Alcoholic Drinking Occurred in Harmony with the Existence of the Universe

June 9, 2006 7:35 AM

Grandiose Survey of Chinese Alcoholic Drinks and Beverages. Includes a section on the Chinese culture of drinking etiquette. Also available in Chinese.
posted by monju_bosatsu (16 comments total)

That is grandiose.
posted by Faint of Butt at 7:51 AM on June 9, 2006

A soy sauce-flavored beverage? Hm. Not so sure if my white guy palette is up for that.

But it is grandiose, that is a fact.
posted by GuyZero at 7:58 AM on June 9, 2006

Milk wine? Ape wine?
posted by StickyCarpet at 8:04 AM on June 9, 2006

"Emperor Zhou ordered his men to gather much drink contained in a pool and hang a forest of pieces of meat, then ordered men and women unclothed to run after one another among the meat forest while he and his ministers drank day and night."

Nice work if you can get it.
posted by StickyCarpet at 8:09 AM on June 9, 2006

"Scientists recently discovered there exist some heavenly bodies composed of alcohol in the boundless universe."

I think I met one of them once. But I'm not sure. We were both pretty wasted.
posted by 1-2punch at 8:21 AM on June 9, 2006

Oh man - it's friday and you know what that means: A Drink Pool and a Forest of Pieces of Meat.
posted by freebird at 9:02 AM on June 9, 2006

That story about the meat forests is pretty famous. That dude pops up in Chinese poetry all the time as the favorite decadent king to loath.

I've had deer antler wine.
posted by kensanway at 9:03 AM on June 9, 2006

Gan bei!
posted by Kirth Gerson at 9:45 AM on June 9, 2006

That is grand, dios.
posted by horsewithnoname at 10:16 AM on June 9, 2006

The finger-guessing game has to be the lamest drinking game ever conceived. Word puzzles and poems? Geeze, no wonder it never took off. Stick to inventing paper.
posted by geoff. at 12:25 PM on June 9, 2006

Do you mean finger-guessing never took off, geoff? If so, you're quite wrong. Just by virtue of being Chinese, finger-guessing games (of which there are probably hundreds; I only know two or three, and I've seen a couple dozen or so) are one of the most popular classes of games in the world.
posted by jiawen at 2:10 PM on June 9, 2006

I like this one:
Huang Di was our common ancestor of Chinese nationalities, a lot of inventions occurred during Huang Di's period

Missing word? 'Mythical.' Anyhoo, I sampled many, many different Chinese distilled and fermented spirits, and I noticed one thing about them: they all tasted absolutely terrible. Didn't stop us from drinking a flask of er guo tou every Friday night, but still.
posted by 1adam12 at 4:55 PM on June 9, 2006

Ha! I saw this site a few weeks ago while looking up info on my sorghum wine (sold as sake). I was hoping that ethnohol.blogspot had started back up before posting. BEAT TO THE PUNCH!
posted by beelzbubba at 9:13 PM on June 9, 2006

Chinese hooch, at least the bottles that friends and coworkers have brought back to Korea and pressganged me into sampling, are evil vile and unpleasant if effective, and to be avoided at all costs. And I'll drink anything.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 7:27 AM on June 10, 2006

is.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 7:29 AM on June 10, 2006

the bottles that friends and coworkers have brought back to Korea and pressganged me into sampling, are evil vile and unpleasant

I wonder if this has something to do with it:

The Jiuqu is roughly equivanlent to the English word malt and yeast, but is somewhat wider in scope, since it may include filamentous fungi as well as bacteria...
posted by StickyCarpet at 7:53 AM on June 10, 2006