Hello and welcome to another edition of your favorite newsletter! This week we are diving into the cultural and historical importance of alcohol along with the ways in which modern products are adjusting to meet current consumers where they are. Society might owe itself to the advent of fermented beverages so it seems only fair that fermented beverages should shift to keep society satisfied.

So first let’s look at the historical impact of booze, then we’ll see how distillers are pivoting to satisfy the modern day drinker.

How We Drank Our Way Into Civilization

Alcohol has always been known as a great social equalizer. At a party where you seem to know one person in the entire guest list? Great time to pour yourself a drink. Where you were once nervous to strike up a conversation you’re now the one breaking the ice and making new connections. We’ve even talked about how alcohol and the community pubs that serve it have contributed to major political events. Alcohol is so good at these things that anthropologists have started to theorize that society owes a great deal of its success to intoxication.

Edward Slingerland, a distinguished sinologist and philosopher, wrote a book called Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization and his recent interview with The Curious Bartender (aka Tristen Stephenson) inspired this segment. Slingerland argues that civilization relied on alcohol in its early years and without it we might not have been able to build the kind of interconnected society we have today. His theory was also enough to inspire anthropologists and other scholars to dive deeper and organize a formal study.

Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig tested the claims made by Slingerland using cross-cultural analysis. Archaeological evidence of alcohol is very fragmented and any texts that survive referencing alcohol come from already well-established civilizations. “For this reason, the research team employed state-of-the-art methods of comparative ethnology and causal inference. They collected data on the consumption of traditional fermented beverages from a global sample of 186 ethnographically documented societies with different levels of political complexity.”

What they found was that alcohol did have some influence on how cultures developed. Although most anthropologists would argue that agriculture, or farming, is the key to modern society this study did show a strong correlation between alcohol use and political complexity. Fermented beverages were linked to cultural bonding via shared practices and group gatherings, and a political tool for forging alliances and enriching the experience of breaking bread with potential allies.

Early texts such as the epic poem Gilgamesh pay homage to the anthropomorphic effects that alcohol seems to contain, referencing how consuming beer actually transforms a wild man into a true human:

It is also important to understand that there is a delicate balance when it comes to the benefit of alcohol to society. Researchers noted that the benefits of alcohol were only noticed when it was consumed socially. When cultures began to drink in individualistic settings (in their homes and largely isolated from groups) the scales began to tip in the direction of societal hinderance rather than asset. In a time when society as a whole is moving away from alcohol for health reasons it is important to remember why it is so engrained into our culture to begin with. Like most things there are benefits and drawbacks to its use but in times of turmoil we might stand to learn a few things from our ancient ancestors.

How Rum Is Transforming and What It Could Teach Other Industries

Many spirits industries have been producing more and more premium brands in part because consumers are becoming more and more aware of the ingredients and additives in the products that consume. We have talked about this at length when it comes to the agave spirits world but that movement doesn’t live in a vacuum. Many other spirits have been shaped by the uptick in consumer awareness, rum notwithstanding.

In an article from their March magazine, The Spirits Business dives into how rum is actually moving away from premiumization in favor of making rum more affordable and approachable. The exciting part is, they are doing all of this without compromising quality.

Many brands are using a model not entirely unlike the one that many restaurants use, offer both premium and affordable products and rely on the distribution of sales to help offset the low profit margin on the more inexpensive product. This is allowing brands like UK based Duppy Share to create higher quality but affordable rums that capture the interest of bargain rum customers that might usually reach for Captain Morgan or Bacardí.

It is also a major focus for American rum legend, Maggie Rogers when it comes to her new American rum campaign. The American Cane Company, with Rogers as the CEO, launched its affordable brand called Banter in order to cater to a customer base that wants both quality and affordability. She is of the same mindset that affordable, quality rum is necessary alongside the more premium iterations.

While many people inside the rum industry see the value in diversifying the portfolio of their brands to offer both premium and affordable iterations of their product some don’t find the effort worth the payoff. Some premium brands believe that they can’t afford to sell their product for any lower and thus see their future squarely in the premium market. Others look for ways to make reasonable swaps in order to achieve a product that might be less premium but still adheres to consumer standards when it comes to additives and ingredients.

Who Will Get The Maker of Jack Daniels?

Sazerac had previously put in a bid to buy the spirits company responsible for Jack Daniels, Brown-Forman, but the tides have turned in favor of another spirits giant hoping to purchase the portfolio. Pernod Ricard, a French wine and spirits company, has taken the upper edge in the financial landscape for the future of Brown-Forman.

Although Sazerac is a reputable spirits company, known for brands under the Buffalo Trace Distillery umbrella, the leader in this battle is its foreign adversary Pernod Ricard. The reasoning behind this is that Brown-Forman sees Pernod Ricard as the logical choice for expansion into the global market at large. One of the previous struggles that the maker of Jack Daniels cites is reaching international customers. Previously the company had relied heavily on third parties to access foreign markets but with a well established international company like Pernod Ricard those challenges would be a distant memory.

The deal hasn’t been struck quite yet though, and no one is out of the running as of now. Sazerac is a much bigger company with over 500 brands in its portfolio whereas Pernod Ricard has about 200 so buying power might still lie in the hands of the wealthier company. It will be interesting to see who ends up winning out in this purchase but the sure guarantee is that it will be Brown-Forman.

This is a clip from a longer video that you can watch on YouTube here, but it was the video that originally inspired the first segment of this week’s newsletter. It had me feeling a sort of inspired romanticism about alcohol and society. I studied anthropology briefly in college, and toyed with the idea of majoring in it, so these types of investigations into the past and the present really fascinate me. If nothing else it gives you a small modicum of reverence for the role that intoxication has played in the development of the human race.

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