Who invented booze anyway?

[Deja Q]

Damn, that stuff is tasty for the tummy! :D :crazy:

[The Traveler]

1. A friend of mankind ...

The Irish invented whiskey, of course. This was divinely inspired so we wouldn't conquer the world.

[mcctatas]

5. But we did save civilization!

Despite the whiskey...or was it becuase of the whiskey?:toast: :beer: :beer: :beer:

[The Traveler]

7. Because

of the whiskey and the poet warrior soul.

[mcctatas]

8. And the shellaillagh...

don't forget the shellaillagh.


An Irishman is never drunk as long as he can hold onto one blade of grass to keep from falling off the earth.
:toast:

[The Traveler]

10. One day

you and I will meet in real life and slay a couple of bottles of John Jameson's, all in a good cause, of course!

[mcctatas]

11. The Jamesons is a must...

otherwise the two of us just might succeed in taking over the world.:beer:

[DBoon]

2. The Arabs

That's why its call Al'cohol

seriously

[Deja Q]

4. Ah, so they invented quesadillas too?

:rofl:

[DBoon]

12. No they invented nachos!

Everyone knows the French invented the quesadilla!

Seriously, Arabs did discover how to make distilled alcoholic beverages:

http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Distilled-beverage

The development of the still with cooled collector — necessary for the distillation of spirits — was an invention of Islamic alchemists in the 8th or 9th centuries. In particular, Geber (Jabir Ibn Hayyan, 721–815) invented the alembic still, from which he observed heated wine released a flammable vapor, which he described as "of little use, but of great importance to science". Not much later Al-Razi (864–930) described the distillation of alcohol and its use in medicine. By that time, distilled spirits were not just chemical products, but fairly popular beverages: the poet Abu Nuwas (d. 813) describes a wine that "has the color of rain-water but is as hot inside the ribs as a burning firebrand". The terms "alembic" and "alcohol", and possibly the metaphors "spirit" and acqua vitæ ("life-water") for the distilled product, can be traced to Islamic alchemy. A still is a tool used to distill miscible liquids by heating and then cooling.

[azoth]

3. Me. It was me. I thought that was public knowledge.

[IChing]

6. Man did, so that he could talk to women

either that or he left certain plants in a jar, and was thirsty or hungry.

[Seabiscuit]

9. The Greek Gods

[kwassa]

13. Origin of "booze"

http://www.word-detective.com/030299.html

quote:
One of the most persistent "booze-myths" traces the word to the name of a distiller, often cited as "E.S. (or E.G.) Booz," who produced whiskey in the Philadelphia area in the mid-1800's. Evidently there was such a Mr. Booz, and he did market his booze in a distinctive bottle shaped like a log cabin, but his name is not the source of our "booze."

For that, we must travel back five hundred years before the advent of Mr. Booz, to around 1300, when the Middle English word "bouse" appeared, meaning "to drink," especially to excess (one of the synonyms listed in the Oxford English Dictionary is "to swill"). We had borrowed "bouse" from the Dutch "busen," meaning "to drink much alcohol" and we originally pronounced "bouse" to rhyme with "house." But in the 1700's we started to pronounce it with a long "oo" sound, and our modern spelling of "booze" is actually a phonetic representation of that new pronunciation.

Meanwhile, back at our Mr. Booz of Philadelphia, while his name may not have been the source of our "booze," his product probably did help popularize the term "booze" as a synonym for alcohol in the U.S.