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Chapter 2

The United Fermentation of Planets

Full disclosure: I’ve always had a bit of an on-again, off-again relationship with Star Trek. I’ve never been a full-on Trekkie—the fact that I used that word proves it, because I believe the preferred term is “Trekker.” But my earliest Star Trek memories predate those of my preferred franchise, Star Wars. I was five when I first visited the galaxy far, far away on its initial theatrical run in 1977. But my recollections of watching Kirk and the crew go back as early as—I think—1975. I was three years old. The show had been off the air for about six years, but the local TV station, Channel 11 WPIX-NY, broadcast reruns at around five or six every evening. I remember knowing who many of the main characters were, at least by look, if not always by name. I also had vivid memories of a vicious, albino, ape-like creature with a single horn on its head. Instead of being terrified, I always waited for that being—which, I later learned, was called a mugatu and appeared in the 1968 episode, “A Private Little War”—to make a return appearance. I was consistently disappointed.

Until I was at least seven years old, I thought the Enterprise crew’s enemies were the “Clee-ons.”

Through the years I would catch late-night episodes from time to time, and I’d see the movies either in theaters or on VHS. When The Next Generation started, I watched the pilot, “Encounter at Farpoint” and set my VCR for the subsequent two or three episodes—but I couldn’t keep up. I’d drop in and out of the series. “Oh, Scotty’s in this episode? I’m in.” But by my early twenties, geekdom had become ridiculously tribal. Remember what I had said earlier about choosing a side? I chose Star Wars because I was, at best, a casual fan of the Trek series (I hadn’t even seen a single episode of Deep Space Nine during its entire initial run) and the movies were usually hit or miss. The Star Wars prequel trilogy became closer and closer to becoming a reality (mid-’90s at this point) and that was giving me all sorts of warm and fuzzy feelings that I just wasn’t getting from Trek.

But when Star Wars episodes I through III turned out to be…well, not so good, I realized that maybe there was a little room in my life for Trek. The J.J. Abrams films arrived at just the right time for that. Eventually, I binged some series episodes (including the aforementioned DS9) and realized that, in a lot of ways, Trek was essentially Cheers in space.

If there’s one thing that gives me hope for the future it’s that when so many genre properties get so much wrong about the role alcohol—or, at the very least, synthehol—plays in everyday life, Star Trek gets so much right.

Diplomacy

Let’s jump back to the tenth episode of the original series, “The Corbomite Maneuver,” which first aired on November 10, 1966. The Enterprise crew encounters a spinning, cube-shaped entity in deep space and they soon make contact with the imposing, bald, big-headed alien Balok, who seems anything but friendly. The alien informs them that the cube—which shadows every move the Enterprise makes—is just a warning. Next up: annihilation. Our fearless Federation explorers eventually end up in a standoff with Balok and, after a series of bluffs on either side, a delegation consisting of Kirk, Dr. Bones McCoy and a young, somewhat whiny Kirk-in-training named Dave Bailey (actor Anthony Call), is beamed aboard the enemy ship for a confrontation with Balok. Our heroes immediately learn that the frightening-looking being whom they thought was Balok, was, in fact a puppet. The real Balok had the body of a follicle-challenged child—seven-year-old Clint Howard, whose brother, Ron, was still trapped in Mayberry at the time and had yet to give him a cameo in just about every movie he would later direct (including 2018’s Solo: A Star Wars Story—see, we all CAN get along). It wasn’t young Clint’s voice we heard, however, as he was dubbed to sound like a grown-up. (Pretty good lip-synching job for a seven-year-old, though.)

And, as it turns out, Balok is a pretty nice guy. All of his warnings and challenges were just tests to determine the Enterprise’s true intentions. What he really yearns for are diplomatic relations with intelligent races from across the stars (his ship was completely crew-less, so he was probably quite lonely and bored). They sealed the deal over a punch bowl full of tranya, the traditional drink of Balok’s home world, poured into some rather funky glasses with wide, multi-sided stems.

The practice of forging diplomatic relations over booze is as old as booze itself. It’s also about as cross-cultural as traditions come. In China, for instance, dignitaries have been known to toast with baijiu, the country’s traditional spirit distilled from grain—mostly sorghum, combined with wheat, rice, barley, and whatever other cereals are available. It’s known for its rather…shall we say, assertive flavor.

When President Barack Obama hosted Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe at a state dinner in 2015, the President toasted the visiting leader with sake (Dassai 23 Junmai Daiginjo, to be precise). And Russians look for any excuse to say “na zdorovie” with a shot of vodka. Diplomatic meetings are just one of those many occasions.

If Star Trek is any guide, then the custom of bridging cultures (and even galaxies) by sharing a glass or two of adult beverages will survive at least a few hundred more years. After all, it did correctly predict in the ’60s that we would be commanding our computers verbally, among other developments.

Tranya may have become a liquid symbol of finding common ground, but, in the real world, it’s been the source of ongoing debate for more than five decades.

There’s a bit of controversy over what the props team actually put in the bowl and the glassware. Clint Howard has claimed that it was grapefruit juice, which he actually hated; he had to work really hard not to betray that fact on screen. William Shatner, in his memoir, Star Trek Memories, remembers it being warm apricot juice with food coloring. To the naked eye, it resembled unfiltered apple juice, so there might be some truth to that.

While Anthony Call’s Bailey character would never again appear on Trek—the Enterprise leaves him with Balok as an ambassador—tranya would pop up again decades later. Jadzia Dax can’t get enough of it at Quark’s Bar on Deep Space Nine.

The 2015 edition of Tiki Oasis—an annual gathering of Polynesia-philes in San Diego, (see Chapter 12) featured a symposium titled “The Interstellar Tranya: Drinking the Good Life and Beyond” hosted by Rod Roddenberry, TV producer and son of Gene Roddenberry, along with tiki expert Jonathan Knowles and others. They presented an encore of the symposium at the Fiftieth Anniversary Star Trek Convention in Las Vegas a year later in an area deemed, what else, Quark’s Bar.

Dueling recipes emerged from that event in a nod to the conflicting reports of the five-decades-old original drink. One was grapefruit-forward and the other, apricot-forward. Both had rum. Lots of rum. These are tiki drinks, after all.

A Sense of Normalcy

The history of exploration is soaked in alcohol, and it’s reassuring to find that the Federation appears to have learned from the past. Long journeys have, for centuries, involved some kind of booze. There’s a popular story about the Pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock instead of their original destination, the Jamestown colony in Virginia, because they needed to stop to make more beer. There’s likely little truth to that tale which the craft beer industry likes to tell, but it is rooted, at least to some extent, in custom.

And then there are also rum and the Navy, which have been closely intertwined since about the dawn of sugarcane cultivation and distillation in the New World. They don’t call higher-proof rums “navy strength” for nothing.

Whenever there is new mode of transportation, you can bet that there will be booze on board. You think folks would have been willing to get into a metal tube that would hurl them through the air at thirty-five thousand feet and speeds of more than five hundred miles per hour if the flight attendants didn’t ply them with booze to help calm their nerves?

So, it’s perfectly logical that the Enterprise and other vessels in the Star Trek universe have bars. You can’t expect people to sign on for a five-year or continuing interstellar mission without a place to unwind, socialize and, yes, tie one on from time to time.

On the original series, we rarely got to see much of the Enterprise’s broader population outside of the bridge, save for a few extras walking down a corridor every now and again and the requisite Red Shirt about to meet an untimely end at some point before the closing credits rolled. The ’60s version of the Enterprise just seemed so…lonely. You can probably thank the modest budget of a series that its network never truly believed in. It frequently got the highest ratings of its Thursday night slot (okay, there were only three networks at the time), but that didn’t stop NBC from exiling it to the Friday night death slot (where it still managed to hold its own).

But, by the time The Next Generation was ready to embark, Star Trek was a bona fide phenomenon. Devoted fans kept the fire burning during the wilderness years, the decade between the airing of final original series episode “Turnabout Intruder” and the release of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. And the cult continued to grow during that period, thanks to nightly reruns on local TV stations. Attendance at Trek conventions, which began in earnest in 1972—nearly three years after the show’s cancelation—grew steadily through the ’70s. Star Trek Lives! gets much of the credit for being a pioneer in the convention space, but the New York City fan celebration—which ran for five consecutive years—was not the first. That honor belongs to a much smaller gathering, Star Trek Con in Newark, New Jersey in 1969.

The relatively brief run of Star Trek: The Animated Series from the fall of 1973 until the fall of 1974 also helped stoke the Trek revival movement.

When “Encounter at Farpoint,” The Next Generation pilot, aired, the franchise already had four original-crew movies under its belt. The last of these, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, had been the most commercially successful of the franchise and nearly tied with Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan as the most critically acclaimed of the classic crew movies; Khan scored 88 percent and Voyage Home registered 85 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. Of course, these scores were retroactive since neither Rotten Tomatoes nor the internet existed in those days. Needless to say, Paramount believed in the franchise and was willing to put some money and production value behind its new syndicated sequel series. The effects are laughable by today’s standards, but they were nothing short of cutting-edge in the ’80s. The production team wanted its world to be as believable as its budget and technology would allow, and that meant populating the Enterprise. It also meant that sometimes that population wanted to go where everybody knew their names. That watering hole had its own Sam Malone, in the form of Guinan. The fact that a very familiar face, Whoopi Goldberg, embodied the role, meant the audience would instantly bond with the barkeep, just as the crew of the Enterprise-D would.

Guinan’s familiarity was already baked in to the series. We didn’t get an episode that spent any significant amount of time introducing this new character. There was no fanfare. Her first scene didn’t even have any lines (those would come later in the episode). She just was. Only Whoopi Goldberg could pull that off.

When it came time to launch another spinoff series—Deep Space Nine, (DS9) which debuted midway through The Next Generation’s sixth season—you could be damned sure there’d be a drinking establishment on the titular remote space station at the edge of a wormhole. It was such a volatile location, with peace always hanging by a thread. Booze played no small role in keeping a wide range of galactic species’ worst instincts in check. And Quark, the resident publican—well, casino owner, really—was just the Ferengi for the job. Ferengi were the wheeler-dealers of the galaxy. They could be a bit sleazy, but they also knew how to defuse a heated situation. When the Cardassians withdrew from nearby Bajor, Captain Benjamin Sisko was intent on keeping Quark around as a community leader—a role played by many a bar owner throughout history and today—for a sense of continuity, of familiarity.

DS9 is the closest thing to a Western that’s existed in the Trek franchise. There’s the obvious frontier aspect to it. If Sisko was the mayor of this one-horse town on the edge of eternity, then Odo was its sheriff. Quark is very obviously its Al Swearengen (without all of the “cocksuckers”). Folks might argue that Enterprise was more Wild West than DS9 because everything was so new and uncharted versus “lived-in.” But I would argue that Enterprise was more like the age of explorers and conquistadors that predated the young America’s westward migration.

Romulan Ale

Each beer geek has their favorites. These “addictive brews” are often rare, and brew aficionados camp out at tasting rooms or wait in lines for hours at major beer festivals to get a taste. It’s nice to know that three or four centuries from now this tradition will not die down. In the twenty-third and twenty-fourth centuries, the galaxy’s obsession will be Romulan ale, which made its first appearance as such in the sci-fi franchise film Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Of course, it’s not the beverage’s rarity that makes Federation (and Klingon) officers go gaga over it, but its illegality on one side of the Neutral Zone.

It’s Kirk’s birthday. Bones shows up at the captain’s apartment and declares, “Beware of Romulans bearing gifts.” The good doctor’s boss, with a touch of faux concern and shock, reminds him of the illicit nature of the drink.

“I only use it for medicinal purposes,” Dr. McCoy lies.

Another thing to love, perhaps more than the continued existence of the beverage equivalent of a white whale, is the excuses that emerged during America’s early-twentieth-century Prohibition still work in the late twenty-third. In fact, it appears that Enterprise-A-era pilots may have learned a few tricks from rum runners of the Roaring ’20s. Bones reveals that a border ship “brings me in a case every now and then across the neutral zone.” Dr. Leonard McCoy was the distant future’s Nucky Thompson!

Kirk notices the bottle’s date: 2283. “Well, it takes this stuff a while to ferment,” the Enterprise chief physician explains. Wrath of Khan is supposed to take place in 2285, so it’s not clear what Bones means by that. Does he mean it’s bottle-conditioned and it’s taken a full two years to ferment? Regardless of how long it took the space yeast to do their thing, the microbes created some pretty strong stuff, as evidenced by the look on Kirk’s face when he drinks it.

Even the Klingon physiology is no match for Romulan ale. In the film, Star Trek: Nemesis, Worf had a few too many at Will Riker and Deanna Troi’s wedding (spoiler alert!), moaning, “Romulan ale should be illegal,” while slumped over a table in the middle of the reception.

“It is,” Geordi La Forge reminds him.

Fake Brews

As promising as the Star Trek future may be for moderate, social drinking, it’s not without elements that suck the joy out of everyday life. Principal among those is synthehol, supposedly the stuff has the aroma and flavor of actual alcohol but lacks some of the more harmful side effects of the real deal. It’s a creation of the twenty-fourth century, as it doesn’t show up in Star Trek series until The Next Generation. That’s confirmed in the season six episode, “Relics,” a.k.a. “The One Where Scotty Shows Up.”

Through some techy sort of glitch, chief engineer Montgomery Scott was hiding in some beaming netherworld between de-materializing and rematerializing for seventy-five years. The Next Generation crew finds him, and we get a lot of Rip Van Winkle/fish-out-of-water-style antics. Among those is Scotty’s attempt to order a Scotch whisky at Ten Forward (Guinan’s bar). The bartender obliges, but when Scotty sips it, he’s disgusted and says, “I don’t know what this is, but I can definitely tell you it’s not Scotch.” Data notes that Scotty is unaware of the existence of synthehol, whose “intoxicating effects can be easily dismissed.”

It doesn’t seem like anyone actually likes synthehol—least among them, Captain Picard. The captain shares some of Guinan’s secret stash of fluorescent green Aldebaran whiskey, which Picard himself procured for the bar. Scotty marvels at its strength, and Picard downs it in a single shot.

Captain Jean-Luc, whose family has owned a French winery for generations, knows his way around a good drink. In the episode “Family,” the captain visits the Chateau Picard winery while on his post-Borg assimilation shore leave in season four, and his brother Robert—a man with a chip on his shoulder as big as his vineyard—ribs Jean-Luc about the captain’s diminished ability to distinguish a 2346 vintage from a 2347 and that it’s all synthehol’s fault. Jean-Luc assures him that the artificial stuff heightens one’s appreciation for the genuine article—and he’s right.

There’s no replacing tradition. The Picard family winery looks like it’s straight out of the eighteenth century, not the twenty-fourth. That’s because alcohol production technology—most notably oak barrel aging—was perfected hundreds of years ago and nothing has come along to improve on it. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Robert Picard is something of a guardian of traditions. He refuses to get a replicator—the magical food machine on the Enterprise—because cooking is a dying art. Jean-Luc insists such art is not lost with technology; there’s just an added layer of convenience. “Life is already too convenient,” Robert retorts.

Robert, if he were alive in the twenty-first century, would have made a good craft brewer. The life-is-too-convenient mantra is the raison d’etre of craft brewers, or any craft beverage maker, really. Sure, massive industrial production and the modern supply chain made beer more convenient in the twentieth century, but the beverage lost its soul. Craft brewers restored the soul by championing quality and flavor over convenience. Hopefully that value system persists well into the twenty-fourth century, as it does with Robert. Hopefully it won’t die with him when he and his son burn to death (off-screen) years later in Star Trek: Generations.

Where No Malt Has Gone Before

For a TV series and movie franchise (and merchandising bonanza) as venerable as Star Trek, it’s kind of amazing that it took nearly five decades for there to be an officially licensed beer line. A Canadian company—in Calgary, Alberta, to be precise—that goes by the name Federation of Beer, negotiated the license with CBS Television to bring these brews into our century. I remember running into a bunch of people dressed as Klingons at the 2014 Nightclub & Bar Show in Vegas when the company was promoting the partnership. Federation of Beer doesn’t actually brew the beers; nor would they be considered a contract brewer in the traditional sense.

They’ve teamed with a number of US- and Canada-based breweries to produce an ongoing series of limited-edition Star Trek beers. But Federation of Brewing acts more as a silent partner in the enterprise (sorry, had to), as the brewers maintain their own branding on the releases. Clifton Park, New York’s Shmaltz Brewing Co. (best known for its He’Brew line) has marketed such beers as Golden Anniversary Ale: The Trouble with Tribbles, commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Star Trek franchise in 2016; Symbiosis, a hoppy wheat celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of Star Trek: The Next Generation the following year; Klingon Imperial Porter and Deep Space Nine Profit Motive, a generously hopped golden ale inspired by Quark’s Bar, released in 2018 to coincide with Deep Space Nine’s twenty-fifth anniversary.

Halifax, Nova Scotia-based Garrison Brewing has produced Klingon Warnog Roggen Dunkel, a dark rye, and Red Shirt Ale, an amber brew that’s a nod to the ill-fated Enterprise crewmembers who wear their crimson attire like a target on their backs.