The Battle to Bottle Palm Wine (2021) | Hacker News Reader

The Battle to Bottle Palm Wine (2021)

atlasobscura.com

17 pointsprmph19 comments

Not mentioned is one more part of the battle: toddy is considered a low-class drink for rowdy workers, and tightly regulated accordingly. This guy has been battling Singaporean bureaucracy for six years now just to be allowed to import it from neighboring Malaysia:

https://www.ricemedia.co/one-mans-quest-to-revive-toddy-the-...

I used to travel to India a lot and would have this when staying with friends in Hyderabad, flies and all. My friend would send one of his servants out in the morning to buy it for us. The way he explained it - someone would climb the palm tree in the evening, make cuts in a place where the liquid would leak out and pool, then there would be fermentation overnight (bacterial, not yeast), and then they collect it on the morning.

It reminded me of a drink here in Switzerland made during grape harvest and also bacterial fermentation. Also sour cider in the babe region but that’s much more sophisticated.

This palm juice alcohol is very primitive and probably something monkeys drank.

Basque region, not bape region.

> staying with friends in Hyderabad, flies and all.

Hmm... flies and all?

> send one of his servants out in the morning to buy it for us.

Hmmm..... one. servants?

> This palm juice alcohol is very primitive and probably something monkeys drank.

Hmm... primitive? monkeys?

Sorry, but I got an uncomfortable feeling from reading your comment. I think my insula cortex activated upon detecting chromatocrat type verbiage.

Not the OP, and my initial reaction was very similar. I'm giving the benefit of the doubt though and assume he meant monkeys in India will drink the naturally-occuring fermentation similar to how moose/elk in Scandinavia will get drunk on overly ripe fruit.

https://enviroliteracy.org/animals/can-elk-get-drunk/

Probably could have been a better choice of example than a monkey but if you spend a lot of time in India, the "we normally see these in a zoo!" novelty probably wears off quickly and its no different than dealing with deer in north america.

What makes an alcoholic drink "primitive"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nipah_virus_infection#Preventi...

> 50% to 75% of those infected die

Whoa

What is it about bats that makes them vectors for so many maladies? EDITED to remove spurious ref to rodents

A big thing is that Bats have a really weird metabolism, during their day it can dip down to 50 Fahrenheit and then go up to 104 F at night when they are active. This can mean they end up carrying a lot of diseases but not dying/showing symptoms of them. They also have very strong DNA repair compared to other mammals. Then in addition many bats are very social and sleep in big groups, which means the disease can spread throughout the bat population.

Edit: Finally and relevantly they can come in close contact with people by coming into our homes, or people going into theirs. This can let the disease cross over.

> Bats have a really weird metabolism, during their day it can dip down to 50 Fahrenheit and then go up to 104 F at night when they are active. This can mean they end up carrying a lot of diseases but not dying/showing symptoms of them.

What is the connection between these two ideas?

Most organisms, including pathogens, have a relatively narrow temperature range they operate in. Hence why we get fevers in order to fight them off. Bats spend most of the time too cold, then get up to the equivalent of a high grade fever for an extended time. Here's a paper on the subject https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4012789/

That covers the first sentence. How does it connect to the second one? So far, you've described how you would expect bats to carry very few diseases, because diseases that found themselves inside a bat would be killed by the temperature fluctuations. It does not appear to follow that bats should be hosting a lot of diseases at any given time.

You've made an interesting counterargument that I've never come across before. I'm purely speculating here, but maybe the diseases in question (rabies, nipah) are otherwise so deadly that they'd normally just kill the host, but in bats, they linger on. All that to say, that bats aren't necessarily hosting more diseases relative to other animals, but they harbor diseases at the more lethal end of the virulence to transmission tradeoff spectrum.

What do you mean, counterargument? A "counterargument" can only exist relative to an argument. So far there hasn't been an argument. To recap:

1. "A big reason bats carry a lot of diseases is that they have large temperature fluctuations."

2. "How does the one lead to the other?"

3. "Diseases can't tolerate temperature fluctuations."

That's gibberish, not an argument. Combining two random (or in this case, contradictory) sentences doesn't make an argument.

I am very intrigued as local, culturally specific wines/beers/fermentation speak so much to our creativity and community as human beings.

But thanks for the heads up about Nipah Virus! Wow!

Ever since seeing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6skjbVDVEg4 my wife has been trying to find a way of importing it to make the dish herself

This story is from 2021 so I wonder how those startups are faring now. For a while molecular alcohol was the hot thing, with startups like Endless West raising a lot of VC to try and shortcut aging.

What’s the average ABV of palm wine?

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