Food and Beverages

Drinking alcoholic beverages has always been a part of human history since ancient times. In the Western countries, however, due to the increase in accidents, violent incidents and disease risks attributing to intoxication caused by drinking alcoholic beverages particularly in the 19th to 20th centuries, drinking had come to be recognized as problematic and even evil. Nevertheless, the theories presented by the medical scientists Michael Marmot and Arthur Klatsky in 1981 that moderate drinking was beneficial to health denied the interpretation, which have been further supported by similar research results. Nowadays, it is commonly understood that drinking alcoholic beverages can do both good and harm based on the intake amount and patterns of drinking. Since early days, people have been consuming alcoholic beverages for a variety of reasons: a medical remedy for health, a social tool to make a successful relationship via moderate drunkenness, and a cultural purpose to induce a state of trance for rituals or ceremonies. Such various drinking patterns for various purposes are often observed in the regions where alcoholic beverages are locally and traditionally produced and consumed.

 

In multiethnic Ethiopia, North East Africa and Nepal, East Asia, each ethnic group produces a wide range of local alcoholic beverages, and their brewing methods, usages and effects are also varied. This presentation focuses on brewing methods of local alcoholic beverages and patterns of drinking of the Dirashe people living in southern Ethiopia and the Newar people in Kathumandu Valley and the Gurung people in the Pokhara area in Nepal, and aims at examining how people develop locally distinctive cultures of drinking.

Figure 1. making alchol beverage in nepal