I'll drink to that where we get behind the scenes of the beverage business.

I'm Levy Dalton.

I'm Erin Scala and here's our show today. Oh, With Thanksgiving just around the corner, is there a beverage that we could identify as being uniquely American?

Some things that come to mind immediately

are the genre of the modern cocktail,

wines from Lambroiska varieties, and cranberry juice.

But what really stands out to me are the wide variety of

corn-based whiskeys including some moonshines, 100% corn whiskeys, and of

course the Great American Spirit, Bourbon.

But where does corn come from?

Thousands of years ago, corn was much different than it is today.

Imagine a bushy grass with thick starchy stalks,

and instead of ears of corn picture the top of the

grass to be more like a grain like the top of some weeds. This grass is

known as Tiosinte and is still abundant in Mesoamerica today.

The colonels in ancient Tiosinte would have been so small

and the fermentable starches in them so scant

that no alcoholic product could have been made from these kernels, nor was it a food stuff.

So if people weren't eating or drinking the kernels, why did we choose this grass for domestication?

Well, about 6,000 years ago people probably weren't

after the tiny colonels. They were most likely after the fermentable starches

in the stalks. Much like Chicha is made today ancient humans would probably chew the stalks to

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