"When a person comes along and goes, ‘I can commit murder with this plant!’ or ‘I can make a drink of this plant!’ things start to happen."

When you pry a piece of corn silk out of your teeth, you’re yanking out a fallopian tube. Good sake should never, ever be served hot. And though you might shudder to hear it, some brewers in Brussels are quite happy when bugs fall into open vats of yeast, because they churn it up, thus becoming “unwitting accomplices in the dance between sugar and yeast.”

These are the sorts of intoxicating lessons you learn about plants, brews and bugs in Amy Stewart’s entertaining new book, The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create the World’s Great Drinks (Algonquin, $19.95), which deserves a place on the shelves of aspiring mixologists and liquor enthusiasts everywhere.

Read more at the Miami Herald.