Proof
“Rogers’ book has much the same effect as a good drink. You get a warm sensation, you want to engage with the wider world, and you feel smarter than you probably are. Above all, it makes you understand how deeply human it is to take a drink.”
Wall Street Journal
Finalist for the 2015 PEN Literary Award
A 2014 Amazon Best Books of the Year
A 2014 Guardian Best Book of the Year Selection for Best Popular Science Books
A Wired Magazine Pick of the Best Science Books of 2014
A New York Times Bestseller
A spirited narrative on the fascinating art and science of alcohol sure to inspire cocktail party chats on making booze, tasting it, and its effects on our bodies and brains.
Drinking gets a lot more interesting when you know what's actually inside your glass of microbrewed ale, single-malt whisky, or Napa Cabernet Sauvignon. All of them begin with fermentation, where a fungus called yeast binges on sugar molecules and poops out ethanol. Humans have been drinking the results for ten thousand years. Distillation is a two-thousand-year-old technology—invented by a woman—that we're still perfecting today. And the molecular codes of alcoholic flavors remain a mystery pursued by scientists with high-tech laboratories and serious funding.
In Proof, Adam Rogers reveals alcohol as a miracle of science, going deep into the pleasures of making and drinking booze—and the effects of the latter. The people who make and sell alcohol may talk about history and tradition, but alcohol production is really powered by physics, molecular biology, organic chemistry, and a bit of metallurgy—and our taste for those products is a melding of psychology and neurobiology.
Proof takes readers from the whisky-making mecca of the Scottish highlands to the oenology labs at UC Davis, from Kentucky bourbon country to the most sophisticated gene-sequencing labs in the world—and to more than one bar—bringing to life the motley characters and evolving science behind the latest developments in boozy technology.
Praise