Proof: The Science of Booze | Adam Rogers | Talks at Google

[APPLAUSE] ADAM ROGERS: Hi. Thank you for coming in, forgoing the Google cafeteria for a lunchtime-- nobody forewent it? It didn't get foregone? Thank you. I appreciate it. I want to do a little calibration first. How many of you are scientists, computer or otherwise here? How many of you are drinkers? Any drinkers in the room. It's my people, hi. [LAUGHTER] Good to see you. I'm sure we've run into each other in the bar. So, we're going to be talking about drinking and talking about it with, I h

ope, a little bit of context. Other people have talked about drinks before. Someone else, for example, this gentleman you recognize him, any history people? That's Ben Franklin. He's quoted famously as saying that wine is proof that God loves us. Which is actually pretty profound, because it gets at the idea that there is some kind of connection between booze and the divine, right? Or I suppose between us and divine, if you will. Nothing, nobody cares for the dumb puns? I would think that would

be-- all right, fine. I'm going to do more of them, so you have to get used to it. That's a thing that's going to happen for the next few minutes. That's actually misquote. It's not what Franklin said. What Franklin actually said was that the rain falling on grapes, which then are made into wine, is a constant proof that God loves us and wants to see us happy. And that's actually even more potent. Because it indicates an intimate connection with the process with nature. And that's part of what I

want to argue today. It's not my favorite booze quote though, the Franklin quote. My favorite one comes from him, any English majors? AUDIENCE: Ogden Nash? ADAM ROGERS: Close. William Faulkner. Not close at all. [LAUGHTER] I thought the Ogden Nash was a car. Wasn't that a Ford or something? No. Noted drinker, William Faulkner, who said this, "Civilization begins with distillation." And so we could be good high school English students first and talk about the metaphor there, right. That civiliza

tion is about boiling down and getting to the essence of stuff. And that's the etymology of the word, sure. It's the etymology of the word yeast too, interestingly, not a coincidence. But I want today to be more literal about it. I'm going to argue that the human relationship with booze is actually the story of how Homo sapiens became people. It's the way that we settled down. It's how we became civilized. It's how we learned to use what was happening in our environment naturally. And eventually

, how we learned to make something completely new, how we became technological. OK. So, can I prove this? Let me try. We'll start here, at the beginning. That's yeast, saccharomyces cerevisiae, sugar-eating mushroom that makes beer. The name is a little on the nose perhaps. But what yeast does, fundamentally, is eats sugar and then excretes carbon dioxide and ethanol, the alcohol that we drink. Don't panic. There's only one more that looks like this in the whole deck. This is only interesting fo

r two reasons. This is a yeast metabolism. This is what made sure that I was not going to be a biologist. This made sure that I was going to be a writer. But two things I want to point out here. The green, the little green down in the lower right, is energy. ATP is the way a yeast and you and I make energy. And it's what we use for-- it's the power source in our bodies. So this is yeast taking in glucose, up in the upper left, turning it into ATP. But then the box is the interesting part. Becaus

e the box is yeast using an enzyme called alcohol dehydrogenase 1 to turn something called acetaldehyde into ethanol and then excreting it. But also using alcohol dehydrogenase 2 to take that ethanol and convert it back to acetaldehyde. Basically, yeast eats its own poop is the point. But that brings to rise an important question. Why does yeast make alcohol? Not philosophically, it's not like an existential question. But evolutionarily, why does yeast make alcohol? So there's two possibilities,

prompted by that little box. One of them is that ethanol is chemical warfare. What do you do when you want to clean out a cut? Use alcohol. Alcohol's really good at killing microbes. It's a microbicide. So maybe yeast is using ethanol to kill competitors locally. Yeast can tolerate really high levels of ethanol. Other microbes can't. It makes its own chemical weapon. So that's what ADH 1 suggests, right? Or ADH 2 says well, maybe ethanol is just a food source. It's storing away nuts for the win

ter, in the microbial way, right? So which is it? How do you figure that out? That is what this guy tried to do. This is a researcher named Steven Benner. He invented a field called paleogenetics. Paleogenetics is a little bit like-- you know how linguists will try to figure out what the first word for something was, by looking at what the word is in all different languages and finding what the similarities are, and trying to back trace it? He figured out you could do the same thing for enzymes.

That if you would take all the samples of that enzyme from a bunch of different organisms, in this case Saccharomyces cerevisiae yeast and the water-related species, look at the various alcohol dehydrogenase enzymes, you could build, as he did-- his team did-- 12 different versions of the primordial ADH, what the first one looked like. They called it adhA. They didn't know exactly how it was going to work, so they had 12 different versions. And what they wanted to do was run the equation. Let i

t run, look at the kinetics, and see what it wanted to do. Did it want to make acetaldehyde into ethanol or make ethanol into acetaldehyde. So they did it. And what happened? Turned out adhA was a lot more like the one that made the ethanol. Yeast wants to make ethanol. So problem solved. Chemical weapon, right? No, of course not. It's not that easy. I said that yeast eats sugar. 150 million years ago, when yeast are first figuring this out, where's the sugar? Sugar cane hasn't evolved yet, beca

use grasses haven't evolved yet. Sugar cane is a grass. Well, plants, where yeasts live, were mostly conifers. They were like pine trees, like on the right there. No, my right. Yeast probably lived exposed to the air on these things, on tree sap exudates, on little blurbs of sap. Like when you come near a pine tree and you get sap on your hand. That's where the yeast lived. And so, because ethanol is volatile, it wants to evaporate-- and that's going to be important later as a property-- that's

a really good property to have in a waste product. That's perfect sewage. Have ethanol, and then it evaporates. But then about 100 million years later-- sorry, about 50 million years later, 100 million years ago, in the Cretaceous period, the fruity plants take over from the pine trees, the fruiting flowering plants. Those are the angiosperms. The other plant there is amborella, it's the very first angiosperm. And yeast now are pre-adapted to live inside those fruits, where all the simple sugar

is that they want to eat, because they can tolerate higher level levels of ethanol. They're making their own ethanol, and they can hang out inside that fruit. So they look pre-evolved, they look ready. What it actually is is a coincidence. But because they're adapted to do that, they have the luck to do what needs to be done in a changing world. Because the other animals that couldn't handle the change to angiosperms, to flowering fruiting plants, went extinct. It was an extinction level event f

or like-- well, let's put it this way. The dinosaurs that figured out how to deal with fruiting flowering plants are birds. The point I want to make about this mostly-- other than I just kind of think it's a cool set of deductions from the lab-- is that fermentation happens without us. It doesn't need us. If yeast makes ethanol in the forest, does anyone get drunk to hear it or something. Right, like if nobody's there, it still happens. There's still fermentation. It occurs. It occurred for mill

ions and millions of years before human beings came on the scene. But then we did. So this is a shard of a pot that's 9,000 or 10,000 years old, found in an archaeological site in China called Jiahu. Jiahu's a really interesting site. It's one of the places where the first instances of rice being consumed by human beings was found. It's one of the first places where there was evidence of written language. It's one of the oldest places where they found musical instruments. It's one of the places

where civilization began, where all of the things that we think make us civilized people happened first. Well, one of the things they found was this pot with some weird residue inside. You can guess, probably it's not a spoiler to say, what that residue's going to be. But they didn't know what it was at the time. So, the researchers who were working the site sent for this analytical chemist, a guy named Patrick McGovern, he works at the University of Pennsylvania. He ran a bunch of tests-- gas c

hromatography, mass spectroscopy, Feigl spot test, he shot lasers at it. He you did all the cool stuff you can do if you have a lab at Penn and found three things. Not ethanol, I mentioned ethanol's volatile. Ethanol evaporates. So even in the oldest samples, even in the ones like the Roman amphoras that they know were used to carry wine, they almost never find ethanol. They find other stuff. What he found was three things. Beeswax, which you only find if there's honey. Rice, he found traces of

rice. And tartrates-- tartaric acid. From anywhere else at any other time that would probably have meant grapes. But not in China, not 10,000 years ago. They had grapes, they had wild species, but they weren't common. McGovern thinks it was probably hawthorn, which he says is like a chalky apple. It's a fruit that has sugar in it. Now if you mix all that stuff together and ground it up and let it sit, you'd have a hard time keeping it from fermenting. The wild yeast, the ambient yeast in the air

, would grab onto that. There's a lot of sugar in there. They would want to make it into booze. What McGovern had found was the mother Eve of booze. Honey makes mead, rice make sake, fruit makes wine and brandy. It's the oldest-- the evidence that he found on this shard, it's the oldest example of human controlled fermentation that anybody's ever found. 10,000 years. I've held this. It's in his office, it's sitting in a Ziploc on his shelf. And I asked to hold it, and he put on gloves, he made m

e put on gloves, he opened the thing. I mean, it was a big deal. But it was a big deal. It's the oldest thing I've ever held. And it did give the sense of a profound connection to the first home brewer, right? Whatever the ritual was, whatever the ceremony was, this is where it happened. This thing. 10,000 years. That's how long we've been at it, at least. Taming this natural process, domesticating it, domesticating yeast, while the yeast domesticated us, right? Please give me more sugar. I will

roll over with my belly up and wag my tail if you will just give me more sugar. That's the key. Here's the only other slide. Does anybody recognize this? It's sugar, yeah. It's glucose, exactly. Simplest of simple sugars. Six carbons in a hexagon, some hydrogens and oxygens dangling off the corners. This is the most important molecule on earth. Not water, water's medium, not message. This is message. Sugar's power. Just about every form of life on Earth uses the energy stored in all those chemi

cal bonds and the lines to stay alive. Sugar's structure-- you get variations in molecules, you get different kinds of sugars. You can attach them together in a bunch of different ways. And instead of having a monosaccharide, a single sugar, you can have polysaccharides, you can have bigger and bigger sugars. Connect these glucose molecules together in one specific way, and you get cellulose. The most common organic molecule on earth-- wood, paper, right? It's just repeating elements of that. Th

at's the sub-unit. Connect that same molecule in a different way, and you get the starches-- amylose and amylopectin. Sugar is literally-- this is just an aside, I'm going to do that a lot-- sugar is literally the backbone of our genes. Deoxyribonucleic acid? The ribo in there is ribose. It's a sugar. We're made of this. It's our storage medium. So that's all neat, right? That's cool. And like I said, yeast eat simple sugars-- mono and disaccharides primarily excrete carbon dioxide, make ethanol

. So that's all fine, if you have a source of simple sugar. Apples have a lot of those simple sugars. Honey, tons, right? Put honey out in water and you automatically get mead. Grapes, grapes are awesome, 25% simple sugar. Every single varietal of wine you've ever had is one grape species. Vitis vinifera, lucky enough to survive an ice age and show up in the Fertile Crescent, Transcaucasian Mountain area, just about when people wanted to plant stuff and make booze. One researcher told me if huma

n beings had evolved on a Pacific island or had started cities on Pacific Islands instead of in the Transcaucasian Mountains, then we'd have hundreds of different species of coconut. And grape would be a rare thing that you found in Whole Foods once in a while. So that's all fine. But what if your most easily accessible agricultural product stores its sugar as starch? Because here's the problem. You know how we in the room-- unless one of you is a mutant-- cannot digest cellulose. We just don't

know how to do it. But we can digest starch. There's an enzyme in our saliva that does. There's an amylase, an enzyme that digests starch, in our saliva that begins that process. Yeast can't do either of those things. So if it's grain or rice or corn, this of barley, it just stores all that sugar as starch. What do you do? Grains are fascinating. They're basically little life bombs. There's an a plant embryo in there and then starch to store fuel, like a yolk in an animal egg. That's what that s

tarch is. When it's time to grow, the seeds-- the barley corns or the grains-- make enzymes that convert that starch into sugar. The amylases that break it down. And why would you want to do that? Fermenting and distilling eventually are like value adds, basically, right? You have a whole field full of that stuff, it's hard to get it to market. But if you take that whole field, and you turn into a barrel of something that you can actually charge more for, it's easier to get to the market. People

want to pay more money for it. It's a value add. So the way that we do that in the West is with a process called malting, like single malt scotch. And malting basically is-- this is Glen Ord Malting, it's owned by Diageo. It's in the north of Scotland. Diageo is a big transnational drinks company. They do almost 84 million pounds of barley into malt a year. It's like seven trucks a day, every day of the year. It only takes about 11 people to run the plant. But basically what they're doing in th

is place is tricking barley into thinking that it's growing. They let it germinate. It grows a little bit. It starts the biochemical processes going and making those enzymes, converting those starches into sugars. And then they arrest the process. They stop it, so they have access to the enzymes. And then you can mix it in with other grains. And you can make beer out of it. Distill beer and you get whisky. Basically, anything that we make that's fermented or distilled in the West, starts with ma

lt or the enzymes that you can extract from the malting process. That's fine, but what if you were working with rice? So if you're making sake or rice wine, like in Japan, they don't use malting. They actually polish away all of the rice bran, the thing that makes rice brown, those are the layers that make those enzymes. What they do is they infect the rice with another fungus-- yeast is a fungus. The fungus is called koji. Have you heard of this? Some of the sake fans probably know about koji.

Koji is a fungus. It makes proteases and amylases. It breaks down proteins, breaks down starches. It's the basis for almost every Asian food. It's how they make tofu and vinegar and sake. It's an Aspergillus oryzae. And so if you know anything about plants, that would make you nervous because most of the Aspergillus species are total bastards. They make aflatoxins, they're carcinogenic. The clinical literature includes phrases like, "bloody ball of mucus in the lungs." They're horrifying. But no

t koji. Koji has all the genes that do all that stuff, but they're all turned off. It's domesticated, it's another tame fungus. We tamed it to do one thing-- make rice sugary so yeast can eat it. Been around since 300 BC. All right, so fascinating process. So interesting in fact, that this guy, Jokichi Takamine, who's a chemist born in 1854, thought that he could commercialize it to not just saccharify-- the process of turning starch into sugar is called saccharification-- not just to saccharify

rice, but barley too. And this was an incredible insight on his part. Because in the late 1880s, researchers like the Buchner brothers were still trying to figure out what enzymes were. People had just really agreed that yeast were the things that did fermentation about 20 years before. That was the discovery that put Louis Pasteur on the map, saying, yeah, no. I'm pretty sure it's the yeast, you guys. Think about that. 10,000 years of using the process, of making fermented and distilled stuff,

and nobody knew what was doing it until the 1860s, 1870s. And nobody knew how it worked until much later. It's the beginning of biochemistry, this realization. Fermentation. Yeast converting sugar to ethanol. Takamine thought that he could convert that process and commercialize it. And he actually figured out how to grow koji on rice bran-- a throwaway product the sake makers didn't want. It was cheaper, it would actually make more sugar. And if you're a big distiller, sugar is actually money.

You want more sugar because you get more ethanol out of it. He was hired by the Whiskey Trust-- which before prohibition was the largest distiller in the world, it was the American distilling conglomerate-- to come to the US, build the facility, and try to commercialize that process here, to make whiskey without malt. Zero malt scotch, instead of single malt. His English language biographer is a woman named Joan Bennett. And she points out he came pretty close, they actually sold a product for a

while called Banzai, again, a little bit on the nose. But things didn't work out. One of his facilities burned down under mysterious circumstances, you can imagine the people who made malt were not so happy about this idea. And the relationship with the Whiskey Trust fell apart, it didn't work out. But so we still today have this process where we malt to make whiskey and make beer. I don't want you to feel too bad for him. He took his process and turned it into what Joan Bennett calls the Alka

Seltzer the 1890s, this stuff, pocket Taka-Diastase. And he got so rich that Parke Davis, the pharmaceutical company, bought it out. Oh, I should say one thing that made Takamine unique was that unlike most scientists of the time, he didn't mind patenting his processes. So the process for making that koji stuff was the first English language biotechnology patent, depending on how you count that kind of stuff. Eventually Parke Davis bought the copyright on this stuff and set him up in a lab. They

wanted him to figure out how to isolate another strange and wondrous chemical that nobody knew how it worked. At the time they were calling it epinephrine. He figured out the process and named it adrenalin. And he patented that too, which led to a bunch of lawsuits, because they made so much money. Eventually, a judge named Learned Hand in 1911 said, you guys got to leave Parke Davis alone. It is in fact legal to patent a naturally occurring product. This is the decision. This is the basis for

the modern biotechnology industry, because of koji. Because of the failure of koji, really. Takamine got so rich. He moved to New York, he had a beautiful mansion. He was kind of an unofficial technological ambassador. And eventually it was his money that paid for these. These are the cherry trees in Washington, DC. He's the guy who bought these, the 2,000 cherry trees. All right, so I'm going to jump from here back about 2,000 years to this place, Ancient Alexandria. You know Alexandria, the li

brary. All that Caesar, Mark Antony, Cleopatra drama. The lighthouse. Founded by Alexander the Great, it's the first modern city. It's built on a gridiron, designed to take advantage of prevailing winds off the desert. It has a beautiful lighthouse, it has plumbing, it has the library that I mentioned. It has automatons, they loved automatons. They had steam engines and if you would open a temple door, and then the robot god in the back would move and catch the sunlight, you could put a coin int

o a slot and a robot bird would sing a song, and the temple fire would light up. They loved that kind of stuff. They had parades for it. This is a city of engineers. They're technologists. And more than that though, they're alchemists. One of the things that the labs there are working on is alchemy. Now alchemy gets kind of-- in my opinion-- it gets kind of a raw deal. Because what we know about alchemy is like, oh, they were trying to convert lead into gold. It's the Middle Ages, they're con ar

tists looking for eternal life, Harry Potter stuff. Fine. Philosophically, they were wrong about almost everything. But methodologically they weren't. What they were doing was inventing the infrastructure for modern science. Critically coming up with a lab and experimentation on nature and the stuff in that lab. So one of the most famous of them is this woman. This is Maria the Jewess. We only know mostly-- I know, I didn't name her. [LAUGHTER] We know about her mostly from a biographer who wrot

e about her much later, named Zosimos the Panopolitan. Gotta get a "the" in my name. Right? How awesome would that be? And he never really said when she was alive, but people think roughly the turn of the first millennium. Do you know what a bain-marie is or a marienbad in a lab? A laboratory double-boiler? She invented that. It's ascribed to her. It's not the only piece of laboratory equipment she invented. She also came up with this. The one on the left is called a kerotakis, the one on the ri

ght is a tribikos. Forgive my ancient Greek, my pronunciation's terrible. In Arabic you would call these things put together an al-anbiq or an alembic. This is a still. She came up with it. She wanted to heat stuff and separate it out. There's some disagreement about this. The still could have been first invented in China. But the way I want you to think about a still is as a separation technology, high technology for separating things. So how do we separate stuff? Filtration, you separate thing

s by size. Centrifugation, you're separating things by weight essentially. You increase gravity and the heavier stuff falls to the bottom. Modern practices, gas chromatography or gel electrophoresis, you separate things by electrical charge. What a still does is separate things based on evaporation pressure, based on volatility. More volatile stuff-- things that evaporate easily-- go over the top first. Things that evaporate with more energy, go over later. And you can separate things out. You c

an get rid of things you don't want and keep the things you do, like ethanol and water. Different molecules evaporate at different temperatures. Now what-- AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] ADAM ROGERS: --No, its fine, I'll stop. Whatever, it's cool. [LAUGHTER] Probably what Maria was trying to do did not involve booze. They had access to Roman wine in Alexandria, but she was probably putting in stuff like sulfur. The alchemists were interested in the spirits in inanimate objects, right, that's where we get

that word too. So she was putting in metals and liquids and stuff like that. She did figure out you need to use copper, and you need to use solder. And you need to keep the heat insulated and keep the heat from getting out, all the basic tenets of distilling. Nobody really knows if anybody ever put that wine in the still to see what would happen. I like to think of her lab as being like a graduate student lab though. And I figure, come on, they must have put-- they were drinking all the time. T

hey put booze in the still, right? It's not clear whether they did or not, there's other evidence. The technology either spreads or gets invented somewhere else. There's evidence of it between 150 AD and 400 AD in India. There's some reference to it in China in 980, wine that burns. The alcohol content would have to be high enough for it to burn so that it would have to be distilled. In about 1000 AD you see references in Russia to bread wine, vodka. In the 1200s there's a big shot alchemist nam

ed Albertus Magnus who writes about burning water. But in the mid 1280s, this guy is the one who really puts it on the map. He's a physician from Bologna named Taddeo Alderotti. He writes a book called "Consilia Medicinalia" where he describes the process for making something called aqua vita, the water of life. And this stuff was magic. It would cure diseases, it would relieve pain, it would fix bad breath, it would purify spoiled wine, it would preserve meat, you could draw essences out of pla

nts and smell them later. For the first time, these people who basically were just witch doctors finally had a chemical that did something. They could make a medicine. It felt like a medicine. And in fact, it was just about the only medicine that they gave anybody who was dying of the Black Plague. Because they didn't have anything else, which contributed to the spread of alcoholism across Europe. What Alderotti also figured out was that if you added a serpentine coil from the top of a still and

then immersed that in cold water, the vapors that were coming out of that still would condense more quickly, and you'd get liquid. He put the capping technology on top of a still. And it spread across Europe. Everyone starts distilling. You end up with places like this. This is, I think, Jim Beam. That's the top of the still at Jim Beam. That's a column still. It goes down six floors from there. It's 60 or 70 feet tall. Or this. This is St George spirits in Alameda. It's one of my favorite dist

illeries. And this is a new one. This is New Caledonia in Washington, DC. The columns are an interesting addition, because what the columns do is let you finesse that separation process further. The stuff you're distilling goes in the top, steam goes up the bottom, and the chemicals fractionate out in the middle. So whatever thing you want, you can put an outlet pipe at a different height on those columns and get out the stuff that you want. It was a later addition to the process. Basically, you

put the stuff you want to distill in that big pot and set it boiling. And then it's plumbing, you turn it on. Scroll down a second, I'm forgetting one important point. So that precision is important, because otherwise you have to just time your process of distilling, so you don't have like methanol in it, which is toxic. Or you don't have kind of yuckier flavors, which is what comes out at the end of a distillation. You just want the middle, the heart they call it. But the important thing I wan

t you to take away from this is the precision that finally evolved. We go from this natural process that nobody knows how it works to one that we begin to identify how it works and can take control of, or at least domesticate, to taking the science of that and turning it into a technological process, one that's precise, and one that we use all the time. That's what's happened there. I have a couple more things I want to say, but I feel like I would be cheating you if I didn't talk a little bit a

bout hangovers. [LAUGHTER] Is that true? I don't want to just get out of here without telling you about hangovers. Nobody knows anything about hangovers. That's not totally true. There's not a lot of science. Here's one of the things I love about the science of booze is of all of the recreational drugs that people take-- whatever your feelings about the legality and morality of that are, we take a lot of them. Of all of those drugs, the only one for which scientists have not articulated a mechan

ism for how it works in the brain is ethanol, the one we have taken the longest. They don't really know. They've got some ideas. If you ask a researcher who studies this stuff, well how does marijuana work-- or methamphetamine or opium. They know the receptor, they know the region of the brain. They kind of know what's going on. Ethanol? We got an idea. A couple of notions for receptors, reaches the brain. Partially that may be because if you really press a neuroscientist on this, they don't rea

lly know how the brain works either. They have some good ideas. [LAUGHTER] A lot of the research in alcohol and how it affects the human body is on dependency and on binge drinking. As you would imagine. Those are problems, and they kill people, and they hurt people, and they cost a lot of money. So researchers are trying to figure that stuff out. But the research on-- I try to think of my book as taking place about three sips into your second round. The pivot point of my book is the moment when

a bartender serves you a drink. It's about what happens when you have one drink or two drinks. But sometimes you mess up. A hangover is a symptom of that. There is not a lot of science on hangovers. I will tell you that almost everything that they told you the day before your first weekend night of college is wrong, or at least unproven. So you're sitting there and you're thinking it's dehydration. It's not dehydration. Your electrolyte levels go back to normal when you're still hungover and yo

u can rehydrate and still have the hangover. People think that because alcohol suppresses a hormone called vasopressin, it's an anti-diuretic hormone, it's the hormone that keeps you from peeing all the time. Had too much alcohol, now you're peeing all the time. Plus, you're not drinking water, you're drinking beer, whatever. So yeah, you're dehydrated. But that's not the hangover. People think that it's too much sugar. It's not. Your sugar levels are fine when you're hungover. People think that

it is, oh, I had impure alcohol, congeners. I should have had clear liquor instead of bourbon. It's not. You get just as hungover with vodka as you do with bourbon. Some people report a worse hangover with bourbon, but it's mostly anecdotal. More complicated, acetaldehyde toxicity. No. acetaldehyde is hard to measure, but your acetaldehyde levels are zero. Methanol toxicity. There's some methanol in anything fermented and distilled. The symptoms look like they overlap. It would be great, becaus

e it's a good excuse for the hair of the dog-- I can explain that if you want. But it's probably not methanol. Nobody really knows. What it looks like is an inflammatory response. Like if you have the flu, you feel aches, you feel kind of stupid, you have gut problems, your head aches-- it also has some overlap symptomatology with migraine. So there are few things that have ever been shown in real studies to have an effect on a hangover. One of them is a drug called Clotem. It's kind of a super

high powered anti-inflammatory that they prescribe for migraines primarily. You can't get it in the United States. I tried. Asked a neurologist, she was like, I'm not prescribing it. It's not on the Pharmacopoeia, and plus no I wouldn't. That's stupid, I'm not doing that. I tried to get it from a friend who lived in England, to get her to lie to her doctor on the National Health Service. She was like, no, I'm not going to do that. So I've never tried it. But a few things that are sold over the c

ounter here have been shown in studies to work. Pyritinol the left is vitamin B-6 analog. It's two B-6 molecules connected by a sulfur atom. The LiverCare thing is an Ayurvedic therapy that's only been shown to work in studies done by the company that makes it, so take that for what it's worth. And one on the far right is prickly pear cactus extract, which kind of makes sense because it has mild anti-inflammatory effects, prickly pear does. It also makes a very good burrito. The one in the middl

e is interesting, because the one in the middle is-- they call it BluCetin. You can't see that well in the picture, I'm sorry. But it's made from a molecule called dihydromyricetin, which is an extract of a plant called oriental raisin or hovenia, which is used to treat alcohol problems in the traditional Chinese pharmacopoeia. But a lab at UCLA looked into it, and it does seem to affect a receptor in the brain that looks like it's the target for alcohol in that relevant range that I was talking

about, in that up to 0.06. Like the drink and a half range. It's a receptor that's involved in how we feel benzodiazepines drugs, like Valium. And that makes sense too, because benzodiazepines and alcohol always have a synergistic effect. They'll tell you if you're taking a benzodiazepines don't drink also, because it will knock you right on your ass. So that's a target that some people are looking at for what receptor ethanol actually affects. And this stuff is supposed to block it. I've tried

all of those. [EXHALES] I mean, maybe. Don't trust anecdote and obviously don't do medical things that I say, because journalist, not doctor. That would be goofy. But I mentioned this is an inflammatory response. And so now you're thinking, because you're smart, you're like, I'm just going to take ibuprofen, right? Anti-inflammatory. Here's the thing. Ibuprofen has as a side effect gastrointestinal problems. Take a lot of it, you get a GI bleed. You already have gastrointestinal problems from t

he hangover, so now you're thinking, oh, well I'll take it with a Pepcid. And now you're taking a fistful of stuff that you're not really sure is going to work, which makes me nervous, I have to admit. But also-- so in the excerpt of the book that ran in "Wired," I said I've started taking a couple of ibuprofen before I go to bed or when I wake up. And people came at me on Twitter. You're going to get a GI bleed. Like how often do you think I'm doing this? [LAUGHTER] No, no, no. Settle down. Thi

s is not-- I don't think it's a problem yet. Of course, like nobody ever does, right? [LAUGHTER] Anyway, so I wish I had better news about hangovers. The anti-inflammatory thing I think has possibilities. So where does that leave us. So I was in Japan a couple of weeks ago, family vacation. And the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo right now is this giant, brutalist, skyscraper-looking place, very ugly. But the original Imperial Hotel in Tokyo was built by Frank Lloyd Wright. It was one of the most beauti

ful buildings anywhere. Like so many Frank Lloyd Wright buildings, it fell down in the 1960s. Not a good engineer, Frank Lloyd Wright. But the one place in the building that still has the original Frank Lloyd Wright appointments is the old bar. So you can go to the old Imperial Bar in the hotel, and it has beautiful Frank Lloyd Wright wall hangings and the tiles and stuff. It's really nice and it's a very nice cocktail bar, so I wanted to go. Because I-- I ordered this drink call the Gemini, it'

s their house drink, it was terrible. But the coaster's really nice, right? It's a beautiful coaster. Because I wanted to feel the connection to history, to a Frank Lloyd Wright building and to the history of cocktails. And that's a thing that alcohol will give you, is that connection down through shallow time, with Frank Lloyd Wright and then deeper with the people who first started making gin, for example, which human beings were making 1,000 years before they knew how it worked. They were mak

ing it without really knowing how to make it. They still don't really know why we taste it the way we do. We make this stuff, and it affects our senses-- our sense of smell and taste. And you and I would taste the same thing and if we told each other that it tasted the same to us, we might be talking about actually different flavors in our heads, or we might taste entirely different things in it, and nobody really knows why. It alters our bodies, it changes our minds, and nobody really knows how

. They're working on it. We taste it differently, we feel its effects differently, every culture that uses it has different rituals for it and manifest the effects of that differently. We have cracked open yeast and the other microbes that are responsible for it and begun to understand that biology. Yeast are an incredibly important model organism in science. They were the first organism that was ever a genetic sequence for. So we've gone from the agricultural process of domesticating a microbe

we only understood vaguely to the cold precision of genetic engineering. But really, we were making booze before we had science, much less before we had booze science. Now that we have all that science, now that we understand it a little bit more, I don't want you to think that that makes the stuff that we drink less magical, less amazing. I'm, I guess, paraphrasing Arthur C Clarke a little bit. Magic is just advanced technology. The science that we use to make this stuff is what makes the magic

. What I want to argue, and what I want to leave you with, is this notion that when you are tasting something that you're drinking-- whatever it is, if you're tasting the strawberry notes in a nice glass of white wine or the smoke in a peated Ila whisky-- that while you are tasting all those things what you're actually tasting, those flavors and aromas you are tasting is civilization. Thank you. That's what I've got. [APPLAUSE] Look, it's my desktop. Sorry about that. I can do questions for a bi

t. Do we have time for that? Is that OK? I can't tell if you're walking out or asking questions. You have to tell me. Oh good. AUDIENCE: So it sounds like a lot of the process of making booze is to get to the sugar. So, can I just put water and sugar, and-- ADAM ROGERS: Yeah, please. Listen, some of my hyperbole is intentional. So go ahead and challenge away. Oh, Yeah. No totally, well I mean that's what rum is. AUDIENCE: Can I just buy Domino sugar and make-- ADAM ROGERS: Yeah, that's rum. A lo

t of the rum that we drink-- I mean, not exactly. Well, let me calibrate that slightly. Most rum is made from molasses. Molasses is a byproduct of processing sugar cane into sugar. If you want to make white powdered sugar, you end up with a lot of molasses, which ferments really easily. In fact, it ferments so easily that you really want your rum distillery next to your sugar cane processing plant, because it comes right out of there. And you've got to get it into the still, because otherwise al

l the wild stuff's going to colonize and it will go bad. You can also make a drink called Rhum Agricole. Rhum Agricole is made from cane juice. So you can just squeeze sugar cane, have you ever tasted it? It's delicious just like that. It's not super sweet, it's just really good. And you can distill that, make a Rhum Agricole. It's a product that got made in a lot of the former French colonies in South America and in the Caribbean. You can find them. They're delicious. They're really interesting

, they smell kind of funky and grassy. And if you're making moonshine-- famously moonshine is whiskey, un-aged whiskey. But like cheap moonshine-- especially present day, cheap, illegal moonshine-- is often like they go buy a lot of sugar, ferment that, and distill it. Or they use any sugar substrate. I've seen a mash made from donuts. Tastes as good as you would expect. [LAUGHTER] What else? AUDIENCE: So a lot of the liquors have precursors, like whiskey is distilled beer. ADAM ROGERS: Right. A

UDIENCE: And brandy is distilled-- ADAM ROGERS: Wine. AUDIENCE: --Wine. Who thought up vodka? ADAM ROGERS: Well, so, a lot of people who think about booze or who write about it go by category. It's a perfectly good heuristic. Wine, beer, tequila, rum, scotch, whatever. They write about a specific thing. I'm intentionally forcing a different heuristic, which is process. Which goes-- and this is the structure of the book. Starts with yeast, goes to sugar, you ferment that, you distill it, you can

age it in a barrel. Then you taste and smell it. Take a drink, has affect on your body, on your brain. And any alcohol, any booze falls under those categories. So vodka is easy, because vodka, you can use any substrate you want. And famously it's oh, Russians had potatoes. But you can make it out of anything, because all you're doing is running it through the still so many times that you're stripping out every molecule, except ethanol and water. In fact, in the United States if you're selling vo

dka, that's all that's allowed to be in it. Those are the only molecules. It's just H2O and ethanol. That's it. Which is weird, because they taste different. So you go well, how does that work? Maybe the levels of alcohol are different, sometimes. But if they all say 80 proof, they're all 40% percent ABV. If it's all 40% ethanol molecules and 60% water molecules, what's going on? Some of it might just be marketing. Theater is super important with booze. Marketing in the theater of-- you know, im

agine that bottle of red wine that you had on that trip where you got lost and you found that perfect little trattoria in Tuscany. And you got that bottle and it was like the best bottle of red wine. And then you get the stuff at home and watching it in front of a "Star Trek" rerun it doesn't quite-- it's not really as good out of the Mason jar. It's like well, it's still good. Don't get me wrong. Plus this is the one with the green Orion slave girl. [LAUGHTER] Always makes wine better. But ther

e's a hypothesis. I have a paper that's pretty great that suggests that the relationship between those molecules can change depending on levels, because the water forms what are called clathrates. Basically they're kind of H2O crystals that surround the ethanol. And the different shapes of those crystals might be perceptible as a matter of flavor or aroma. It's tantalizing as a paper. And it was a pretty good paper that I don't know that anybody followed up on. It also, of course, came out of a

lab in Russia, as you expect. What else? AUDIENCE: You mentioned the hair of the dog. Can you talk a little more about that? ADAM ROGERS: Yeah, good, thank you for reminding me. So there used to be a whole class of cocktails called pick me ups. And the pick me ups were drinks that were designed to drink in the morning, because everybody was drunk all the time. [LAUGHTER] Awesome. It's what it's like at Yahoo, not Google. You guys don't drink like that. You don't see many of them anymore. So the

last one-- acceptable morning drinks now, the bloody family, like a Bloody Maria or a Caesar or a Bloody Mary, and a Mimosa, you see those. The Corpse Reviver Number Two? Do you know this drink? I love that drink. It's a great drink. The Corpse Reviver Number Two does not refer to zombies. The corpse in that name is the hungover person who has dragged himself into a bar, before going to work that day to try to come back. So that's hair of the dog. The idea is that if you're hungover you have a l

ittle bit of booze, and that makes you not feel the hangover anymore. So probably all it does is just delay the hangover, because you're more relaxed about it. But there is a theory. I mentioned methanol toxicity. There is a theory that says that a hangover are actually the symptoms of a very, very, small amount of methanol. So methanol's really cool. It's a different alcohol. And alcohol dehydrogenase-- we all make that too, that's how we process alcohol in our own bodies-- will work on methano

l also. But instead of having ethanol, which it can change into acetaldehyde aldehyde in us, when it works on methanol, it changes it into formaldehyde, which is bad. Doesn't last long in the body, it's not good for you, but it kind of goes away. But it turns into formic acid, which is the stuff in ant venom. So you get acidosis. Formic acid interferes with the enzyme that we use to process oxygen in our cells. So the heaviest oxygen users in our body are the eyes and the brain. That's why when

you have oxygen deprivation the first thing that happens is you stop seeing colors. And then you get that tunnel that closes in when you're not breathing. Formic acid messes with the enzyme that does that. It's why methanol toxicity will make you go blind. And eventually it goes into the brain, messes with the brain's ability to deal with oxygen, you get Parkinsonian tremor. Eventually, it kills you. But if you show up in an emergency room with methanol toxicity, not that I'm recommending this,

the first thing the doctors will do is they will give you a giant dose of ethanol. Because ethanol displaces the methanol off the enzyme. The enzyme would much rather work on ethanol. They hit you with the ethanol, the enzyme throws the methanol overboard, goes to work on the ethanol, and you excrete the methanol through your breath, and you pee it out. Basically, that's the therapy for it. So the notion is if a hangover is methanol toxicity, you're going to have another drink, the ethanol will

displace the methanol off the enzyme, and you will feel better. That's the theory-- that's the hypothesis, nobody's proved that. It's a great just-so story. It sounds terrible. It sounds like an awful solution to me that I have not tried. The other bad thing about this is that according to some studies, the kind of person who-- it's like 10% of the people who admit to trying hair of the dog regularly also end up becoming alcoholics. They sound related, but not causal, right? AUDIENCE: So I know

that a lot of alcohol relies on wild yeast, but when people-- ADAM ROGERS: Relies on sorry? AUDIENCE: --On wild yeast. ADAM ROGERS: Oh, wild yeast, sure. AUDIENCE: So when did people start isolating yeast and actually culturing it? ADAM ROGERS: Yeah, I don't know if there's a great answer to that. There is a notion-- you can imagine at first it's all just your starter. Just like people had sourdough starters that they would pass down. So you'd go, well that winery over there makes good wine regu

larly, and that winery on that hill doesn't. So I'm going to buy it from over there, without knowing it's because their yeast sucks and their yeast works really well. But you get until the late 1880s when people start to really kind of consciously study the yeast strain and make sure it's working. And a lot of that comes out of-- oh, which brewery is it. I'm not going to remember. But a specific lager maker in Germany, where they were like we're going to have a lab. We're going to understand our

yeast. We're going to figure out where it comes from. For a while they even thought they had a unique yeast. It's Carlsberg. So they started calling it Saccharomyces carlsbergensis. That was making their exact lager. Turns out it probably was a mix of a couple other strains that nobody knows where one of them came from yet actually. But it was late where people started to really focus on that. And there's still a controversy in distilling, especially about how important the strain of yeast is.

Whether you can just use any old commodity yeast, or whether you need your specific one. Brewers, especially-- you know any home brewers you know this. They'll be very specific about like that's a yeast that you make a very specific kind of beer with, ale, whatever. And they want to stick with it. AUDIENCE: You mentioned the alchemists and the early alcohol things. And they mixed them with herbals and made medicines. And being Italian, I'm a fan of amaros and herbal things and get my Fernet Bran

ca after dinner. Do you think there's a direct link-- ADAM ROGERS: Must be from San Francisco. AUDIENCE: --No, New York, born and bred. Do you think there was a direct link from that. I mean, did they take the medicines and carry it forward, and people said, you know what, I'm going to drink this any time. Or was it lost and rediscovered? ADAM ROGERS: You can still get the drinks that are if not the actual recipe, descendants of the recipe, from the monks taking the herbs in their garden and mac

erating it in neutral spirit or distilling it with. You know, Chartreuse-- AUDIENCE: Yeah, I guess. ADAM ROGERS: --And Benedictine. Benedictine, right? Benedictine monks make Benedictine. That's why it's called that. That's why I like the amari and Chartreuse and Benedictine especially, because I feel like that's a connection to at least to the 1600s and what they were making then. It's the same recipe. Probably tastes different for a lot of other reasons. But if what you're asking is when did i

t stop being medicine and become fun-- AUDIENCE: Sort of. ADAM ROGERS: --That is less clear. Although, there's a chunk of history in the book, but there's not a lot of cocktail history, I'll admit. But I've read a lot of it and I like it. So some of that mixing traces back, interestingly, I think, not to bars but to pharmacies. So pharmacies were also allowed to dispense alcohol in this country in the early '18s. So call it '10s, '20s. Pharmacists were allowed to dispense alcohol. They were also

allowed to dispense things like extract of cocaine and opiates and stuff like that. And they were also places where unlike bars, women could go, so they were more social in their own way. There's a book called "Fix the Pumps" by a guy named Darcy O'Neill that's great about this. And one of the things that Darcy says, is these pharmacists were making bitters, tonics, that you could mix with soda water. That's where Coca Cola comes from, it's where Dr. Pepper-- like Dr. Pepper. That's his recipe.

Or Boker's Bitters or Angostura Bitters. That's where all that stuff comes from. These ingredients-- so you begin to be like, oh, I'll mix that up, and maybe I'll put some ice in it. And there's ice cream. You could have ice cream at the soda fountain too. So that's where at least what we would consider the modern version of the cocktail comes from. And it transitions from being a medication-- or at least something that we all just say is a medication-- into something that's recreational. AUDIE

NCE: I like I like some really old whiskey's. ADAM ROGERS: Me too. Man. AUDIENCE: Unfortunately they're very expensive. ADAM ROGERS: I know. It sucks. AUDIENCE: So I'm wondering if you see a future in which we may have a better scientific understanding of what the aging process does, and we may be able to imitate it in a shorter time period and get them less expensive? ADAM ROGERS: Holy smoke, are there some people who would like to know the answer to that. And for real, not just as an abstract

concept. But if you are a small distiller, a craft distiller who's trying to make a brown spirit, you don't have time to wait. You don't have enough stock to wait for 10 years before you can start selling things. You need to start selling stuff now. And if you'd like to make whiskey, you want to accelerate the process. So without understanding the chemistry well yet, because they don't, one of the approaches is to use a smaller barrel. You probably know this, right. Use a smaller barrel and you

get more surface of the wood exposed to more, relatively, of the liquid. The problem with that is you get all the extractives out of the wood, but you don't get any of the oxidation or esterification that comes with just time. So people will try other tricks to try to make that happen. There's a distillery that actually plays heavy bass music at their barrels to try to get the vibration, so they get more exposure and mix it up more. There's a company called Terressentia that says that they have

a process that combines sonification-- or sonication? Sonification I guess is if you're playing the video game. Anyway. It combines a processing sound with some kind of filtration technology that they can make something taste older. I've had it. It tastes I guess fine. It didn't necessarily taste older to me. AUDIENCE: So you're not necessarily convinced yet? ADAM ROGERS: No. I'm not convinced of that. And I think also what is happening is that a lot of distillers are starting to try to say that

the flavors that you get from something that is not aged for a long time are not a bug, but a feature. They're saying, oh no, we're making something different here. But I know that there are small distillers who can age for not eight years, but some shorter amount of time and still pretty something that's really spectacular. So there are some methodological things going on. Whether anybody will ever be able to say, oh OK, well here's my oldness extract-- you know, doop doop doop-- and then ther

e you go. I don't know, although that's standard practice in some of the most traditional drinks you can think of. If you're making cognac, super appellation controlled, a lot of rules, old brand-- Cognac is brandy from a particular region, made in a particular way-- you're allowed to add something called the-- my French is as bad as my ancient Greek, I'm sorry-- a boise. And what it is essentially is tannic tea. And they'll keep the same kind of water soaking in really tannic wood for 50 years.

And they can add that to their product. And it makes it darker and you get a more of a big, mellow, older flavor. And some winemakers will do that too. They'll age in a big steel vat, but they'll soak tea bags full of sawdust, essentially, in there to get some of the wood flavors into it. So Yeah, they're trying. But the specific processes do seem to require time in the equation. AUDIENCE: So I guess as a piggyback question off of that and a lot of the things you mentioned, we're about the proc

ess. And you have this overarching idea of the process. Is there a piece of that process that's sort of yet to be invented? I mean I think a lot of the things that you just mentioned are ways we can use modern science and understanding to replace or advance are quicken or make that process more efficient. But is there some great leap of technology waiting for booze that will take it to the next sort of amazing euphoric level? ADAM ROGERS: Let me give you two. One is genetically engineering yeast

to do other stuff. So there's a researcher in Australia named Isaac Pretorius, and he worked on a yeast that-- I'm going to radically simplify this, I'm sorry, this is terrible. Basically, it would take crummy grapes and make decent wine. Because it was able to break a particular molecular bond that was liberating a flavor that you wanted in Sauvignon blanc that they were growing in too hot a climate for Sauvignon blanc, essentially. There's a woman in France named Sylvie Dequin, and she's work

ing on yeasts that will make wine that tastes good, but has lower alcohol levels. You might know this, but especially in California wines, alcohol, ABV's creeping up. Because the yeast that they're using and the process they're using is more efficient. They're getting more alcohol off the sugar. So you end up with wine that used to be 8%, 9%, you can get it at 15, which is super high. And it does-- I mean it's a flavor that people like, but also you're blitzed on a glass of wine. So she's workin

g on yeast that won't do that. You still get the flavor, but not the alcohol. Of course nobody in the world-- I shouldn't say that. If you have a GMO yeast, you can't sell it in Europe. And you'd have trouble selling it here, you'd get controversy. So after Pretorius made that yeast, once he knew which genes it was, he went back and did it standard breeding, he grew a strain up without genetically modifying it and he sells that. So there's room in the yeast, to mess with yeast and come up with s

omething new. The other thing that's probably true, there's a researcher in England, works on drugs and alcohol, named David Nutt. And he was actually in charge of UK drug policy until he had the temerity to suggest that they were over-regulating marijuana and under-regulating alcohol, so they fired him. He says that he has a few different compounds based on benzodiazepines that if you take them, they make you feel exactly the same way as having a drink or two, but they're reversible. But they h

ave an antidote. He says. So since it's synthehol. He's published on the idea, and he's published sort of the vague how it might work. And he says he's tried his own and taken the antidote, and it worked. But as far as I've found-- if you guys have one of these papers, tell me-- he hasn't sent me a paper. I asked him. He wouldn't talk to me, but he sent me a couple of papers. He hasn't published the here's the compound, here's the test, here's how I know it works. He says he needs the funding to

do it, which is always a dicey thing for research. It's like if you guys give me more money, then I'll give you the thing. But intriguing, right? Maybe less fun, comes in a pill, instead of as a Corpse Reviver Number Two. But an intriguing advance in how we get buzzed. Anything else? That's a pretty good beat to stop on anyway. Oh, one more. Sure, go ahead. AUDIENCE: To pick one favorite drink. ADAM ROGERS: Cocktail or-- no, see, here's the thing. I'm the most annoying person in the world to dr

ink with now. I'm so unpleasant now, not because-- I'm working really hard on not being judgey about people's drinks. I'm getting there, I'm evolving. Is that really a chocolate martini, really? OK, if you like the chocolate martini, you can have the chocolate martini. But I get that question and I get all contextual. I'm like, well, am I-- is it hot out? Is it the end of the day? Is it evening, or am I about to go out, or is this after dinner? The truth is that the thing that kind of got me int

o this-- though there are a lot of things that got me into this-- was single malt whisky. And that's still I think, along with with the Shinkansen and rocket ships, I think single malt whisky may be one of the pinnacles of human achievement. So it's probably that. Thank you very much you guys. I really appreciate it. [APPLAUSE]