What we think of as cocktails today are not very old compared to the history of humanity. Do you think the martini is old? The martini would be on TikTok doing a viral dance when compared to the toddy. The margarita and mai tai would be playing with Paw Patrol toys compared to grog.
We’re not sure when the first person got drunk. The fact that animals often get drunk on spoiled fruit should offer us a pretty good idea of how ancient the act of getting drunk is.
Fruit is that most devious of foods: It wants you to eat it, if you’re the right animal. Meanwhile, yeast decided to evolve to co-exist with the fruit trees. Of all of the things yeast could have specialized in, it was creating ethanol from the fallen (forbidden) fruit. The rest is, well, Genesis: “The dude blamed the chick; I heard the chick blamed the snake; and I heard they were naked when they got busted.”
In other words: We’ve gotten drunk under trees and talked to snakes for eons.
The earliest evidence we have of the consumption of alcohol in an intentional form comes from China about 8,000 years ago—a mix of honey, fruit and rice, among other things. This isn’t to say that the proto-Chinese invented drinking; there was just a large amount of well-preserved evidence there.
If they did invent drinking what we’d now call prison hooch or pruno, they sent the idea back pretty quickly to the Middle East and Caucasia by Neolithic standards. There is evidence of wine production just a handful of centuries later in places like modern Georgia (the country) and Iran. Georgia still has the claim on making the first wine. The Mesoamericans also got in on the action early in the game, with chicha. Like Americans to this day, they fermented corn to make alcohol. Like a few Americans today, they drank it in the morning and most of the work day. They also rubbed it on human sacrifices—they weren’t messing around in those days.
From there, we jump back to the Middle East for barley beer, and to those crazy young whipper-snappers in Ancient Egypt for herbal wine that was mostly used as medicine … apparently. The Bronze Age, however, seems to be where the party really got started. The Sumerians created the first beer that we might recognize, giving credit to their god of beer, Ninkasi. Some Mesoamericans decided that cacao was better than corn wine, and gave that a shot. Others started drinking pulque, the now-again fashionable drink of Mexico. Pulque was (and is) made from fermented agave and dates back more than 2,000 years.
You didn’t think I would leave out the Romans, did you? Contrary to popular opinion, most Romans weren’t drinking alcohol all the time. Most of them could only drink posca on a regular basis, which was vinegar diluted with water. This still exists today as switchel, and it was a common “Gatorade” of the colonial world. Romans consumed a lot of wine as well, but they consumed it rather sensibly, with water mixed in. All of that stuff about them throwing up in “vomitoriums”? That was just a misinterpretation of the Latin word for exit.
As in some fancier places in America, beer was considered barbaric. Drinking wine unmixed might have become fashionable elsewhere thanks to the Macedonians, led by some guy named Alexander something-something.
The industrialization of spirits meant that even the poorest of people suddenly had access to really bad decisions, and the wealthiest had more options.
Lest you think I am leaving Africa out: There is a strong tradition of fermented beverages there going way back, generally made from things like palm and sorghum. The sad history of colonialism and slavery, and the spread of Islam, make the waters a little muddy, as alcoholic beverages would go in and out of fashion with the regimes. Surely there is a tradition of even more ancient drinking, going back to the dawn of humanity, that has been lost to time. Southeast Asia and Indonesia were in on the game—the latter making a distilled red-rice wine called batavia arrack that would often be featured in punches, after Indonesians gained distilling technology from Muslim traders.
If there was anything good that came from colonialism, one could argue that it was the cocktail. Before the Western powers set out to claim the world in the name of the crown, drinking was a mostly local affair. Sure, wine-trading went back thousands of years, but unless you had some serious clout, you ended up with the dregs and the vinegar. The industrialization of spirits meant that even the poorest of people suddenly had access to really bad decisions, and the wealthiest had more options.
Brandy, before rum, became the darling of empires. It became popular when people started distilling wine to make it easier to ship; the thought was that people could add in water when it arrived. The fact that it tasted nothing like wine when it got there wasn’t really a problem—and it also picked up all of those nice barrel-aging attributes. While rum would eventually take the place of brandy (and salt for the Romans) as cheap pay for the locals, it wasn’t long before we got drinks like the original julep, the milk punch and others that only the most esoteric hipster bartenders make these days.
From here, mankind invented things like grog (rum and water, with sugar added for seafaring officers) and punch (weak tea and strong spirits, sugar, spices and water). Finally, with the invention of refrigeration technology came the widespread availability of ice, and this young and plucky nation decided that ice is better than water. Oh, and that they also liked to avoid taxes by turning grains into hooch.
You know the rest of the story …