20 Drinks That Shaped History More Than You Realize

How do you make a list of revolutionary beverages and leave out water? You need it to survive. But once people learned to contain and control good water (using clay pots, wells, irrigation ditches, and eventually aqueducts), communities could expand in size. Water management allowed towns and cities to grow, and without it, this list wouldn’t exist. Never again will I take water for granted!

People baked bread from grain, but it didn’t take long to figure out that if they mashed that same grain a bit more, it made a drink instead. And so, beer. It was filling, it kept better than grain, and it gave people a reason to gather. So you can see why it was a very important drink in many early cultures.

The trouble with wine is that you need more than just good grapes; you need a warm climate and fine enough pottery, or your entire production will go sour. That all meant wine was expensive, and that meant it was exclusive

Mead is a type of alcohol that’s created by fermenting honey and water. It’s probably one of the oldest alcoholic beverages ever. It was often called a drink fit for the gods (and no, not the Lana Del Rey song), which, for all intents and purposes, is great branding. It provided calories and a buzz, and became an important part of Norse culture and European history.

As humans domesticated animals, they discovered how to milk them, and life changed forever. The earliest animals likely milked were sheep and goats. It added a reliable food resource that allowed some groups to flourish in areas where the environment was less hospitable. However, the capacity to digest lactose into adulthood was only found in certain groups. So next time a latte destroys your day, don’t blame Starbucks, blame your ancestors. On a personal level, although I used to be lactose intolerant, I think I would be dead by now if my tolerance didn’t increase over the decades given how much coffee and dairy I consume daily.

Sake was born out of early efforts at fermenting rice, becoming the national drink of Japan. And because its foundation is rice, sake was naturally intertwined with Japan’s agricultural practices. Sake also has a firm grasp on Japan’s religious and cultural life. That is a lot of ground for a beverage to cover, and I applaud their ambition.

Chicha, a beer brewed from fermented maize, was the cornerstone of the Inca Empire. Chicha was central to agriculture and religious rituals, and Inca rulers used it to assemble massive labor forces and solidify political connections. If all you know about the Incas is from the movie The Emperor’s New Groove (I can’t say I blame you; that’s how I learned about them, too), the empire leaned on corn beer more than you’d ever guess!

Pulque, a somewhat intoxicating beverage produced by fermenting the sap of agave plants, was popular throughout Mesoamerica for centuries. It was considered holy by the Aztecs, and used in religious ceremonies and for medical purposes; it’s also very nutritious. The same plant used to make pulque is used to make the popular drink tequila, though the two drinks are made in very different ways, so the relatives of this drink are still out there ruining people’s Saturday nights across the globe.

Palm wine is possibly the most low-effort great alcohol of all time, and I mean that as high praise. You stick a tube in a palm tree, wait a few hours, and drink what’s fermented by itself. Palm wine has been an essential social and ceremonial beverage throughout much of tropical Africa and some of Southeast Asia for millennia. Alcohol, for free, provided by a tree.

Kvass is a Slavic drink that’s made by fermenting old black rye bread in water with a little sugar. Which, if you’re like me, sounds like a recipe you’d make up by mistake one lazy afternoon. But it’s been around for over 1,000 years, serving peasants and kings alike with a tasty, hydrating beverage while putting stale bread to good use.

The earliest chocolate drink was bitter, spicy and frothy, which is quite different than the Polar Express marshmallow that’s currently happening in my cup. The drink originated in Mesoamerica, and when the Spanish conquistadors brought cacao back to Europe, wealthy Europeans made it a status symbol. Somewhere between the Aztecs and today’s coffee shop, we added a giant heap of sugar and haven’t stopped since. Thank God we did.

Distillation involved heating and then cooling wine in order to condense the alcohol, and began around the turn of the first millennium. The resulting product came to be known as “burnt wine.” Today we call it brandy. Of course, it was initially used as medicine. Look at any historical drama; there’s always a character passing out on the chaise lounge and a doctor prescribing a shot of brandy. Selling brandy as “medicine” was pretty much the entire revenue stream.

Rum is made from sugar cane, grown in the New World, where the cultivation was so backbreaking that growers resorted to slave labor. Rum became associated with the slave trade itself. It is a beverage that is literally woven into one of the most terrible parts of our shared history. I’m not going to joke about that part. Rum kept for a long time, which is how it became a drink for the age of sail.

By the 1700s, the British navy was issuing rum rations to sailors and started adding regular citrus juice to fight scurvy. Watering the rum down made the supply go further, and the lime juice kept the disease away. All in all, the combination of watered rum and citrus kept sailors healthier on long sea journeys. It is wild to think of an empire built on watered rum and citrus.

Molasses was needed to distill rum. Rum was one of colonial America’s most popular drinks. So molasses trade was the heart of the New England economy. Taxing the stuff was a direct attack on colonial economic prosperity. Add that to the issue of taxation without representation, and you have a powder keg. The Boston Tea Party may be the most famous protest against taxes imposed by Parliament, but molasses got the ball rolling.

Coffee came to Europe as a sober stimulant just in time for the Age of Reason. In many ways it was the opposite of alcohol, because rather than clouding your brain, it made you alert. People met in coffeehouses to share news and debate issues. Lloyd’s of London and the London Stock Exchange were originally coffeehouses, and later cafés in France became meeting places for radical thinkers. My love of caffeine has caused not a single revolution. Lorelai Gilmore (my favorite fictional coffee addict) will be disappointed.

“Would you like some tea?” is quintessentially British, but China had been drinking it daily long before it acquired that particular flavor. In Britain, its caffeine kick enabled factory workers to get through long working hours during the Industrial Revolution, while boiling the water meant it was safer to drink, quietly saving many lives in densely populated towns. And Britain’s addiction to Chinese tea led to the opium trade with China, which exploded into the Opium Wars.

Carbonated water was invented in Europe in the 1700s and usually sold as a medical remedy for nausea, among many other ailments. It turned out that bubbly little stomach fix was the beginning of the soft drinks industry we see today.

Coca-Cola was invented in the 1880s by a pharmacist named John Pemberton, who initially sold about nine servings of it each day. Nine! It came out during the temperance movement, and eventually filled the demand for a nonalcoholic beverage. Then it rode the growth of the United States and became the iconic image of the nation around the world. Many say that Coca-Cola is oone of the most recognized words on earth, after only “OK.”

Starting off our list with water, let’s close it with water too, well, sort of. It now has a price attached to it. In the late 20th century, companies bottled up mountain spring water, and sold it as part of a lifestyle. We go from providing free drinking water to all, to selling bottles of water, to now buying pricey insulated tumblers to carry around our water in. Magnificent.

This content was created with the help of AI.