They May Take Our Lives, But They'll Never Take Our Oversized Wine Glasses!

Ah, alcohol. The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems. You do so much for us, and yet, you're so bad for us. 

It is an unfortunate truth that, for as great as a nice bottle of beer is, alcohol is a public health nightmare. Alcohol consumption is the fifth largest contributor to premature death and disease across the world, responsible for upward of 3 million deaths a year. The battle between alcohol and no-fun "there is no safe level of alcohol consumption" public health experts is never ending, but now, thanks to a new study, the doctors have a new weapon in their arsenal.

The premise of the study, conducted in England – a place where you quite literally can't take a step without stumbling into a pub – was simple: How is alcohol consumption affected when pubs stop offering their largest size of wine glass? 

For 4 weeks, a group of 20 pubs simply stopped offering their largest wine glass – 250 mL in all but three cases. And this intervention did indeed result in a small but noticeable 7.6% reduction in daily wine consumption. More importantly, beer and spirits sales showed no noticeable increase, daily revenues were not affected, and just four of the establishments included in the intervention received complaints about the missing wine glass.  

So, what does this mean overall? Well, for one, the researchers said that people who frequent drinking establishments generally limit themselves to a specific number of alcoholic units. Which makes sense, if you have to drive home, you can only drink one or two beers or glasses of wine. The size is a secondary concern; if bars offer smaller sizes and people drink the same number of drinks, quite naturally the amount of alcohol consumed is reduced. Your liver is happy, the bartenders are happy, the doctors are happy, everyone wins. 

There is, however, just one problem with this study. Sure, the English didn't complain much, but they have their whole stiff upper lip thing going on. Try this study again in Scotland and we'll see how they take it. The headline practically writes itself: "Wine consumption in Scotland down, scotch consumption up 500%."

A Guide to Interplanetary Liquor Production

Hey, if you were going on a years long journey in a tin can with absolutely nothing else to do, you'd probably want a good stiff drink as well. Beer might be nicer to drink than homemade liquor, but it takes up a lot more space, and space aboard any interplanetary space vehicle will be at a premium. Obviously, we've been making liquor for a very long time, and even in space, the basics are pretty much the same. But there will be some differences, as you can see here.

The first space liquor probably won't be whiskey. Whiskey comes from corn, and corn needs some space. Rice-based liquor is more likely, since rice needs less space. Or most likely, it'll come from whatever plant material the astronauts happen to have lying around. Nobody said it was going to be good liquor.

Fermentation will be a little tricky, but not spectacularly so. Yeast doesn't care about gravity, but a basic centrifuge would be necessary to ensure the yeast gets everywhere throughout the mixture.

The big problem is distillation. Back on Earth, you distill with fire, and there is steam, and chemicals are released. These are things you don't really want on a spaceship. However, you don't actually have to distill liquor, according to the article. There are other, safer ways of doing distillation's job using pressure differentials. And wouldn't you know it, there's a whole vacuum outside the ship! How convenient.

I don't know about you, but I'd drink space booze. I'd drink space beer too. It wouldn't matter how bad it is, and I'm assuming it will be pretty bad. It's space booze. You gotta drink it.

A Trip to Wigle Whiskey

When you think of whiskey, two places probably spring to mind: Scotland and Kentucky. And if you did think of another place, I can almost guarantee you weren't thinking of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. But at the turn of the 18th century, western Pennsylvania was quite the place for whiskey, with over 4,000 stills documented. That's impressive, considering there probably weren't many more people then that living in western Pennsylvania. By 1808 the stills of Allegheny County produced so much whiskey they could have provided half a barrel's worth to every person living in the U.S. That is a lot of whiskey.

Obviously, times have changed. Today, there is only one distillery in all of Pennsylvania. That distillery is Wigle Whiskey, located in downtown Pittsburgh. And yes, it's pronounced "wiggle". It was named after one of the instigators of the Whiskey Rebellion, Phillip Wigle, who was German and would have pronounced his name with a V instead of a W and with a long I. But, we are Americans, and we have a proud tradition of mispronouncing foreign words, so wiggle it is.

Unfortunately, I didn't think to get a picture of the entire building, but this is not a large operation. The building the distillery is in looks like just another building. The distillery itself only produces 9,000 bottles of various liquors a year, which is not surprising considering the small scale of everything.

The whiskey making process is pretty similar to the beer making process. Our tour guide commented that whiskey is basically distilled beer, and the process starts out basically the same. They had samples of the predistilled, um, fluid (I know it has a name) which was, well, it tasted like...it had taste. I finished it though. I've been on a tour of the Troegs brewery, and while Troegs is by no means a large operation, it completely dwarfed this place. But Wigle prefers to keep things small. Small, and completely organic, using only local ingredients.

This is literally most of their operation.

There's an upside and a downside to this philosophy. Of course, the upside is that their products are of the very highest quality and taste. I won't go into details because the art of liqour tasting is a field I don't want to waddle into. I couldn't tell you about the intricacies of the flavors or whatnot, but I enjoyed everything I tasted their, even the gins, and I do not like gin. The various whiskeys I tried were all excellent, and the bottle of Pennsylvania bourbon I came away with is some of the best whiskey I think I've ever had. It has lots of flavor, but it goes down very smooth, with almost no bite of alcohol afterward. It's the kind of liquor you can let sit and savor, rather than gulping down as quickly as possible before the alcohol overwhelms your mouth.

You can probably guess what the downside is to completely organic whiskey. Just like organic everything, Wigle whiskeys are very expensive. Sure, they're nothing against Scotch, where you can easily spent upwards of $100 for a good single malt, but compared to other bourbons, they're pretty pricey. Before I went to Wigle, the most I'd ever spent on a bottle of bourbon was $45 for a single barrel reserve whiskey. Kentucky Spirit from Wild Turkey if you're curious. The bottle of PA bourbon I bought cost $58. I think it was worth it though. It's actually new, I got a bottle from the third ever batch of the stuff, which is kind of cool.

This was a doubly interesting trip for me, because even though I grew up in Pennsylvania, I've never been to either Pittsburgh or Philadelphia before. Nearby, adjacent, in the area, sure, but never in the city. I still have to go to Philadelphia, but at least I've been to Pittsburgh. It's an interesting place. It was grey, cool, and raining during my trip, so not ideal visiting conditions. I was struck by the abundance of old industrial type buildings, surely relics of Pittsburgh's past. They were everywhere, even downtown. But as we walked the mile or so from our parking garage to the distillery, we actually passed right through an arts and crafts festival. It wasn't on the same scale as say, Artsfest, but there were lots of people out and about. The overall effect was kind of strange. But it was a good kind of strange. I hope those old buildings don't get demolished to make way for classic urban gentrification, they give the city an interesting atmosphere which I enjoyed.

So, even though it was about an unpleasant a day as one could imagine in mid-September, the quality of the whiskey plus the fun of taking a little stroll through a surprisingly interesting city was well worth the long drive. I took a few other pictures as well. One of them is hilarious.