24 Quotes by Adam Rogers

Every four seconds, someone on earth buys a bottle of Glenlivet.

We distill ideas from something diffuse and hard to grasp into something precise. We distill knowledge to its essence the same way we distill fruit wine to brandy, beer to whisky, fermented sugar cane juice to rum.

If, when you say whiskey, you mean the devil’s brew, the poison scourge, the bloody monster that defiles innocence, yea, literally takes the bread from the mouths of little children; if you mean the evil drink that topples the Christian man and woman from the pinnacles of righteous, gracious living into the bottomless pit of degredation and despair, shame and helplessness and hopelessness, then certainly I am against it with all my power.

The manufacture of alcohol was, arguably, the social and economic revolution that allowed Homo sapiens to become civilized human beings. It’s the apotheosis of human life on earth. It’s a miracle.

Now, champagne is pressurized to six times the atmospheric pressure on earth at sea level, enough to propel a popped champagne cork faster than 30 miles an hour. Lesson: letting the cork shoot out of a bottle when you open it is both tacky and dangerous.

Ethanol might help with a hangover because it stops the body from breaking down methanol.

It’s not enough to admire the pretty bottles filled with varicolored liquids behind the bar. You’re supposed to ask questions about them – what they are and why they’re different, and how people make them. The only people who can get away with going that far down a rabbit hole are journalists, scientists, and three-year-olds. And three-year-olds aren’t allowed in bars.

It wasn’t until about 10,000 years ago that we humans took control of fermentation for ourselves, entering into a partnership with that fungus long before we knew what it was. We domesticated that microbe, the same way we domesticated dogs and cattle, to do a job: make drinks.

It’s arguably the dumbest mixed drink ever invented.