Focus 580; A History of the World in 6 Glasses

Somebody once said and I'm sure you're familiar with this quote probably are. Tell me what you eat and I will tell you who you are. This morning in this hour of focus we'll see if we can extend this kind of analysis to a choice of beverage and our guest for the program is Tom Standage she is the technology editor at The Economist magazine and he's authored a new book that takes a look at six of the world's most significant beverages beer wine spirits coffee tea and cola and how they can be viewed as important technological advancements that reflected the societies that produced them. And in some cases did indeed change the political and economic landscape of the times. The book is titled A History Of The World in Six Glasses. Walker is the publisher for the book and our guest Tom Standage is here now and spending some time in the United States talking about the book he makes his home in Greenwich in England. It is out on the West Coast this morning and was good enough to spend some time with us on the phone to talk about it. He is as I mentioned his technology editor at The Economist He's author of a number of books including The Turk the Neptune file and the

Victorian Internet which was made into a documentary how the Victorians wired the world. He's written about science. Technology for many magazines and newspapers including Wired The Guardian The Daily Telegraph and he is as I said joining us this morning by phone as we talk. Questions are welcome. People who are listening can call in. All you have to do is use the regular number here in Champaign Urbana 3 3 3 9 4 5 5. We do also have a toll free line that's good anywhere that you can hear us and that is 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 here in Champaign Urbana and toll free 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5 at any point here people can call in. We just ask callers to try to be brief so we can keep our program moving but otherwise anyone is welcome. Mr. Standage Hello. Good morning. Thanks for talking with us. We appreciate it. It did. It was there. Something in particular that started you thinking about

beverages as technology. I know that sort of came later. And what the initial the impetus came from was a newspaper article about a wine a South African wine as it happens which was very very popular in the 19th century and it was among other people who liked it it was the Polian favorite wine. And this made me sort of think of Napoleon in a different way because you think of him normally as a general striding around the battlefield. And you don't think of him going home at the end of the day and saying oh I've got open a bottle of wine. And so I started to wonder what other people in history would have drunk at the end of the day when they were being historical figures as it were. And so I started to look at which drinks were popular at which times. And it turned. Not that that different drugs were dominant in different areas of history. And so I ended up with this chronology which sort of replaces the stone age on age from that sort of approach with the beer age the wine age the spirits age and so on.

It was only later that I noticed that as I was writing the book that I had to explain why each drink displaced the previous drink. And that's very much like the story of why one technology displaces another I mean why do people switch from VHS to DVD or whatever. And I realized that really what I had here was a classic sort of technology story where you have competing technologies and then one of them either becomes more successful than another. It turned out after the fact to be rather more like my technology coverage of The Economist than I that I expect it to be. One of the things I think is interesting and I guess is that not a particularly profound sort of insight is that the the different drinks do seem to have a personality or perhaps it is that we associate the personality with the kind of people that might say that this is what this is my favorite I would rather have a glass of wine than a beer I'd rather have a cup of coffee than a cup of tea. And what's interesting to me is when you look at how it is that these beverages developed and and who it was that developed them. The there there is great sort of continuity in this idea of the personality of the beverage and the drinker

that goes all the way back to the. Probably to the beginnings of these things and we still associate those qualities with the beverage in the drinker today. Yes I mean that was one of the things Dr. tickly enjoyed finding out which is that many of the customs and sort of values associated with drinks have extremely ancient origins. So when you think of beer today you may think of a sort of rather fatalistic you know Homer Simpson sort of character who says oh you know everything's got a drug about it will drink beer but that's actually very much the mentality of the Samarian culture and Mesopotamia of what is now modern Iraq where which was one of the earliest beer drinking cultures. And similarly you know when you think of coffee you think of a sort of intellectual and you think of somebody who's very wired and. And you have already a business person and a coffee was first embraced in the west within coffee houses where businessmen and scientists used to meet so oddly you do get this sort of continuity of the of the culture surrounding the drink. And and I think that's great and that's really what I've tried to.

That's why I think drinks are informative because what I'm trying to do with this book is encourage people to actually see the history in the drink. I have a cup of coffee right in front of me here now and now whenever I drink coffee you know I can't help but think about the particular historical period where coffee was in there in the driving seat of history and that's what I'm hoping other people will do and that they will love they will they will sort of see history in these otherwise rather mundane everyday object. Well when we talk a little bit about all of these things the beginning as you do with beer. Which is interesting enough ends up being associated with people becoming settled people becoming farmers and probably those other things happen first but there is a very strong connection between between grain fermentation making beer and also people settling down people staying in one place and people in becoming involved in agriculture. Yes I mean all of these things go together the establishment of civilizations. The switch from being a hunter

gatherer to a settled lifestyle. The rise of writing and the making of they all happen in the same part of the world which is the fertile crescent of the ancient Near East. And you get the first civilizations of Mesopotamia and also of ancient Egypt. And yet I don't think it is a coincidence at all because you get the first civilizations there because those are the best places for wild grain in particular Bali and towards the end of the ice age of about 10000 8000 B.C. people start to collect this barley because if you if you collect it and store it in a pit then it's an insurance policy against a future food shortage. So it's a very sensible thing to do. The trouble then of course is you can't really go very far from your store of grain and so you get a more settled society where you start to have people settle down in in their semi permanent and then permanent villages around their stores of grain and of course one of things that happens with your store growing is that the water gets into it and it ferments and returns it to beer and once this happened accidentally people

started trying to make it happen deliberately. And so you get the phenomenon that settlement and beer go together and in fact if you had two settlements of farmers because they then started to cultivate the barley deliberately and one of them knew about beer drinking and the other one didn't. The beer drinking village would actually have had the advantage because beer the baking of beer has the effect of purifying the water supply and even in a small settlement the water quickly becomes contaminated. Has another advantage which is it's very nutritious it has a vitamin B in it and if you're eating less meat which you probably are because you're not doing as much hunting then that's a good thing. So ultimately bear gives an advantage to those people who started to drink. And as a result the first civilizations in Mesopotamia and Egypt are founded by beer drinkers and in those cultures beer is the universal regular. Everybody drinks it even the children. And in order to keep track of the supply of grain and bread and beer which are made from it and the use of the currency so that she taken in by the Treasury and paid out to the workers to build irrigation systems even to build the pyramids that writing has to be invented to

keep track of it so right at the earliest samples of writing from Mesopotamia contain the symbol for beer. Very frequently because they were there it was part of their development to record the distribution of beer. You can. Certainly make alcoholic beverage with grain You can also of course make it with fruit you can make it with honey. That's what mead is. And probably people also did these things too. Is there any way to know which came first was beer really the first alcoholic beverage that people made. That's a very good question of course of course. This is all 6000 years old before writing so we don't have any solid evidence. I am inclined to think that Bear was the first widely available alcoholic drink you probably could have made me eat at the same time so some people say meat is. And I can see I can see where they're coming from. The trouble with meat is that you can't scale up the production in the way that you can with beer because you need to have you know your your honey bees and so forth. So a small about of wild honey could be baited to it to

be. But if you wanted to feed the thousands of people who were building the pyramids that you would be able to give them more meat whereas they were given four lives a bread and eight pints of beer a day. So I think have made beer probably of comparable antiquity but that band was the dominant drink in that period simply because you could you could mass produce it. Wine comes along later. I don't think you could make wine without pottery and pottery only shows up in the middle east at about. Six millennia B.C. and you would then have got wind almost immediately as soon as people tried to store grapes in clay pots then they would have cemented and I thought that's how wine was originally made in the mountains of northern Iran so I think I think wine probably comes a bit lighter and that's why I have the first of my age is as the beer age. Whenever I hear about the beer of the ancient world what the Egyptians would have made in Mesopotamia is we have made one of the things I wonder is would if you set down a bowl of this or a mug or whatever it is that they would have like to drink it out of in front of us today

what it would be like. What would we recognize that it be or certainly I wouldn't think that it would be like whatever one's favorite beer today you know it wouldn't be like a bass. But I wonder what would it be like. Well I was very into doing it finding this out when I was when I was writing the book so a number of people have reconstructed Samarian and Egyptian beer and it would have been drug initially out of big pots with that with straws. This is before they were cops I'm dumb I don't know it was a way of sort of everyone sharing the drink that would have consumed in Mesopotamia. And anyway the key thing that this that distinguishes ancient beer from modern bit is that it. In the 13th century hops became an almost universal ingredient in beer and ancient beer so for most of human history did not have hopes in it. So if you want to see what it's like you need to find one of the rather raw unhoped beers and they are they do exist and mainly they are deliberate recreations of old beers. So I've actually got one in my bag and I'm carrying it around with me but I'm telling people about the

books that the KGB what I'm doing face to face. Radio interviews I spritz all people say hey you want to try it. It's a great disappointment to me that I could do that with you now. But I can tell you a bit about what it tastes like instead of the hopes it has Juniper and nettles to balance the taste of the molds so it's recognizably a beer but it tastes sort of sweet and y Nia than a modern beer because you don't have the bitterness of the hops to to to balance the taste of the malt so. It's recognizable as big but at the same time it's clearly different and is the alcohol content approximately when a contemporary beer would have. There was no single answer that just as there's no single answer today. It's very clear from the Egyptian Mesopotamian sources that they made about 15 different kinds of beer. And so they made strong beds for special occasions they made particular beers for religious use. They made wheat beer which we would call small beer for consumption by children. So I mean there were there were huge ranges of beers just as there are also day for very very like to very dark and they could vary how much smoke

they were putting in and how much wheat they were putting in so that there wasn't as there wasn't a single ounce or so some of that would have been as strong as strong beers but I suspect that the vast majority of beer was probably quite weak because it wasn't fermented for very long and because people were drinking it all the time it was the it was the universal drink so they couldn't be you know under the influence over time so I suspect a lot of it was kind of one or two percent alcohol and it was it was really as much a food as a drink and it was consumed by everybody. Well it's interesting because that points to that we think about or at least probably a lot of people would think about alcoholic beverages being somehow debilitating and drinking them not a good thing. But when you consider the fact that through time one of the reasons one of the benefits that some of these beverages would have been the fact that it was safer to drink them than it was to drink water that there would also be some prep some positive a connection between health and consumption of these beverages. Yes absolutely. That was one of the big motivations for consuming these drinks. Because when you boil the water to make to make beer that it's

that helps to have a booth. And you know stays in the water. But City Wine has antibacterial properties of its own and it was it was conceived by the Greeks and Romans mixed with water and that had the effect of killing nasty things in the water as well so yes this was very much part of the appeal of these drinks. Our guest in this hour focus 580 Tom Standage he is the author of the recent book A History Of The World in Six Glasses it is published by Walker and company and it is a way of looking at history and the development of technology by looking at six beverages beer wine spirits coffee tea and carbonated soda. He works with The Economist magazine he's technology editor at The Economist and he is spending some time now in the United States to talk about his book History of the World in Six Glasses. If you'd like to read it you can head out to the bookstore and take a look at it. Questions are also welcome here. 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 toll free 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5. Well let's. Talk a little bit about wine. What what sort of advancements in

technology would have been necessary to get you from the age of beer to the age of one. Well wind as I said earlier was it was almost as ancient as beer. But but it was never as widespread and there was too early civilizations of the Near East and this is because they were both in rather inappropriate climates for the growing grape vines and so instead the wind had to be imported. And this cost rather a lot of money and therefore wind was strictly for the elite. So King Scorpion was an early Pharaoh of Egypt for example. He was buried with 700 jars of wine in his tomb and they were imported from the Holy Land as it later was from the 11th as I should probably say. And and that part of the world was much more suitable for for viticulture So that shows you that that wind was associated with status because it was rare. And essentially what happened in the in the late. Well yes it during the first millennium B.C. is that wind became more widely available to senses it became more widely of 8. While socially in the Syrian culture and then later in Greek

culture and Roman culture and this is because they were just further north and so having discovered the wonders of wine they were in a more suitable climate to grow it. And the Greeks also increased the the production by training vines along wooden frames as we do today. Previously vines had been left to sort of grow up trees and things like that it was all the other rather less organized so you could you could increase production by organizing the vines the way they grew. And this then meant that the consumption of wine spread not just socially and did too. It was more widely available it also spread geographically and wine became a very important export for Greece. And of course at that point ancient Greece was the coolest civilization in the Mediterranean they're the most advanced the most cultured the one that everyone wanted to be like and they were also the culture that produced this wine and so everyone who wanted to aspire to be Greek would drink the the the wine and they would drink it in the Greek manner using the right vessels and all sitting in a circle with the the wine and water mixed in a in a

pot in the middle and you get burials in the south of France and Italy and so on. Where people who were actually not Greek are buried in the Greek style with they have all the Greek drinking vessels and that this is them showing that they are sophisticated so wine becomes a star. He added with sophistication because previously it was only for the Kings and now it's for everyone as well. And of course these cultures look down their noses at be a drink as they call the barbarians and that idea that wine is more cultured more sophisticated the beer persists to this day. Yeah I think it's fascinating that even back then there was this notion that beer was somehow a low class drink and that one was an upper class drinker that even even then also people made distinction distinctions among various wines that is that if you were more wealthy if you had a more refined taste then there were certain wines for you had there were their wines for more common people and then there were wines for the people who were more wealthy and I'm sure they thought maybe they did had more sophisticated palates. Yes this is I mean it was the case initially obviously that the that the rich did drink wine and the

masses drank beer. But by the time you get to the Roman period even the slaves were drinking wine because the production is so huge it's pretty horrible wine is called Laura and it was indistinguishable from vinegar really. And then the soldiers had a Sunday best of wine called pasta. I thought about that. Yes there was this whole hierarchy of wines and a private dinner party. You might actually have from three different wines depending on the social status of your guest if you had a senator you know you could send him the finest for learning them and then your sort of middle class guests might get a slightly less elevated wine and then if there were people present. Who had previously been slaves who were now freed men. They were they were sort of the lowest of the low as far as the Free People look at it so they got a less exciting wife. Yes the Romans were very interested in this idea that the drink should reflect the status of its drink. And this idea survives today every day of it you know when your boss comes around for dinner and you get a snotty fancy a bottle of wine that's of the salad that you have that you buy. Do you know what that what someone else could write so it's that's a very edged idea.

Well we talked a little bit earlier about the fact that there are some people who are making an effort to produce beer in the style of the ancient world just so you could have the experience of what it would be like the sort of the similar question. This is perhaps more difficult but you also wonder if we could bring out what we would consider to be a nice bottle of wine to serve to friends or family or guests and to we could then bring out some wine that the ancient Romans would have considered very good. And we said those side by side what we would think about the ancient Romans 1. Well once again there are people recreate against and in fact I went to a Roman vineyard in the south of France and I mean you know it's it previously was a vignette in Roman times and the chap who runs it now restored it and he's actually rebuilt the tiled winery using Roman sources and in some cases even Roman mosaics as diagrams of things like the Wine Press Ganey. He now does things like that where they do the harvest he gets some of his workers to wear

togas and things like that. And they gather up the grapes they press them using the Roman wine press and they ferment them using Roman methods. And what's what's particularly interesting about this is if you read the Roman rat recipes for wine some of them sad rather unpleasant because the Romans modified the taste of wine by adding additives to them and the one that everyone really turned their noses up today at is is the water adding sea water to wine really sounds disgusting. Anyway the three Roman wines that that that this man Mr. Duvall makes in the south of France the sea water one I think is the most interesting and again I have a bottle of it that I'm carrying around with me. The reason it's interesting is that the sea water and the fenugreek Herb's that are mixed together what with the wine while it's fermenting give it a bouquet that is exactly the same as the pheno Sherry you have often get a sort of salty nose to a sherry and then you dilute this with water and you can see that it would actually be a wonderfully refreshing drink. And so this is why I think we constructed these

ancient drinks is so informative because on paper it sounds revolting that you have seawater mixed with the wine. It's a very small about it's about the sixtieth part of the whole wine and it's very well integrated and in fact. It's delicious. So they really knew what they were doing the rabbits and I was quite surprised to discover this but yes it's surprisingly good. One other thing before we lose this leave the subject of one that I thought was interesting that I didn't know and particularly struck me having being someone who lives here in a university community is the origin of the term symposium. Yeah it was a drinking party. It was the day that Plato Plato's Symposium visited a great work of a Greek philosophy which Socrates and other philosophers sit around to discuss various philosophical matters and while they're doing so they drinking wine and this was a this was a common thing that a great man would have these drinking parties and they would sit around and it was a very sort of finely calibrated drinking occasion because the idea was to be just drunk enough to be. To have the freedom of

tongue but but but not to be actually on the floor. And at the end of the night having drunk all night SOCRATES About walked away everyone else is sort of terrible hangovers but he's not and this is meant to tell us that he is you know he's the perfect. He's the perfect Greek and the perfect man and so forth but yes the Plato regarded to suppose it was as a good model for teaching and so. So he used to walk around you know with his students and talk to them in the evenings they would sit down and have these happy comical drinking parties where they would discuss matters and the idea of the supposedly it's a quasar competitive environment I mean you're trying to sort of rap to you other people in your and your wasted your and your philosophical insights and so on. But there were very strict rules about about it it's also you know it's an orderly form of competition and in fact that's what the Greeks have given this. They have the bases of the Western way of life is orderly competition so you have competition between companies that gives you capitalism you have competition between political parties that gives you

democracy you have competition between lawyers you get the APIs area legal systems. So this idea of of all of the competition I think that civilized cultures sort of bunch of competition gives you the scientific method as well. This is this is all coming out of the symposium and it's you know the basis of what the Greeks have given us and what underpins the western way of life. We are about at the midpoint here and we will talk some more with our guest Tom Standage in just a moment first however before we do that we must do this this is a test of the Emergency Alert System. Leading the way I don't I don't I mean. And this is AM 580 W while our urban focus 586 program My name's

David Inge. And again I will introduce our guest for this hour of focus We're talking with Tom Standage He's technology editor at The Economist magazine. He has also written for other magazines in newspapers including Wired The Guardian The Daily Telegraph. He's the author of the books the Turk the Neptune file and the Victorian Internet which was made into a documentary how the Victorians wired the world. And he writes a lot about science and technology issues his most recent book is titled The History Of The World in Six Glasses. It's published by Walker and. Company and it takes a look at the history of these six beverages and how it is they developed and the connections between their development and the societies in which they grew up. The beverage is being beer wine spirits coffee tea and carbonated soda like Coke or Pepsi depending on whatever it is your favorite he is. He makes his home in England but he is now visiting the United States spending some time traveling around the country talking about his book History of the World in Six Glasses He's in Seattle. This morning questions are

welcome. We do have someone here on line 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 toll free 800 2 2 2 9 4 5 5. That's the number to call. We'll talk with the caller right here locally in Champaign Urbana. One on One. Hello hello yes interesting comment. Police are trained to just expand peacefully or more like Ciena. Caesar's allegiance later today are actually of colonies and what about the concept of zero. Someone said they learned about it but they didn't like to use it. Charles OK can you. There certainly is a relationship between beverages and globalization I guess maybe that's yes we can think about it. I mean bare bare You couldn't really transport so it was generally conceived where it was made and then wine was was traded locally. So particularly in the Mediterranean basin so the Phoenicians for example were great traders in that area and they are thought of carried wine making as far as Spain and they also carry other things with it like the

alphabet. And they spread that around the Mediterranean and yet the Greeks and the Romans set up colonies elsewhere I mean that the the southern French Roman colony was it was a big wine producing area and they're still finding these shipwrecks around the Mediterranean now with thousands and thousands of them for I have of of wine in that so this was that this was a huge thing. Yeah wine does also link to the Roman military expansion. And that's it. It's quite closely intertwined with the Roman military in several ways one for example is that Roman soldiers were given the liter of wine a day and it was this wine called pasta and it has like a wine that has a natural antibacterial properties. So if you. It's that with water which is how they conceived it. It actually made the purified the water. And that meant if they were if they were on the march while they were besieging a town then without realizing it they actually had quite a good works of water purification system that and I'm sure that gave them a military advantage over a Norman wine drinking opponents. Another

way in which military and very military was influenced by wind is that when you were when you returned from a military campaign you were very often rewarded with with land. And the most prestigious thing to grow on that land was in fact was was with vines. And as the Romans did better or better they started giving away more and more of the land around Rome to people to rise to grow vines on. And they started growing less and less grain and they started to have to import grain from from North Africa. And in fact eventually the many many vineyards around Rome were sort of amalgamated. And this drove people into the City and Rome becomes the largest city in the world and its population exceeds a million for the first time largely because of this increasing production of wine. Finally the stuff of the sort of badge the emblem of a Roman centurion was a staff cut from the sapling of a vine. And this is because of the vine reminded the Romans both of where they'd come from they thought themselves as humble farmers who would somehow become this great military power. This also reminds them of where they'd gone where they've gone to because they were

this great but if you go there with a great sophisticated civilization and wind sort of encapsulated both of those things it's one of the simple crop on the other hand a sophisticated trick that they were very close relationships between wind and that rabid military you know it's interesting that roughly speaking you can see the limits of the Roman world by looking at the line between where people are wine drinkers and where were people as beer drinkers. Yes I wanted to get to the ditto I mean in in England where I come from. Yeah you could see very clearly in the archaeology that that when the right would show up at one stop drinking wine and then when the right would leave everyone goes back to beer. This is because you know drinking wine was a it was an important part of the Roman lifestyle and when you were within the Roman trade network you got hold of all this wine that if they even made wine in England a driving times and then once the records disappeared that aspect of the culture went with them. So yes now you have the sort of beer drinking cultures in Europe and that the Southern culture is a by of knowledge the distinction between the two is the distinction between whether they were part of the rebel empire or not.

Let's talk with someone in nearby Belgium. Why number four. Hello good morning. Didn't catch early part of your show but I'd like to suggest another drink that is just pretty much totally disappeared that has had a pronounced effect on us and that is a beverage that was made in and and pretty crumby in America and in the Central America that was made out of coca. And now that their drink was consumed very greatly and Mr America. But we turned it into a truck with bars and stuff like that consumed a different sort of way but then went on to become a very very very expensive crap. Well actually cocoa is one of the drinks I didn't include. I have a list of drinks that almost made it. And at the time when chocolate was yes you're right it was the elite drink it it's a digital part of the world in Central America and then it was overseas brought to to Europe and it appears around the same time as

coffee and tea in the 17th century and it starts to become popular. And by and large chocolate was more popular a Catholic. Southern Europe while coffee was more popular in Protestant Northern Europe and the area in question I think is marked in particular by the scientific and financial revolutions which happened in Britain and in and in Holland and in those countries. Coffee was far more important than chocolate. So so that's why I have an age of coffee at that point rather than an age of chocolate. I can't really see any sort of broader geopolitical implications that follow from the the popularity of chocolate. So it's one of the drinks along with meat and gin and a couple of others that almost made it as one of my drinks but didn't quite you know it where the drink didn't make it through because it wasn't very very powerful car. Spread the product that came from it. Yes I had quite a severe potential effect on the world I mean everybody seemed to like trying to quit. Well I agree at that at times I should do a history of the world and several foods which

case I'll have to consider it. But this case I concentrated on drugs I've a particular I would say that the drinks that are that have these broader links to the world history and I could see there are some links obviously with chocolate but either a stronger legs I think with or without the drinks at that point and coffee is really a driving seat of history during during that period so that's why I've got the coffee rather than take the test. That's not to say I don't like an occasional cup of hot chocolate myself but I drink a little coffee. Thanks very much for doing it let's go to Kankakee for the next color line number one the pillow. The color there and kinky line one but I thought I was lying for their god to be commanded for to do so you're wonderful and viewing history the possibility for symposia fascinating. Thank you very much smaller so students of what the president talked about from the standpoint of world and western hemisphere

history. Star closes certainly thank you. Well thank you for the go. Well again other questions comments are certainly welcome to you as we continue to talk with our guest Tom Standage 3 3 3 9 4 5. Five toll free 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5. Well let us move on and talk a little bit about the two caffeinated beverages coffee and tea and I wonder to what extent we talked earlier about the fact that there were societies in which a lot of people consumed some kind of alcoholic beverage even even children did in more dilute formulated formulations and that they did that because they it was safer to drink than water. So to what extent did the popularity of coffee and tea O itself do not only to the stimulant effect but to the fact that again because the the water was boiled it made water safe to drink but it wasn't intoxicating. Now exactly I mean coffee was coffee had an enormous impact when it was introduced simply because

here it was as a nonalcoholic alternative to water and of course like drinking beer for breakfast which is what people in Europe were generally a beer wine for breakfast is what people were generally doing like coffee appears. Unlike those drinks coffee wakes you up. I mean it shocks the mind dulling it and. This was noticed almost immediately. This coffee drink. One observer Wright said 660 has caused a greater sobriety among the nations and people started to realize that they'd been in this sort of alcoholic haze for centuries and centuries. That's another poem published in London in 674 calls wine the sweet poison of the treacherous grape that drowned the very reason and berries for all the procedures our brains Whereas whereas coffee is a graven holds of liquor that makes the GDX quicker. So this was even at the time of coffee the introduction that was very quickly apparent that Europe was waking up and this had an amazing effect because the both the drink itself and the places where it was drunk the coffee houses were new and they were imported from from Arabia and they made possible all sorts of

new things in particular. They were venues where people could get together drink coffee and discuss things they were respectable venues where you could meet people to do business and have political discussions and scientific discussions and adds you know you could do any of those things in taverns and so amazing flourishing of innovation occurred and we get things like the scientific revolution where where scientists go to reinvent they get rid of the old Greek theories which are wrong and establish new ones. And so Sir Isaac Newton he writes his theory of gravitation in the particular mathematics era century lays the foundations for modern science. He does He writes that book to settle a coffeehouse argument in fact about the nature of it. Gravity let me also get this on the at the financial revolution so we get the stock exchange's we get to the South Sea Bubble. We get all sorts of new schemes of lottery added sugar and the Lloyd's of London comes out of a coffee house called Lloyds Jonathans which is another coffee half enough to become the London Stock Exchange. So there's this amazing sort of five

acceleration of its actual activity that is stimulated by coffee. How is it that given the fact that in England there were people who drink both tea and coffee and the coffee was certainly important as you said has this connection between intellectual pursuits and commerce with the development of the coffee house. How was it though that when we think of the national drink of England. RE I was a bit of an accident really. Tea and Coffee appear in London about the same time and initially tea is more expensive because it's had to come all the way from China whereas coffee has only had to come from Arabia and so initially it's all about coffee. But then Charles the Second married a Portuguese princess and part of her dowry was a was a chest of tea because the Portuguese were among the first European nations to import tea into Europe and so tea becomes fashionable at the London court and then the aristocracy all want to drink it too. So the East India

Company which has been granted a monopoly on trade with the EAST starts to bring it in from China and gradually the demand starts to go up and an East India Company realizes it's got a monopoly on an extremely valuable and sought after commodity. I mean initially tea is so expensive that that you actually have to lock it up and that's why tea caddies exist and why you have locks on them. Because this was a very expensive luxury. But as the volume of of imports went up it became far more widely available and by the end of the 18th century so much tea was being brought into England. That everyone could afford to drink two cups a day even the very poorest people could or could afford to have it. And so this is rather a sort of curious British term for doctor that they have these strange far reaching political effects because in order to secure the tea supply the East India Company ended up dictating foreign policy to go to the government and you get pigs like at the Boston Tea Party in American independence and in the east you get the Opium War which is where the British government goes to war with China ostensibly about their

free trade but in fact to defend the East India Company's decision to pay for the the t that it's importing with opium which is growing in India. So this is sort of state sponsored drug running. But this is this shows you the extent to which the tea trade sort of perverted British foreign policy. Well let's talk with the other people who are listening here will go to Chicago. Our next caller on our toll free line one for Hello. Hi I came into you from position kind of late so I'm not sure if you were talked about the fact that all of these drinks you seem to name are stimulants their mood altering. And I was wondering because 100 ton tiring gathers when they use mood altering substances substances usually herbs. It's usually related to a religious ceremony. Now I was just wondering if you had any thought about whether he's settling down into groups or just the stress of living in society creates a greater need for having a mood altering substance all the time.

Yes I think there's a lot of truth in that. Some anthropologists divide hunter gatherer societies off into smoking and drinking cultures. So a lot of the North American tribes for example were predominately smoking cultures and that's absolutely where the colonists arrived or gave the beer's hard liquor they were you know they they responded to it as if it were a majestic substance where you had to consume enormous quantities of it at the very point of being slightly intoxicated you had to be totally intoxicated. So yes I do. That was part of it and there was of course used religious ceremonies in India in Egypt and in Mesopotamia it was thought to be a gift from the gods because the exact process by which the the cruel fermented into into beer was not understood so it was just thought to be magical This was therefore a gift from the gods and it was the right thing to offer them. So so yes all of that fits together. The other thing is that yes when people settle down and become farmers it was a much less enjoyable lifestyle. I mean swirling around as a hunter gatherer you did you you could spend a lot more of your time at leisure whereas being a farmer was much harder work. But there

was compensation in the fact that you could at least make beer. So some people have suggested that this was the sort of trade off that our people were prepared to settle for this more arduous lifestyle more stressful lifestyle in return for the ability to to to to have beer. And so yes you have you have a more stressful lifestyle but the beer makes it makes it worthwhile. So is there any sense there is increasing complexity or stress that we increase the level of our stimulant you know for example. Coca-Cola which had some coke in it as compared to cocaine. Well actually I think the opposite is true I think today there's a backlash against all of these all of these drinks I mean my six drinks three have alcohol in the three have caffeine in them. But the fastest growing drink category now is bottled water. And that seems to be you know the appeal of bottled water seems to be the basis on the basis that it's pure and it doesn't contain stimulants so I think I think a lot of people now are saying you know we don't have to have these these debates all the time well at it we can't have

the sort of purity rings and of course a lot of bottled water actually just comes out of tap anyway so if you're a particularly pure It's as pure as it's all it's all just to say the bottled water is no purer than that than the tap water. But I think that's why people prefer the bottled water over the tap which is that they feel that it is 80s pure and it's desirable for that reason and not that it's desirable because of the lack of stimulant rather than because of the stimulant. Thank you nothing as well I do think it's interesting you make that comment about water that that in fact you do. End of the book identify a possible seventh beverage and that is that being water. Yeah. According to microbiology we are now at the end of the cold era and I think it's pretty clear that the next era will be the drink that defines the next era as water. It's already the fastest growing category but as well as being very popular bottled water. I think there are other ways in which water sort of dick will define mankind's future. There's growing political tension over water in many parts of the world

and I think that's only likely to increase with climate change and water being being more scarce for the boys. If mankind is going to move on from planet earth and go to other places starting with the moon of Mars a prerequisite is that if you find water in those places that you need it to grow crops to make oxygen to make rocket fuel after all so that Nasser is going to launch a probe to look for water at the on the moon because they want to let me base that now and they're going to need to find water if they can do that so I think these other drugs have been steering the course of history for the last 10000 years I think water is now getting into the driving seat. We have two other callers will get right to them but I do want to again introduce our guest for the benefit of anybody who might have tuned in last five minutes. We're talking with Tom Standage he is technology editor at The Economist magazine and his book is A History Of The World in Six Glasses It's published by Walker and company and he suggests that one way to. Perhaps take a look at human history in the development of technology is to look a little bit at the history of the

six drinks that we have been talking about beer wine spirits coffee tea and carbonated soda. We have some other callers here the next stop is in Urbana I believe Lie number one. Hello. Yes. If based on a program we had on the on the radio tour yesterday if people are going to go up into space I would recommend that they bring powdered Gatorade along along with their water. Yes Tang was supposed to be the drink of the space age there is no I didn't I didn't but the Russian the Russian astronauts very clearly have a favorite drink which is vodka. It's being in the space station is pretty horrible I mean it's nothing to do with that they don't do any science. Pretty much all they do is fix the space. So they can stay up that which is kind of sad a bit of a circular argument. But yes it's traditional that they are when they send the Soyuz capsules up to to the to the to the Russian astronauts they'd all be in there you have a bottle to afford. They put them inside the space suits that are in the capsule apparently and then that way they could maintain their supply.

There was even talk of developing a special beer for consumption in space that was going to have an added vitamins and so forth I'm not quite sure what came of that plan but but I like the idea of space beer because because beer obviously with you know the earliest drug is a drug by by the earliest civilizations so the idea that it could be could still be new kinds of it specifically for spacefaring tickled me. Did you ever see the one Jerry Lewis movie were the other the Russian Russian cosmonaut has a powder powder drug. I don't have an agenda how you get that you could do that but. But if I could see the it makes that because obviously the Russians including the astronauts have a very keen on their vodka there as they were the joke of course but I think I think the jury was one and I know for a fact that what happened was we won't you know swallowing an entire vial of this stuff for years but then the whole go on the water. Well spirits out spirits are one of my drinks I do them all together but I do them in the age of exploration because

that's the point where the first European explorers are heading out from Europe and they they want these. These drinks that survive on long sea voyages and pack a lot of alcohol into a small space so I don't consider spirits of the space age I consider them in the colonial period. You know the year the Romans put little pieces of lead in their one day yet they used all thought the things they wanted they did put lead in then they put seawater in and they put chalk on line and they put I mean amazing range of additives and today we failed that horrible you know wine should be pure and in fact why at the time Roman said that the best wine was the wine you didn't need to to to mess with. It's just that the product wasn't a very consistent product so travelers would often take a little pouch of herbes and things with them so that when they were in a in a roadside inn they were served wine and it was a bit dodgy they could adjust the taste in their own way. And in fact it's there is a sort of vestige of this idea hanging around today which is the use of oh come in you know for some reason we think the use of oats to flavor wines and to and to

sort of balance you know it's as if this is a week of it teaches you sometimes I get more for example that for some reason is accepted all the other attitudes are not and that's really an arbitrary distinction. You know it's there's no real reason why we should be allowed to use oak and wine and not other things. OK. Are they well let's go to another urban of calling this lie number two. Hello. Hi Tom this is Luke was calling from about oh I should probably be at work right now but I've been cheerfully listening you're your program for the last hour. Being in the wine business I'm curious how many producers growers you visited throughout Europe who were using acclaim for growing grapes in the old Probyn yogic method and did that surprise you how many people were were making wine the whole way. Well I only went to I went specifically to this to this Roman Vineyard and I intend to go to another one at Pompei because they. There's a couple of Italian wine makers who specialize in the the old grapes in the old methods

and they are replanting the vineyards of Pompei and they're going to be making authentic wines there. So but they are the only one I actually specifically visited for this for this period is the is the one in the afternoon so I didn't I didn't go to any others. There is a resurgence in the in some of the older methods that the that the Romans used. And what's the name of the other yard in your place. It's called Terrelle which is what's called mass. That oral but the website is w w w docs Toradol which is t o u r e double l e s dot com and it's a bilingual website and it tells you all about what they're doing right. And the the winemaker did all this in conjunction with Andre Cherney or who is a a great French authorities on ancient wine so it really is. You know academically and archaeologically very sound indeed. Thank you very much also. One recommendation check out the style of the least and there in the northeast corner gently doing the same thing with probably knowledge AND and OR are

claimed for it. Thank you very. One thing I would tell you one more here will go to avoid this is line 3. Hello I am really enjoying the sale and I'm really enjoying all this wonderful information I haven't seen the book yet but I think I think that you can have a history of the world without talking about the development of TV and Hina though that is one of the drinks and we haven't had a chance to talk about it but. But but one of the things I'm trying to show is that these drinks have reached our cupboards in our kitchens. Today you mean ours in America. Well I mean I mean A-Rod will be two years to the very widely consumed drink I mean a lot of people in India drink tea and the reason they do is the British introduced it. So I'm actually trying to show how the different world cultures interconnected that we have an Arab drink in front of the coffee. Yes I mean the west coast of you know Seattle which is now the center of coffee culture and then yes in Britain we drink tea even though it's from from China and everyone drinks Kozhikode us from all over the place so we packed drinks provide a way to show how interconnected different cultures are in a thing

wondering if your book talks at all about how key influenced the development of technology and well religion culture and I guess by definition technology writing and so on in. In the firey Well not as ancient a drink as the Chinese say it is they say they would drink it since 3000 B.C. but in fact it only really started to be drunk in the first century B.C. so writing and so on and so forth in China actually predates tea by quite a long way. One of the things that T is associated with the development of paper money because the team merchants were having to send such enormous amounts of money to each other that they started to get used banknotes instead so that's one of the technological developments that that arose from TI but yes I do talk about tea in China and the Tang dynasty and so forth and that's it that is part of it so and it was hard at Millet originally adopted by the monks. I understand it because I threw out a way of keeping them awake during their long. Exactly right yes that's what it was for and similarly coffee was adopted by the superheat in Yemen to keep awake religious practice. So so all of these drugs very

often have religious connotations as well. Thank you very thank you that's an interesting point to end. Do you think that the fact that there are there are certain sorts of religious mystical sacred connections to all of these drinks with the possible exception of Coca-Cola and that that is the that is still the reason that we continue to have toasts and that food to lift a glass to the gods to each other and when people get married and there are special occasions that's what's one of the reasons why we do that. Yes not exactly I mean that there are some very ancient customs that have survived to this day with drinks and that's probably the most obvious if you write it off as a chick is you know here's to a happy marriage with a journey you'll somehow you know the implication is that the alcohol somehow unable to call upon a higher power. This is exactly what people thought when they first discovered BIA they thought it must be magical it must be connected to the gods. And by offering it to the gods that way you could you could offer them to do you a favor. So we popped that survives right to this day. And that's kind of a pagan thing that we do and we

don't think about why we do it but that's what's happening. Well it is a fascinating and very entertaining story. And I wrote I recommend it to anybody who would like to have something fun to read and you'll learn some things as well it's a history of the World in Six Glasses by our guest Tom Standage. He's technology editor at The Economist magazine where the book is published by Walker and company fairly recently out so you should be able to find it in the bookstore. He makes his home in Greenwich in England but he's now spending some time in the United States to talk about the book he's out on the West Coast this morning and Tom Standage thank you very much. Thank you very much indeed.