tamaranth | 2026/048: A History of the World in Six Glasses

2026/048: A History of the World in Six Glasses — Tom Standage

Understanding the ramifications of who drank what, and why, and where they got it from, requires the traversal of many disparate and otherwise unrelated fields: the histories of agriculture, philosophy, religion, medicine, technology, and commerce.

Standage explores the histories of six 'period-defining' drinks, from beer in the Neolithic to cola (Coca-Cola vs Pepsi) in the modern era, and explains how each beverage has shaped history.

The drinks in question are beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea and Cola: there's an epilogue focussing on water, contrasting the lack of safe drinking water in parts of the developing world to the modern Western fad for bottled water -- often pretty much the same stuff as comes out of the tap.

There were some really fascinating connections and remarks in this book. I learnt that the Coca-Cola Company supplies 3% of humanity's total liquid intake; that Caligula drank century-old Falernian wine; about the role of rum in the slave trade and in the European colonisation of America; about the all-male coffee houses that spawned the Stock Exchange and Lloyds of London; that tea was initially vastly more expensive than coffee, and how it sparked the Opium Wars; about anti-Coca Cola sentiment in the Communist Bloc, and how Coke came to represent America while Pepsi cornered the Soviet market. (Krushchev was a fan.) There's also a fascinating appendix on how to taste ancient drinks, from King Cnut's Ale (St Peter's Brewery) through retsina to Fentiman's Curiosity Cola.

Again, this audiobook wasn't a wholly great experience. I missed being able to highlight interesting sentences, and I found the narrator's voice rather bland. But this was an interesting book and I'd recommend it as an accessible -- albeit Western-biased -- guide to the history of popular drinks.