A single yeast species built most of civilization's alcohol

Rogers opens with the microorganism doing the real work behind every alcoholic drink: Saccharomyces cerevisiae, a single-celled fungus that, left with sugar and no oxygen, produces ethanol and carbon dioxide as waste products of its own metabolism. Humans didn't invent fermentation so much as discover and then selectively breed a wild yeast that happened to be extraordinarily good at converting sugar into a psychoactive molecule.

What's notable is how long this relationship predates any scientific understanding of it. People were brewing and fermenting for thousands of years without knowing a living organism was responsible; the microbial explanation only arrived in the nineteenth century. Rogers uses this to frame alcohol production as an ancient biotechnology, arguably one of the first, refined by trial and error long before anyone understood the biochemistry underneath it.

Takeaway: nearly every alcoholic beverage in history depends on one domesticated microbe humans didn't even know existed until relatively recently.