Drink Like a Geek. Jeff Cioletti
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.
Balok’s Best of Both Worlds: Non-Traditional Tranya
As mentioned earlier, there’s been a bit of controversy about the contents of the prop tranya back in 1966—Clint Howard swears it was grapefruit juice while William Shatner insists that it was apricot juice. Since tranya was a symbol of diplomacy and interplanetary understanding, my version has an equal amount of both. Since it’s sort of tiki-ish, I wanted it to be rum-based—particularly rhum agricole. I also wanted to include something distilled from Iowa grain, as a nod to everyone’s favorite Iowan, a man by the name of James Tiberius Kirk. That’s where the Iowa unaged corn or rye whiskey (a.k.a. moonshine, but it’s legal) comes in.
•2 ounces white rhum agricole (Rhum Clément and Rhum Barbancourt are accessible options)
•1 ounce Iowa white dog/moonshine/unaged corn whiskey (Country Gal Moonshine from Iowa Distilling Co., Two Jay’s Iowa Corn Whiskey from Broadbent Distillery, River Baron Artisan Spirit from Mississippi River Distilling Co., and Iowa Legendary White Rye are some good examples; if you can’t find anything from Iowa, any unaged whiskey will do)
•2 ounces grapefruit juice
•2 ounces apricot juice
•2 dashes orange bitters
Pour all ingredients in a shaker full of ice. Stir well. Strain and serve up in a stemless Cosmo glass because it most closely resembles the glassware in which Balok served