As it turns out, us human-type-creatures are super fond of booze, cultural and legal admonishments notwithstanding. It also turns out that you have to do very little work to get things to ferment into our favorite drinkable--ethanol. You basically need water, a starch (or better yet, a sugar), and yeast though sometimes mother nature will supply this for you too.
Historical
I am not a booze historian, though, I imagine that's a really interesting field. Here's a listing I stuck together for my own use of things people actually fermented and drank in antiquity. Like chiles which have different names for fresh, dried, and smoked versions, many of these drinks have distilled versions which I've supplied as appropriate.
- Beer: a basic fermented drink made from grains of some sort and a yeast. There's some work that needs to be done to convert the starches in the grain into sugars so the yeast can do they thang but it's easy enough to do in the comfort of your own kitchen should you be so inclined. I could easily fill multiple articles about beers and whisk(e)ys but we'll keep it to the basics.
- A beer with slow-working yeast that likes low cave-like temperatures are typically German lagers. Pilsners (from the Czech city of Pilsen), Marzens (with two dots) famous for Oktoberfest, and Dopplebocks brewed by monks to replace bread during fasting are all examples.
- A beer made with fast-working yeast at just under room temperature are typically ales of which there are many, many types. These include porters probably named after the folks who primarily drank them, stouts, barleywines, lambics made with fruit, and most (all?) farmhouse ales. They take not much time to ferment and don't need to be aged.
- Beers with different grain bills turn into some of our modern day favorites when distilled including Bourbon, Whisk(e)ys, and I dunno, a lot of stuff, including my personal favorite Scotch. Most of today's cheap liquors start with a thing that looks a lot like beer.
- Ethiopian tella is a beer brewed from teff and sorghum (assumedly malted or otherwise converted).
- Cider: These are fruits or fruit juices that are fermented into an alcoholic drink. We think of cider today as fermented (or non) apple juice. I'm lumping a bunch of things into the same category even though they're not really the same thing.
- Cider made from pears is called perry.
- Distilling cider yields the founding father favorite applejack.
- Wine: Today we think of a wine as a drink made from grapes, usually not distilled, and often aged, but wine is a pretty generic term.
- Brandy is distilled wine and originated for preservation and to ease shipping. Cognac and Armagnac are brandies specific to regions of France.
- Fruit wines of all types are known and Romania has a fantastic distilled version made from plums named tuica with some fancy letters.
- Mead: I find it fascinating that mead is so well-recognized in popular culture but so few people know where it comes from. The answer: bees. Mead is often adulterated with other stuff but beyond water, honey, and yeast, that's it.
- An Ethiopian version of mead is called tej and includes bittering agents.
- Balche (with an accent) is a Mexican version with roots all the way back to the Mayans.
- A mead with fruit like berries is called a melomel.
- Metheglin is mead with added herbs and spices
- Distilling mead is sometimes called honey jack.
- Potato beer doesn't seem to have been a thing but as a cheap way to increase the fermentables in a mash they're super popular. We're probably all familiar with vodka but the Norwegians also have akvavit distilled and flavored with herbs.
- Rice is a common ingredient in modern beers but Japanese sake is a non-distilled drink made primarily from rice.
- Distilled rice drinks are unsurprisingly common.
- Corn is also a common ingredient in modern beers and commonly made into chicha in South and Central America.
- Bourbon is distilled from a mash mainly comprised of corn.
Hazards
Other than hangovers, there are many hazards with alcohol in worldbuilding. First and foremost: pay close attention to how things are named. An "Elven Cognac" doesn't make much sense since Cognac is a French town, unless your Elves are French. Which I suppose they could be. Similarly, "Dwarven Scotch" doesn't make much sense even though four out of five grognards think dwarves should speak in Scots English, myself included. We also get in trouble with things named in other languages that aren't place names. Lager comes from the German lagern meaning "to store" and we often anglicize this as lagering. You can make up your own etymology if you like but be mindful of where some of these came from.
Another pitfall is wanting to stick things together for story or other reasons that don't make sense culturally or geographically. Sake drinkers likely won't originate in an arid place because you can't easily grow rice there. Similarly, people who don't grow grain won't be brewing a lot of beer. They probably have all kinds of other fermentable drinks, but that probably won't be one of them.
As a final thought on hazards, people have a history of staple drinks following stuff that a) grows commonly, and b) is cheap. Large drinking establishments/cultures/traditions require a lot of raw materials to produce the volumes required. Industries and trade are almost always found around these situations as opposed to fermenting in small batches for personal use, sometimes to preserve the value of fermentables at the tail end of their usefulness.
Another pitfall is wanting to stick things together for story or other reasons that don't make sense culturally or geographically. Sake drinkers likely won't originate in an arid place because you can't easily grow rice there. Similarly, people who don't grow grain won't be brewing a lot of beer. They probably have all kinds of other fermentable drinks, but that probably won't be one of them.
As a final thought on hazards, people have a history of staple drinks following stuff that a) grows commonly, and b) is cheap. Large drinking establishments/cultures/traditions require a lot of raw materials to produce the volumes required. Industries and trade are almost always found around these situations as opposed to fermenting in small batches for personal use, sometimes to preserve the value of fermentables at the tail end of their usefulness.
How the Dwarves Got Their Whisky
You can go at this from basically two directions: decide what they drink and adjust things around it, or figure out what goes on there and then figure out what they brew. I do a mix of the two as suits the situation. Here's a long for-instance.
Dwarves in my world love beer and whisky and we're going from "what they drink" to "what has to be true". Both beer and whisky require grain in abundance and grain doesn't generally grow underground very well. Kallvor is a low-magic world so there are no mystical greenhouses. What has to be true for this to work? They either have to grow it themselves or import it from someone else.
Imagine, for a moment, a drinking craze going on in the Dwarven Empire. These guys are good craftsmen, heavy drinkers, and most of all, excellent traders. How long do you think it would take for a Dwarven merchant to go from "gawd, this crap is super expensive to buy" to "why can't we grow and make this ourselves?" Maybe they hire a lot of farm laborers and the staff to hire, train, and organize them. Do you think those guys would make a barrel of royals?
Now let's go from beer to whisky. What do we know about beer? It's heavy (I mean, water's freaking heavy and beer is mostly water), it goes bad real fast if not kept cool and out of sunlight both of which are common in merchant trains, and you can distill it to make it better in just about every way. Remember brandy? Same solution to the same problem so it shouldn't be a stretch.
What happens when Dwarves start setting up large scale farms to supply grains for beer production? Every Dwarven settlement that has arable lands is now heavily incentivized to set up fields that they might not have done otherwise since most of their food is grown underground. We expect that major Dwarven settlements are trade hubs for their raw materials and crafts so they already have a bartertown on the surface, but now this takes on extra significance as the hub of trade and the center of their farm systems. Now we play this forward for thousands of years and we have traditions and establishments that have become, dare I say bedrock, of Dwarven society. Was it crafts or booze that built the Dwarven Empires of old? Sounds like a good discussion over a pint.
One of the greatest cities on the Kallvor map is Vendregogh, an old Dwarven barter town. The Dwarven undercity has been abandoned for ages but the tradition of grain growing and beer making remain. Because of their heritage, they lean heavily into Dwarven traditions more than, say, Elven or Human traditions. Furthermore, since there's an unbroken tradition of large scale farming there, they're better at it than, say, their counterparts elsewhere like Falcon or Trand. Does this explain Vendregogh's prosperity? Maybe!
Kobba
OK, fine, I'll give one more example. Cedarwood, forever immortalized in pixels is a town in the middle of the forest unimaginatively called the Black Wode. This time we go in the other direction from "what they have" to "what they drink". From the fiction, Cedarwood is an ancient walled city that's been busy ripping itself apart for thousands of years. They don't really grow anything inside the city and the walls aren't super far from the forest itself. Given that any large farming system would require a) tearing down a lot of forest, b) a large standing army to keep it safe from enemies, we quickly arrive at a reliance on farmers markets supplied by mostly subsistence farmers from the nearby area.
What do subsistence farmers in a mixed deciduous and coniferous forest grow? Tree fruits are probably common, as are berries, but stuff like like potatoes, carrots, beets, onions, and other root vegetables are likely staples. We don our creative hat for a minute and take inspiration from sugar beets, sweet potatoes, and Dwarf Fortress to create a mythical forest-native tuber named sweet root.
This fictional tuber is found natively in the area and has been cultivated for the thousands of years that the site has been inhabited. In that time selective breeding has increased crop yields and sugar content and they are grown commonly in the area. On top of eating them as a bland, if high value source of calories, they can also be processed into molasses or mashed and fermented into the sweet, perfumed, local favorite known as kobba.
Kobba is usually brewed on site at taverns and each brewer has their preferred adjuncts and mash ratios and whatnot. It's a fairly forgiving fermentable with a relatively high yield and can produce cheap low quality rotgut to fancy oak aged super high alcohol content drinks and everything in between. But why stop there? Let's take the second runnings or maybe the first runnings from a really questionable crop of sweet root, ferment it, an then distill it. Then you get a very rum-like and perfumed liquor called krum.
This fictional tuber is found natively in the area and has been cultivated for the thousands of years that the site has been inhabited. In that time selective breeding has increased crop yields and sugar content and they are grown commonly in the area. On top of eating them as a bland, if high value source of calories, they can also be processed into molasses or mashed and fermented into the sweet, perfumed, local favorite known as kobba.
Kobba is usually brewed on site at taverns and each brewer has their preferred adjuncts and mash ratios and whatnot. It's a fairly forgiving fermentable with a relatively high yield and can produce cheap low quality rotgut to fancy oak aged super high alcohol content drinks and everything in between. But why stop there? Let's take the second runnings or maybe the first runnings from a really questionable crop of sweet root, ferment it, an then distill it. Then you get a very rum-like and perfumed liquor called krum.
But Wait, There's More!
If we're talking about rabbit holes, this one's awfully deep. "What do you drink here?" is a really good way to connect with the culture and traditions of an area and having good answers helps your fictional world live in relatable ways. It also helps breath some life into your ever present bars and taverns maybe adding some color to the characters who live and work there. In the words of one of my players "games tend to represent the interests of the designers." I guess I'm a drunk.
In this session we've talked a little about biomes, agriculture on both small and large scale, etymology, and all manner of brewing science. We've also considered quite a lot of other cultures to grow inspiration given all the cool stuff going on in this world. This is one of the many truths I see in Worldbuilding--verisimilitude lives in the details and otherwise forgotten associations.
