Greta Christina has been writing professionally since 1989, on topics including atheism, sexuality and sex-positivity, LGBT issues, politics, culture, and whatever crosses her mind. She is author of
The Way of the Heathen: Practicing Atheism in Everyday Life, of
Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing to Do with God, of
Coming Out Atheist: How to Do It, How to Help Each Other, and Why, of
Why Are You Atheists So Angry? 99 Things That Piss Off the Godless, and of
Bending: Dirty Kinky Stories About Pain, Power, Religion, Unicorns, & More, and is editor of
Paying For It: A Guide by Sex Workers for Their Clients. She has been a public speaker for many years, and many of her talks can be seen on YouTube. Her writing has appeared in multiple magazines and newspapers, including Ms., Penthouse, Chicago Sun-Times, On Our Backs, and Skeptical Inquirer, and numerous anthologies, including
Everything You Know About God Is Wrong and three volumes of
Best American Erotica. (Any views she expresses in this blog are solely hers, and do not necessarily represent this organizations.) She lives in San Francisco with her wife, Ingrid. You can email her at gretachristina (at) gmail (dot) com, or follow her on
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I’m getting an image of drunken oak trees, sort of wobbling even though there’s no wind…
The juxtaposition of two things that become more powerful and beautiful with age is lovely.
Scotch whisky as a kind of maple syrup, too. I like that image!
I would like to be reincarnated as one of those trees.
Drunk trunk? 🙂
What beautiful dream!
It’s not totally out there as it may seem at first blush. We get maple syrup from trees, after all, and if there’s one thing that human history has taught us, it’s this: given a great enough sugar content, some human somewhere will find a way to make booze out of it.
That being said, I’d be far more interested in helping you make your dream a reality if you had dreamed of bourbon trees.
I’m not an expert on trees but as I understand it the truck functions as a support mechanism to hold the weight of the branches above it. The bark is what contains the sap and therefore what carries the water and soil nutrients up and the fuel from the photosynthesis of the leaves down. Hollowing out the tree shouldn’t kill it if it were done carefully.
I think that the biggest problem would be sealing the “cask” properly so that it didn’t spoil.
However the colour of whisky comes from the sherry casks that they are aged in. Well they used to. Now the colour comes from spirit caramel which is added for the purpose. Not as romantic an idea but certainly practical.
Is is sad that I’ve given this so much thought? 😉
We get maple syrup from trees, after all, and if there’s one thing that human history has taught us, it’s this: given a great enough sugar content, some human somewhere will find a way to make booze out of it.
You can make wine from birch tree sap rather easily. I’ve tried it a few times.
If a 2×4 in a industrial sized steel tank qualifies Bud as ‘Beechwood aged,’ there must be a marketing angle here.
A hollow in the depths of the trunk shouldn’t harm the tree, think bird’s nests etc, think how you could entrance the woo-woo crowd with ‘live tree aged’ booze.
How many vitalist tropes can you spin on the notion?
That made me think of a very happy, drunken dryad.