Dr. Tom Shellhammer

Likewise.

Oh, yeah.

I think we need to do things that make us enjoy ourselves and happy.

And alcohol is part of it.

I think it's been part of that forever.

It kind of depends.

So the basic production process of making any alcoholic beverage starts with some sort of fermentable sugar and yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae mainly, and in some other cases, some different Saccharomyces or non-Saccharomyces strains.

But these organisms are converting these fermentable sugars into ethanol.

And ethanol is the alcohol that we find in all alcoholic beverages.

The starting material varies.

Grapes are fermented to wine.

Mashed, malted barley is fermented into beer.

Agave is fermented into pulque.

And these have ethanol in them, but they all have these other components that come from the starting material.

That's what makes wine taste different than beer, that tastes different than pulque.

And then if we've got a distillation on top of that, we end up concentrating the ethanol and we concentrate some of these other flavorants that are coming from either the byproducts of the fermentation or from the starting material.

So you ferment wine, you get brandy, you ferment beer, you get whiskey, you ferment polka, you get tequila.

So on one hand, the ethanol part is like a common thread amongst all these, but it's these other minor components that make brandy taste different than tequila or certainly wine tastes different than beer.

And as Jackie pointed out, it's the combination of these things.

And also then what you do with that beverage by itself, are you drinking tequila straight or are you making margaritas out of it?