Sit down at almost any decent restaurant and the first thing you'll hear is some version of "any allergies or dietary restrictions we should know about?" Kitchens ask because they know food comes with risk, and asking costs nothing. Walk up to most cocktail bars, though, and that question rarely comes up at all, even though a modern cocktail menu can carry just as many of the same ingredients as the kitchen next door. Egg whites, dairy, animal fat, nuts: they're all sitting i

Most people today would find the idea of chewing and spitting as the first step to making alcohol rather confronting — yet for millennia, this was one of humanity’s simplest and most effective brewing techniques. Chewing starch-rich foods like maize, cassava, or rice allows enzymes in saliva, especially amylase, to break down complex starches into simple sugars. Yeast cannot ferment starch directly, but it can ferment sugar. Before malted grains and mold starters (like Japan