The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks Read Free

pyramid in Cholula, Mexico, depict people drinking pulque. The Aztec Codex Fejérváry-Mayer, one of the few pre-Columbian books not destroyed by the Spanish, portray Mayahuel, goddess of the agave, breast-feeding her drunken rabbit children, presumably offering them pulque instead of milk. She had four hundred children in all—the “Centzon Totochtin”—and they are known as the rabbit gods of pulque and intoxication.
    The strangest bit of evidence for pulque’s ancient origins comes from a botanist named Eric Callen who, in the 1950s, pioneered coprolite analysis, or the study of human feces found at archeological sites. He was ridiculed by his colleagues for his bizarre specialty, but he did make some astonishing finds concerning the diet of ancient people. He claimed that he could confirm the presence of “maguey beer” in two-thousand-year-old feces just from the odor of the rehydrated samples in his laboratory—which is either a testament to his sensitive nose or to the powerful bouquet of very old pulque.
    To make pulque, the flowering stalk of the agave is cut just as it starts to form. The plant waits its entire life for this moment, stockpiling sugars for a decade or more in anticipation of the emergence of this single appendage. Cutting it forces the base to swell without growing taller; at that point, the wound is covered and allowed to rest for several months while the sap builds. Then it is punctured again, causing the heart to rot. This rotten interior is scooped out and the inside of the cavity is repeatedly scraped, which irritates the plant so much that sap begins to flow profusely. Once it begins flowing, the sap is extracted every day by means of a rubber tube or, in the old days, a pipette made from a gourd called acocote. (The acocote, in case you are inclined to grow your own, is often made from the long, skinny segment of Lagenaria vulgaris, a common bottle gourd also used to make bowls and musical instruments.)
    A single agave can produce a gallon a day for months at a stretch, yielding over 250 gallons in all, far more than the plant would contain at any given time. Eventually the sap runs dry and the agave crumples and dies. (Agaves are monocarpic, meaning that they bloom only once and then expire, so this is not as much of a tragedy as it may seem.)
    The sap needs less than a day to ferment—historically, this took place in wooden barrels, pigskins, or goatskins—and then it is ready to drink. A bit of the previous batch, the “mother,” is usually added to start the process. It ferments quickly thanks in part to the naturally occurring bacteria Zymomonas mobilis that live on the agave and on other tropical plants that are made into alcohol, such as sugarcane, palms, and cacao. (These bacteria do such an efficientjob of producing ethanol that they are used to make biofuels today.) However, this microbe is entirely unwelcome in other brewing processes. It is the cause of “cider sickness,” a secondary fermentation that can ruin a batch of hard cider. It can spoil beer as well, releasing a nasty, sulfuric smell in a tainted batch. Still, it is the perfect catalyst for turning agave sap to pulque. Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the common brewing yeast, helps with fermentation, as does the bacterium Leuconostoc mesenteroides, which grows on vegetables and also ferments pickles and sauerkraut.
    These and other microorganisms bring about a quick, frothy fermentation. Pulque is low in alcohol—only 4–6 percent alcohol by volume (ABV)—and has a slightly sour flavor, like pears or bananas past their prime. It is something of an acquired taste. Spanish historian Francisco López de Gómara, writing in the sixteenth century, said: “There are no dead dogs, nor a bomb, that can clear a path as well as the smell of [pulque].” Gómara might have preferred pulque curado, which is pulque flavored with coconut, strawberry,