Readers seeking titles on a given drink or drug will find much to contemplate in the following volumes. For beer, there is Lynn Pearson’s Built to Brew, which is a good general history of the drink and of the growth and heritage of the brewing industry, and The History of the Beer and Brewing Industry, from editors Ignazio Cabras and David M. Higgins, which mostly covers the post-1980 period. On the history of gin and the social response to it, there is Jessica Warner’s Craze: Gin and Debauchery in an Age of Reason and Patrick Dillon’s The Much-Lamented Death of Madam Geneva: The Eighteenth-Century Gin Craze.
A few volumes examine wine from interesting dimensions. Charles Luddington’s The Politics of Wine in Britain considers how one’s taste in wine could be read as a marker of political party, social class, and gender in early modern Britain. In Champagne in Britain, 1800–1914, Graham Harding considers the impact of a French import in shaping Victorian culture. Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre’s Imperial Wine takes a transnational approach to understanding wine in Britain, tracing the emergence of the global wine industry to the British Empire’s legacies of settler colonialism.
Readers looking for histories of non-alcoholic addictive substances may be interested in Brian Cowan’s The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse and Cannabis Britannica: Empire, Trade, and Prohibition, 1800–1928, by James H. Mills.
