Testament to the Past

With the holiday season beginning, I often find myself thinking about celebrations and how frequently alcohol is part of them. Although people are familiar with the different kinds of alcohol-rum, vodka, beer etc. – not everyone knows what they are made of. And what is the difference between lager and ale anyway? Well you’re in luck. Alcohol comes from plants and ethnobotany is one of my areas of expertise. So if you’re terrible at small talk, here are a few bits of alcohol-related trivia that you might want to use as a conversation starter at your next holiday party!

Thanks to the multitude of beer commercials out there, you probably know that beer is made from barley (Hordeum vulgare) grains. Unless it’s made from wheat (Triticum aestivum) in which case it’s called Weizenbier or Wheat beer. But you might not know that some beers are brewed using corn (Zea mays), millet (Panicum miliaceum), or sorghum (Sorghum bicolor), (e.g. African Pito beer). In fact most of the most popular commercial American beers mix corn in with the barley to reduce the cost. The fragrant flowers of the hop plant (Humulus lupulus) are typically used to flavour beer but some breweries add spices or fruits like raspberries (Rubus) or pumpkins (Cucurbita maxima) to produce a more complex tasting beverage.

So what’s the difference between lager and ale? Lager is fermented under cold conditions and ale at room temperature using different kinds of yeast, which are by the way are a kind of fungus. In fact, alcohol is the waste-product of brewer’s yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae). So technically when you drink alcohol you’re drinking fungus-urine! But clearly that name didn’t have market appeal hence the names beer and wine.

When beer is distilled, a process in which some of the water is removed by heating or freezing the beer, the alcohol becomes concentrated and therefore more potent. Medieval alchemists considered distilled alcohol to be magical. In fact the words whiskey and aquavit both mean “water of life”. Whiskey, scotch, gin, bourbon, and some vodkas are made from distilled beers to which hops are not added, although vodka can also be made using potatoes (Solanum tuberosum), sugar beet (Beta vulgaris), and even soybeans (Glycine max)! Scotch is a special whiskey made by drying malted (=germinated) barley over a peat moss (Sphagnum) fire, adding some peaty water to the malt and storing the finished product in oak (Quercus) casks for at least three years. Gin is a clear whiskey that has been flavoured with a variety of plants, most prominently juniper (Juniperus). Bourbon obtains its distinctive taste by being aged in charred oak barrels.

The Japanese beverage sake is also a kind of beer made with fermented sake rice (Oryza sativa) not the rice varieties that we eat. However, both yeast and a mold (Aspergillus orzyae) and are used in fermentation.  The exact same species of mold is also used to make soy sauce.

Alcohol is also made from the stems and roots of plants. During photosynthesis plants produce a sugary sap in their leaves, which is transported through special tubes in the stems called phloem to the roots for storage as starch. The most commonly known stem libation is rum. Rum is made from a grass that produces lots of sugar: Sugar Cane (Saccharum officinarum). The cane juice or molasses (the by-product of sugar production) is fermented and aged to produce rum. The sap from Sugar Maple (Acer saccharum) trees can also be fermented to produce a kind of “maple rum”. Palm wine is made from the sap of date (Phoenix dactylifera) and coconut (Cocos nucifera) palm trees. Rhubarb (Rheum rabarbarum) stems can be crushed, mashed and fermented to produce a very nice “rhubarb wine”.

Tequila and mescal are alcoholic beverages produced by baking the fleshy leaves of Agave (Agave) plants that grow in the deserts of Mexico. After baking the leaves, the agave juice is extracted, fermented and aged in wood barrels, usually oak.

The starchy tubers of potatoes and roots of sugar beets are also fermented and distilled to produce some kinds of vodka. Since potato vodka is flavour-neutral it is often used as a base for flavourful alcohols (see below).

So if you enjoy drinking you’ve got a lot of plants and fungus to thank! And remember that if you are imbibing this holiday season don’t drive!

This September I was thrilled to be able to go on a tour of southern Manitoba with my colleagues here at the Museum. Our mission: to learn more about the people, places and wildlife that calls this part of the province home to generate ideas for new gallery exhibits.

One of the most memorable things about our trip was neither a person, nor a place, nor an organism. In fact, it wasn’t even an animate object – it was a force: the wind. For anyone who has spent time on the treeless prairies you know what I mean when I say that the wind has an almost tangible physical presence. Standing on the Assiniboine River valley slope on a lovely patch of mixed grass prairie near Minota, I almost felt that I would get blown away along with the Dotted Blazingstar and Hairy Golden Aster seeds. On a windy day such as that, it was easy to understand why so many prairie plants evolved wind-dispersed seeds. Plants in the Aster family are particularly adept at becoming windborne due to the extreme modification of their sepals.

Most of us have picked a dandelion and blown the fruits away but we rarely examine them closely or truly appreciate their beauty and functionality. Next time you see a dandelion look a little closer before you blow and admire one of the innovations of nature.

One of the problems with being a botanist working at a museum is that most of the botanical specimens cannot be displayed in an exhibit. The bulk of the collection consists of herbarium specimens (dried, pressed plants mounted on paper) that are very fragile and light sensitive. As a result they usually can’t be displayed for long (or at all) without being damaged. Further, a pressed plant is only a two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional organism and can’t really convey the true beauty of the species. As a result, I need to be innovative when creating exhibits in ways that my colleagues with their fancy artifacts, skeletons, and fossils don’t have to be.

One of the ways that we represent plants in our galleries is by creating models of what the plant looks like when it’s alive. Our artists will go into the field, photograph a plant and then collect a specimen of it. Back at the Museum they take colour notes, do drawings, and take more photographs, to get as much information as they can. They then dissect the plant, make molds of each part, and later those parts are re-created out of a variety of materials, like waxes and resins. After painting all the plant parts, each of the pieces is then put together like a giant three-dimensional puzzle. The Western Prairie Fringed Orchid (Platanthera praeclara) model, our most complicated one, consists of 300 parts!

Another way that people will be able to appreciate the Museum’s botanical collection, as well as another hard-to-exhibit group of organisms-pollinating insects-is via our upcoming Prairie Pollination virtual exhibit. With funds from the Virtual Museum of Canada, the Heritage Grants Program of the Manitoba Government and The Manitoba Museum Foundation, this exhibit will feature over 200 specimens of prairie plants and pollinating insects. Visitors will be able to see photographs of the Museum’s specimens, photographs of the organisms in the field and interpretive information on how plants and pollinators interact with each other. Video tours of native prairie and The Manitoba Museum’s collection vault, learning resources for teachers and a variety of games and activities will help visitors learn more about these organisms and why they are important. Full and temporary staff (including me, of course) are busy preparing the content for this new exhibit, which will open in October of 2013. Prairie Pollination will be an innovative way for people to access information on recent Museum research and collections in an interesting and user-friendly way.

To help The Manitoba Museum obtain additional funds to create a mobile phone application that will link our collections with restored and remnant prairies where these organisms live (a virtual biocache) please consider voting for the “Click, Text and Pollinate” project at the Aviva Community Fund website, click here.