Smells like clean spirit: What does your drink cost the earth?

Could our traditional alcohols be less damaging to the environment, and to our health? Mridula Ramesh offers some answers, in Part 2 of a Trade-Offs special.

In 1805, Sewak Ram, an artist working with the East India Company, painted a desolate landscape, reeling beneath a cloudless sky. In the foreground stand three palm trees, seemingly thumbing their noses at the drought.

The eye is drawn to a solitary figure, clad in a loincloth and turban. He is clinging to the side of the tree, high above the earth, with a pot tied to his waist. It is a toddy tapper at work, braving the elements and the odds to collect the sap.

Toddy, made from the sap of a range of palm trees, remains a popular traditional alcohol. The sap ferments naturally and immediately. Within two hours, alcohol content rises to about 4%, rising further as time passes. Within a day, the liquid becomes vinegar.

Sociologist IM Saldana, citing 19th-century Revenue Department archives, writes that toddy acts a “supplement to food, and in years of scarcity, a substitute for food”. Indeed, studies have shown that one pint of toddy meets 10% of our daily requirement of iron and nicotinic acid, besides containing trace elements of calcium, and Vitamins B1 and B2.

“Traditional drinks tend to be a good source of calories and B-vitamins, especially folate and B-12,” says James McHugh, author of An Unholy Brew, a fascinating book on alcohol in ancient India, and a professor of South Asian religions at University of Southern California. These are the vitamins that can somewhat mitigate the enhanced risk of cancer that comes from consuming liquor.

That’s important, because last week, US Surgeon General Dr Vivek Murthy declared that alcohol is so clearly linked to certain types of cancers that bottles ought to come with the same kinds of warnings as cigarette packs.

Could certain traditional brews be healthier? Traditional drinking snacks were certainly more well-thought-out. Parse them closely and they appear to be a good blend of protein, fat, fibre and fermented foods, which slow the absorption of alcohol into the bloodstream and protect the gut microbiome.

Also, “it’s hard to get blind drunk on toddy,” says Desmond Nazareth, founder of Agave India, a maker of heritage alcohol. “It’s a volume thing,” he adds.

McHugh notes that drinking was also discrete and sporadic, in clearly marked spaces, during festivals and socially; not alone at home, every night.

Traditional alcohols may be better for the climate as well. Data shows that packaging accounts for about a quarter of the greenhouse gas emissions of alcohol (less for spirits and more for fermented drinks like beer).

Companies have been experimenting with ways to shrink this footprint. “Bag-in-Box” packing is one way. Here, a plastic bag is placed inside a cardboard carton, and the alcohol within is dispensed via a tap. Data suggests that this kind of packaging has a carbon footprint up to ten times lower per litre of alcohol. It also gives the product a longer shelf life, and improves the efficiency of transport (less breakage, lighter for reverse logistics).

Transporting in bulk, in reusable barrels; and bottling locally, in reusable glass bottles, may have a lower footprint still, depending on the weight of the bottle, and the type of energy used to produce it. However, the overall sustainability of a packaging solution depends on the local recycling context as well: If the plastic from the Bag-in-Box gets tossed and clogs up waterways or burned to produce dioxin, that doesn’t help.

The better options appear to be the ones we’ve largely lost: toddy served in an earthen pot, or tongba made from cooked and fermented millets and served out of a reusable tankard.

Going traditional and making alcohol locally eliminates transport too, which accounts for 4% to 13% of its carbon footprint.

Sadly, drinking traditional liquor in a non-seedy place is either possible only in history or in a few states in India. This is a lost opportunity. Perhaps we could consider reviving the sura bars of old; controlled places, nicely furnished; female spies optional.

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How alcohol is made is central to its sustainability. From field to glass, one litre of spirits emits 2.5 times as much greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions as a litre of wine, and four times as much as beer.

Ways to make the process more climate-friendly include using carbon-neutral fuels to power distillation, and recycling or reusing the water. However, such investment does not make financial sense when customers don’t reward sustainability, and when regulations are not stringently implemented. Meanwhile, fermented traditional drinks such as tongba and toddy have a negligible carbon and water footprint.

Then there is the crop alcohol is made from. Most spirits today use sugar, which can be a climate villain, although we saw how sugar can be grown more sustainably in an earlier column. The same techniques — monitoring water use, using more compost, etc — can make barley, wheat and others more climate-friendly. Using local crops that are suited to the climate, as well as leftover crop or damaged crop, to make alcohol reduces climate impact.

Who knows? Perhaps the first brew was born when a farmer accidentally drank water in which some rotting grain had fallen. Indeed, several startups are beginning to see value in leftover bakery product. One, Misadventure Vodka in the US, collects old bakery goods to make what they claim is the first carbon-negative vodka. Other startups are making beer from bread, rebirthing an old idea: the ancient Sumerian Hymn to Ninkasi offers a detailed recipe for beer made from twice-baked barley bread.

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Taking things a step further, could alcohol be a climate warrior? I believe it could.

To understand how, let us hark back to India’s forests.

When my family went on safari in Madhya Pradesh, I noticed crescent-shaped fires as we approached the entry gate. I later learnt these were lit to clear debris from the base of the mahua tree, so that tribal women could collect flowers the following morning.

The families sell these to a local trader, keeping some for themselves. The crescent-shaped fires, lit in the driest time of year, can set off forest fires. The women who collect the flowers are vulnerable to wildlife attacks. When attacks happen, the animals face swift revenge.

So much risk taken for a few thousand rupees a year, which may seem small but is sometimes the only source of cash for a tribal family.

The sugar-rich flowers form an ideal substrate for alcohol. The flowers are collected, dried, fermented and distilled in an ingenious contraption. The spirit, considered holy, is interwoven into tribal life from birth to death. Mahua spirit is placed on the umbilicus when a baby is born. It is intrinsic to weddings, feasts and funerals. Mahua is medicine, money, companion, guide.

What does this have to do with climate?

Forests are sublime climate warriors. They store carbon in trunk and soil, and soothe the inherent volatility of India’s water cycle, improving the climate resilience of their surroundings. But forests are under threat, partly because they are valued too cheaply. And partly because they provide too little cash to their surrounding communities. This can be improved by attaching higher revenues to sustainable forest produce such as mahua.

Mahua is, Desmond Nazareth says, “one of India’s national treasures — hidden in plain sight.” His company began making mahua spirits in 2018, buying the mahua flowers directly from tribal communities at a much higher price than they would have got from their local dealer.

But mahua liquor is not flying off the shelves, even though many acknowledge its superior taste profile.

When I ask Desmond why the spirit has not caught on, he points to complicated taxation as one factor, and lack of consistency as another. “Take a random walk through the forests of central India, tasting mahua. You’ll taste some excellent stuff alongside some absolute rubbish.”

Then there is image. “The idea of a ‘country liquor’ brings to mind filth and seediness,” he says. Indeed, when I asked to try mahua in MP, the manager of our hotel said, “Don’t. It’s too dirty.”

This is unfortunate, because if mahua became India’s tequila, tribal communities could benefit, and forests too (if such mahua came with a forest-sustainability tag that ensured collection minimised fire risks and threats to wildlife).

The good news is that policy-makers have begun to bite. In 2023, the government supported two tribal self-help groups that produce and sell mahua that is made by tribal women in a certified facility. The liquor is of a high quality, and now needs to scale.

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“In ancient India, alcohol was seen as this complicated messy thing that was just part of the fabric of the universe and had to be managed,” says McHugh. It still is. And maybe it can be managed. If we learn from our ancestors.

(Mridula Ramesh is a climate-tech investor and author of The Climate Solution and Watershed. She can be reached on tradeoffs@climaction.net)