I’m skeptical that most of SE Asia drinks “spirits”. How are they defining spirits, wine, and beer? I would have thought of spirits as being things that were distilled after fermentation, and I don’t think that most of common alcoholic beverages in SE Asia are distilled.
Whiskey is an incredibly popular drink in India. It’s often mixed down into something lower ABV (mostly water) and it ends up closer to a typical wine’s ABV as the consumed product, but it still spirits that arr being bought/sold.
There are several whiskey distillers in my part of California and 3 of them were started by Indian men that like to talk shop.
I gotta say, I’m pretty skeptical about how gerrymandered “Western Pacific Region” and “South-East Asian Region” are. They cross each other!
I really doubt this info. Sake is popular in Japan and would be (or should be) categorized under wine, yet wine is at zero in southeast Asia. So either wine literally means “grape wine” or the data is fucked up.
Sidenote: Sake isnt actually popular on Japan, as it’s seen as a “old man’s drink”. Saki sales locally have been dropping for decades. But the popularity of Saki internationally (thank you weebs!) gave it a major boost.
Source: saki weeb.
It could be categorized as “other” or “beer”. “Wine” usually means grape, and when it isn’t grape, it’s usually fruit. Obviously, sake and other rice wines are called “rice wine”, but if you are going to put them into a broader category, they probably fit better as a “beer”. Non-distilled fermented grain
What is the “other” in Africa? What they drinking over der
Learned a bit about “other” from a different coolguides post the other day.
Possibly things that are actively fermenting like kumis, kefir, or kombucha
Bless your heart. 🫂
Moonshine. Of the worst kinds, sometimes.
To just name two sources:
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2015/4/1/ugandas-ongoing-struggle-with-moonshine
I’m trying to figure out what the other is anywhere. My America must be showing, but I can’t think what other could be at all
It depends on how they categorized things. People drink all sorts of fermented fruit and vegetable juices that could loosely be labeled “wine” or “cider”. There’s also a whole bunch of things that could also loosely be called “beer” like shake shake.
Spent a year in the south/south east of Africa, and different variations of fermented maize beer were the most common alcoholic drink among locals.
Thobwa is the Malawian/Zambian version, while umqombothi is the South African one.
Weird how wine has fallen behind in the US
