The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks by Amy Stewart Page B

Europe.
    By the eighteenth century, potatoes were a staple food crop in eastern Europe, and distillers were experimenting with them as early as 1760. Those early trials must have been difficult. Potatoes, after all, are merely thickened stems that grow underground and store food and water for the next generation. Unlike the starch in grain, the starch in a potato is not intended to be converted to sugar all at once to feed a germinating seed. Instead, it is released slowly, over a long growing season, to nourish a young plant. This is a brilliant survival strategy for the potato, but it doesn’t help the distiller.
    A Polish pamphlet called The Perfect Distiller and Brewer, published in 1809, described the process of distilling vodka from potatoes, with the warning that it was the worst kind of vodka, behind vodka made from sugar beets, grains, apples, grapes, and acorns. In fact, potatoes only became a common ingredient in Polish vodka because they were cheap and abundant, not because they made a high-quality spirit. They tended to turn into a thick, sticky paste in the fermentation tank, the starch was not easy to convert to sugar, and they produced higher levels of toxic methanol and fusel oils. Russian vodka makers looked down on cheap Polish potato vodkas; to this day, they insist that the best vodka is made from rye or wheat instead.
    SWEET POTATO
    Ipomoea batatas
convolvulaceae (morning glory family)
    The sweet potato is not really a potato at all —it is the root of a climbing vine closely related to the morning glory. And, by the way, it has nothing to do with the yam, which is a starchy root in the Dioscorea genus grown in Africa. (While Americans have traditionally called soft, orange sweet potatoes yams, true yams are almost never sold in the United States.)
    Sweet potatoes are native to Central America and traveled around the world courtesy of European explorers. One of the earliest alcoholic beverages made from the spirit was mobbie, a fermented drink of sweet potatoes, water, lemon juice, and sugar, which was described in Barbados as early as 1652. It was a popular “small beer” for over a century, until a plague of sweet potato beetles wiped out the crop. Sugarcane plantations took over sweet potato fields and rum became the drink of choice.
    Brazilians also made a fermented drink of the tubers, called caowy. It wasn’t much to Europeans’ liking: writing in 1902, American winemaker Edward Randolph Emerson said that the Portuguese improved the drink’s flavor by renaming it vinho d’batata, “which sounds much better and sometimes there is a lot in a name.”
    The best-known sweet potato spirit is Japanese shochu, a distilled beverage of up to 35 percent alcohol that can be made from sweet potatoes, rice, buckwheat, and other ingredients. Korean soju is also sometimes made of sweet potatoes.
    Throughout Asia, “sweet potato wine” refers to a homebrew not too different from what the islanders drank in Barbados. A sweet potato beer is made in North Carolina and in Japan, and sweet potato vodkas are just coming on the market.
artisanal potatoes
    By the time American distillers were applying to use surplus potatoes for their whiskey blends in 1946, vodka was poised for a comeback. The troops returning home from Europe had done a little drinking in foreign lands. They were ready to try something new. With the postwar prosperity came a new era in cocktail drinking. Mixed drinks like the Moscow Mule and the Bloody Mary won over drinkers who liked vodka as a neutral, all-purpose mixer. Whether it was made of grain or potatoes didn’t matter so much. During the last half of the twentieth century, vodka became the spirit of choice for cocktails.
    Now potato vodka is getting another boost from foodies’ enthusiasm for artisanal vegetables. Chopin, a Polish potato vodka launched in North America in 1997, quickly became a popular premium brand. Many other Polish