Why Make Your Own?

Not long ago, our forebears regularly drank a rich variety of wines, ales, and aperitifs that make today’s range of choices look impoverished by comparison. While most of us today peruse a wine list to choose between grape wines—a Cabernet or a Pinot Noir, for example—previous generations might have chosen between grape wine, cider, honey-based mead, metheglin (a mead with herbs added), perry (pear cider), peachy (you can guess what that was made of), or a variety of herb-based ales.
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Given the symbolic place alcohol holds in our shared culture—consumed at celebrations and often accompanying important rituals or rites of passage—making our own alcoholic beverages is a particularly rich form of self-expression. The human relationship with fermentation is long. Some of the earliest discovered writings are Sumerian brewing instructions, and some of the earliest known paintings show people making and drinking beer. As people began to create and inhabit cities, fermented beverages saved millions of lives by helping to kill the bacteria in the shared water. The purpose of the earliest agricultural studies was to enhance wine and beer production and quality. The process of making alcoholic beverages led to many of the first laws, to the early specialization of labor, to guilds, and later to labor unions. Both drinking and prohibitions against it have deep roots in many of our religions.
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And while today almost all of us buy our alcoholic beverages ready-made and prepackaged, making them was as common as cooking dinner throughout nearly all of our history. Countries, regions, and families each had their own cherished recipes for alcoholic beverages. Most of these recipes are lost, but some of the best—at least the ones that were written down—appear updated and standardized on these pages.