Alcohol
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7correct to beat the crowd
This liquor and alcohol trivia quiz has 261 free questions with answers and covers the whole bar: how spirits like whiskey, gin, tequila and rum are made and where they come from, the classic cocktails and who invented them, beer and wine basics, and the odd corners of drinking history from Prohibition to the world's strongest beers. Questions start easy enough for anyone who has ordered a drink and climb to the kind of thing only a bartender or a distillery tour guide would know, so it works as a pub-quiz round or a party game. Every answer has been checked against a real source and each question shows its citation.
30 of 261 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which toxic alcohol, once known as wood alcohol, can cause blindness when it taints bootleg spirits?
Methanol
Methanol is turned by the body into formic acid, which attacks the optic nerve; oddly, one antidote doctors can give is ordinary drinking alcohol.
Q 02Which French scientist showed in the 1850s that living yeast, not chemistry alone, turns sugar into alcohol?
Louis Pasteur
Louis Pasteur went on to patent a way of gently heating wine to kill the microbes that spoiled it; pasteurisation was only later extended to milk.
Q 03A regular beer such as a standard lager is roughly what strength in alcohol by volume?
5%
5% is the usual benchmark, which is why US health guidance counts a 12-ounce beer, a 5-ounce glass of wine and a 1.5-ounce shot of spirits as the same single drink.
Q 04Which simple cocktail is nothing more than vodka topped up with orange juice?
Screwdriver
The Screwdriver's name first turned up among Americans in wartime Turkey; the popular but unproven story is that, lacking a spoon, they stirred the drink with a screwdriver.
Q 05What US term equals twice the percentage of alcohol by volume in a distilled spirit?
Proof
Proof doubles the percentage, so an 80-proof spirit is 40% ABV. The word goes back to tests that 'proved' a spirit's strength for the taxman, such as checking whether gunpowder soaked in it would still burn.
Q 06Which fermentation by-products, other than alcohol itself, give drinks much of their flavour and are blamed for worse hangovers?
Congeners
Congeners are why colour is a rough guide to the morning after: bourbon, brandy and red wine carry far more of them than vodka, and studies suggest the extra load makes hangovers worse.
Q 07Which liver enzyme carries out the first step in clearing a drink from the body, producing acetaldehyde?
Alcohol Dehydrogenase
Alcohol dehydrogenase works at a steady pace, clearing roughly one standard drink an hour, and nothing a drinker does afterwards can speed it up.
Q 08Which bar technique crushes herbs or fruit against the bottom of the glass before the liquid goes in?
Muddling
Muddling is done with a muddler, a blunt pestle that mashes the ingredients to release their flavour; the mint julep and its relatives, the 'smashes', are built this way.
Q 09Which of these is a key ingredient in a classic Manhattan cocktail?
Sweet Vermouth
A Manhattan is whiskey (traditionally rye), sweet vermouth and Angostura bitters, stirred and garnished with a cherry; gin, white rum and tequila have no place in it.
Q 10What refreshing cocktail typically combines white rum, lime juice, fresh mint, sugar, and soda water?
Mojito
Mojito is a Cuban diminutive of mojo, a sauce or marinade, from the Spanish mojar, 'to make wet'; the drink was born in Havana, though exactly how is still debated.
Q 11Which cocktail traditionally features tequila, lime juice, and an orange-flavored liqueur?
Margarita
Margarita is Spanish for 'daisy', and one leading theory makes it a tequila version of the Daisy, an older cocktail of spirit, citrus and orange liqueur; rival tales credit women named Margarita.
Q 12Which New Orleans cocktail combines rye or cognac, Peychaud's Bitters, sugar and an absinthe rinse?
Sazerac
The Sazerac is named after the French brandy it was first made with; when vine blight choked off supplies around 1870, New Orleans bartenders switched to American whiskey.
Q 13Which American motorsport grew out of drivers outrunning the law with carloads of illegal moonshine?
NASCAR
Q 21Which vodka cocktail becomes a Caesar, often called Canada's national cocktail, when clam broth is added?
Bloody Mary
The Bloody Mary's tomato juice met clam broth in Calgary in 1969, when Walter Chell needed a signature drink for an Italian restaurant and borrowed the idea from spaghetti alle vongole.
Q 22What is the wine steward of a fine restaurant called?
Sommelier
Sommelier began as the Old French word for a pack-animal driver: the court officer in charge of baggage and provisions ended up in charge of the wine.
Q 23The earliest evidence of winemaking, from around 6000 BCE, was found in which present-day country?
Georgia
Georgia's claim rests on chemistry: fragments of 8,000-year-old jars from two villages south of Tbilisi still carried tartaric acid, the chemical fingerprint of wine.
NASCAR's roots lie in Prohibition, when Appalachian bootleggers tuned ordinary-looking cars to outrun the police; Bill France set up its forerunner in 1947 with seed money from the moonshiner Raymond Parks.
Q 14Port, Sherry and Madeira all belong to which category of wine?
Fortified
Fortified wines get a dose of spirit, originally to stop them spoiling on long sea voyages; added part-way through fermentation, it kills the yeast and leaves Port naturally sweet.
Q 15Which type of beer uses top-fermenting yeast at warmer temperatures, giving fruity flavors?
Ale
Ale yeast works warm and rises to the top of the vat; lager yeast ferments cold and sinks, which is why lager brewers needed caves and ice-packed cellars before refrigeration.
Q 16What is the base ingredient for rum?
Sugarcane
Sugarcane gives rum by way of a leftover: by the traditional account, enslaved plantation workers in the 17th-century Caribbean found that molasses, the residue of sugar refining, would ferment.
Q 17Sake, brewed from polished rice with koji mould, is the traditional drink of which country?
Japan
Japan's sake is brewed more like beer than wine: koji mould turns the rice starch to sugar before yeast ferments it, though 'rice wine' is the nickname.
Q 18Which white grape joins the dark-skinned Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier as Champagne's three main varieties?
Chardonnay
Chardonnay is the only white grape of the three; a Champagne made from it alone is a blanc de blancs, while the two Pinots are pressed so gently that their dark skins barely tint the juice.
Q 19Gin takes both its name and its defining flavour from which berry?
Juniper
Juniper reached English as 'gin' through the Dutch jenever; the spirit took off after 1688, when William of Orange's governments curbed French brandy imports and encouraged home distilling.
Q 20What sinks through the orange juice to colour a Tequila Sunrise?
Grenadine
Grenadine gives the drink its dawn glow; it took off in 1972, when a Sausalito bartender served it to the Rolling Stones and the band went on ordering it all across America on that year's tour.
Q 24Which style of wine gets its colour from leaving red grape skins in the juice for only a few hours?
Rosé
Rosé is rarely a mix of red and white: French law forbids that shortcut everywhere except Champagne, so the pink has to come from the grape skins.
Q 25Where in Scotland are the smoky, peaty whiskies Laphroaig, Lagavulin and Ardbeg made?
Islay
Islay's peat is burned to dry the grain before distilling, and the smoke clings to it all the way into the glass.
Q 26What French term sums up the soil, climate and topography that shape a wine?
Terroir
Terroir underpins France's appellation rules, which is why French labels put the village or vineyard ahead of the grape variety.
Q 27Which anise-flavoured Greek spirit turns milky white when water is added?
Ouzo
Ouzo clouds because anethole, the oil that gives anise its flavour, dissolves in strong alcohol but not in water; add water and it comes out as a milky haze, the 'louche'.
Q 28What term describes a wine produced from grapes harvested in a single, specific year?
Vintage
Vintage matters most where it is rare: Champagne and port houses usually blend across years to keep a house style, and declare a vintage only after their best harvests.
Q 29Which rum cocktail did Pat O'Brien's bar in New Orleans make famous, serving it in a curvy lamp-shaped glass?
Hurricane
The Hurricane was a wartime fix: whiskey was scarce and distributors made bars take surplus rum with it, so Pat O'Brien poured the rum into a fruity drink named after its hurricane-lamp glass.
Q 30A drink shaken or stirred with ice, then strained into a stemmed glass, is served how?
Up
Up drinks come in a stemmed glass for a reason: with no ice in the drink to keep it cold, the stem keeps a warm hand away from the bowl.