World In 6 Glasses Book Report

In the book “A History of World in 6 Glasses” by Tom Standage, it talks about 6 drinks that are quite popular, and how they came to be. Standage wrote about how these drinks took different important roles and wrote about their history. In this essay, I will speak about the origins of beer and wine, and how each beverage brought upon new things that helped the development of humankind. Beer and wine are both alcoholic beverages, that till this day are still existent and have changed through out the years. According to Standage, beers discovery was inevitable around 10,000 BCE in a region called the Fertile Crescent (11). Cereal grains being the primary ingredient for beer, which at first they did not know but suddenly were able to discover how it could be used in different aspects not only for eating. Discovering that gruel after a few days would become “slightly fizzy and pleasantly intoxicating, as the action of wild yeasts from the air fermented the sugar in the gruel into alcohol… turned into beer” (Standage 15). After all those events beer then became a prominent factor in modernization. Since the discovery of beer one of the few things that it impacted greatly was the adoption of farming and initiating first written documents. Standage writes that wines discovery is …show more content…
Greek philosopher Eratosthenes declared “Wine reveals what is hidden”, and Plato believed “…Wine provided a good way to test a man’s character’’. These two beliefs revolve around the same concept (63). Standage speaks about that in a symposion people will get together, drink, and talk about different subjects. Socrates put this to test, by discussing the subject of love, but he is the only one that does not get intoxicated. Plato considers him as the ideal drinker since the he uses wine to get the truth out of people but him himself does not get drunk