and the drink you built with care can’t be tasted. This course stops at the glass where you can still taste it. The ratios, the ice, and the size of the serve are how you stay there. More is not more of the good part.