The most recommended books about drinking culture

People have been making and drinking alcoholic beverages for as long as the technology has been around that allows them to do so – some 8,000 years, as it turns out. In this glorious gallop through the long and varied history – or, rather, multifarious histories – of beer, wine, and spirits around the world, packed with odd facts that will make you a champ at any booze trivia quiz, Iain Gately entertainingly shows how tightly intertwined the various forms of alcoholic beverages have been over the centuries with the societies that produce them, and how our western love/hate relationship with the demon alcohol has evolved.

A sensual cultural history mixed with economic history, specifically the rise of capitalism, Schivelbusch launches an interesting argument—that one particular substance, or taste, has often defined the zeitgeist of whole nations for definitive periods. This book is wide-ranging and general in its treatment of alcohol, as well as several other drinks and spices. There are excellent imaginative connections made, and the book invites thinkers to think deeply and broadly about the meaning of intoxicants in history and in their own lives.

When recommending books on drinking and drinking properly, not necessarily making drinks properly, there are few recent releases that cover this ground. Jeffrey’s fun primer on the basics of drinking, its culture, and traditions make this a great first floor requirement in the skyscraper of imbibing. I would add that this would be a perfect gift for novice enthusiasts as it will help dodge plenty of missteps for sure.

During the height of the Second World War, British biochemist Joseph Needham traveled across China with his assistant H.T. Huang to study Chinese scientific development, braving breakthroughs, and Japanese incursion along the way. Needham spent the next half-century compiling his findings into the Science and Civilization in China series, which rewrote our understanding of China’s place in world history. The story of its creation, and the colorful characters behind it, is memorably told in Simon Winchester’s The Man Who Loved China, a book that sadly had little to tell us about Chinese drinks. This volume, however, written by Huang, is the urtext for understanding the development of Chinese alcoholic beverages.

My grandfather hunted squirrels to put in the stew pot, raised turnips and mustard greens, and shared all that he had with family and neighbors. Joe Gray Taylor’s book takes us back to the beginnings of the cuisine and hospitality of the American South where folks made the most of the natural environment and its riches. This book also describes the way people “visited” in the South, sometimes staying with relatives or friends for weeks or months on end, the hosts accepting them naturally, adding places at the table. Taylor covers Southern hospitality from the days of the frontier through the antebellum and Civil War years and Reconstruction, including the richest and the most impoverished populations, reminding me that I myself am just one generation removed from living off the land.

A book about Korean liquor might seem out of place on this list, but hear me out. Park’s book tells the story of soju from an unusual perspective, explaining Korean distilled spirits’ origins and development in terms of the historical circumstances that created them. It explores Korea’s place in the ancient world to explain when the country first encountered and widely adopted distilled spirits, a task that necessitates a sustained gaze on China. Accordingly, Soju provides readers with the most detailed examination of ancient Chinese liquor since H.T. Huang’s, and provides several noteworthy updates and improvements on his work.

This well-researched volume explores the history of cocktails in the U.S. through the godfather of bartenders everywhere, Jerry Thomas. 

Since Thomas was the first to systematically record the drinks of his age, publishing his first bartender’s guide in 1862, his writings serve as important historic sources from anyone interested in mixology.  

Bartender guides tend to be terse and practical, reducing storied and noble creations to a few efficient lines of text.  Wondrich engagingly discusses the history and merits of more than one hundred cocktails, all of which illuminate the times and places in which they were created and drank. 

The result is a series of revelations about the drinks, some famous and some forgotten, that imbibers typically take for granted. Just like a good recipe, it takes history, culture, and geography to inspire a good cocktail. Thanks to Wondrich and his research, the history is much more accessible in this… show more.

At some basic level, the drinking culture in eighteenth-century taverns has survived in Parisian wine bars and cafés today. Yet, as a social anthropologist, Demossier shows us that wine-drinking culture has changed into something different today. Since 1980 the number of French people who drank wine every day has plummeted from over 50 percent to barely 20 percent. Yet at the same time, wine has taken on a larger cultural role in French identity as a nation even for those who drink wine less regularly. All the TV programs, books, wine blogs, wine tourism, and consumers flocking to wineries for a degustation at the source demonstrate that drinking wine is now as much a part of what it means to be French as speaking French.

Patrick McGovern is an archeologist on a mission to discover ancient tipples. In Uncorking the Past he recounts several of his most significant finds, including the world’s oldest-known manmade alcoholic beverage at Jiahu, a nine-thousand-year-old site near the Yellow River in north-central China. The story of its discovery—and recreation with Dogfish Head Brewery—is fascinating, but the explanation of the role of alcohol in neolithic Chinese life makes it required reading.

The first book I read by British novelist Kingsley Amis was Lucky Jim, one of the greatest satires on academic life ever written (I do not, however, recommend reading it when you are applying for a teaching position as I foolishly did, since it will mess, mess, mess with your head). Amis enjoyed the drink far more than he should have, earning him the reputation, as he put it, “of being one of the great drinkers, if not one of the great drunks, of our time.” His extensive familiarity with the bottom of a glass bore at least one good fruit. Everyday Drinking is a painfully witty, laugh-out-loud collection of essays and even quizzes on different kinds of alcohol from around the world.