Post by Printehr on Jul 15, 2008 15:35:23 GMT -5
We know what the Kahlo and Guild pubs were for (watching Kamkenta races and socializing with other Guild members, respectively), but something's been bugging me for a while now. In order for it to be a real pub, they would have had to have served alcohol- and since I very much doubt that a Maintainer or a Writer could've walked into a pub and ordered a Bud or a Guinness, this raises the question: what WAS served at these pubs?
Virtually every Surface culture has an indigenous alcoholic beverage, and the D'ni are no different- in the books (I forget if it was the BoA or the BoT) there is a reference to red wine in the city. Because of their subterranean location, its unlikely they made them from local ingredients however (unless they made some sort of mushroom or fungal wine, which quite frankly I don't even want to speculate on), so they probably used ingredients from Ages they had access to. We know they had grain, so there's beer right there (we're not sure if they had barley, but the D'ni could have resorted to wheat beers or even more exotic beer recipes), and that they had imported fruit, from which could be made a variety of fruit wines. I mentioned earlier in another thread that I though that D'ni beer would be a more sophisticated form of the beer the Ancient Egyptians drank, since they had ten thousand years or so of uninterrupted history to perfect their recipe. But just as their are a variety of beers up on the Surface, there were probably a variety of beers in D'ni, and deciding on what kinds they might have had is pure speculation at this point.
So aside from beer and fruit wines (there's no specific mention of grapes in relation to the D'ni, so until we hear for a fact that they knew about grapes we can't assume that they had grape wine), what else might they have drank? It seems unlikely that being as technologically advanced as they were that the D'ni wouldn't have discovered distillation, so distilled beverages probably existed; the distillation process and the raw ingredients used vary wildly from drink to drink, though, at least on the Surface, so they could have had anything. Soniclight mentioned he hoped the D'ni had hot buttered rum- well, in order to have rum, they would have needed sugar cane juice. It's likely that they did have an equivalent plant, but we don't have any evidence of it, and if we assume they had sugar cane we can assume they had corn (for bourbon) or agave (for tequila) and then pretty much anything goes. So for the time being, at least until we receive more evidence of fermentable plants, that we limit our conclusions on distilled beverages to the ever-present clear spirits, which is essentially watered down ethanol, and can be distilled from any type of fermented beverage.
Virtually every Surface culture has an indigenous alcoholic beverage, and the D'ni are no different- in the books (I forget if it was the BoA or the BoT) there is a reference to red wine in the city. Because of their subterranean location, its unlikely they made them from local ingredients however (unless they made some sort of mushroom or fungal wine, which quite frankly I don't even want to speculate on), so they probably used ingredients from Ages they had access to. We know they had grain, so there's beer right there (we're not sure if they had barley, but the D'ni could have resorted to wheat beers or even more exotic beer recipes), and that they had imported fruit, from which could be made a variety of fruit wines. I mentioned earlier in another thread that I though that D'ni beer would be a more sophisticated form of the beer the Ancient Egyptians drank, since they had ten thousand years or so of uninterrupted history to perfect their recipe. But just as their are a variety of beers up on the Surface, there were probably a variety of beers in D'ni, and deciding on what kinds they might have had is pure speculation at this point.
So aside from beer and fruit wines (there's no specific mention of grapes in relation to the D'ni, so until we hear for a fact that they knew about grapes we can't assume that they had grape wine), what else might they have drank? It seems unlikely that being as technologically advanced as they were that the D'ni wouldn't have discovered distillation, so distilled beverages probably existed; the distillation process and the raw ingredients used vary wildly from drink to drink, though, at least on the Surface, so they could have had anything. Soniclight mentioned he hoped the D'ni had hot buttered rum- well, in order to have rum, they would have needed sugar cane juice. It's likely that they did have an equivalent plant, but we don't have any evidence of it, and if we assume they had sugar cane we can assume they had corn (for bourbon) or agave (for tequila) and then pretty much anything goes. So for the time being, at least until we receive more evidence of fermentable plants, that we limit our conclusions on distilled beverages to the ever-present clear spirits, which is essentially watered down ethanol, and can be distilled from any type of fermented beverage.