A cool guide to alcohol preferences around the world

What is the "other" in Africa? What they drinking over der
- Never lived there for long, but VERY briefly lived in Gambia for work for a few months a while back. Most people didn't drink but most that did drank palm wine, which I'm assuming would be classified as "other" instead of "wine" here.
- Spent a year in the south/south east of Africa, and different variations of fermented maize beer were the most common alcoholic drink among locals.
  Thobwa is the Malawian/Zambian version, while umqombothi is the South African one.
- I'm trying to figure out what the other is anywhere. My America must be showing, but I can't think what other could be at all
  
  Cider for example?
  
  It depends on how they categorized things. People drink all sorts of fermented fruit and vegetable juices that could loosely be labeled "wine" or "cider". There's also a whole bunch of things that could also loosely be called "beer" like shake shake.
- Possibly things that are actively fermenting like kumis, kefir, or kombucha
  
  Bless your heart. 🫂
  Moonshine. Of the worst kinds, sometimes.
  To just name two sources:
  https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2015/4/1/ugandas-ongoing-struggle-with-moonshine
  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5409547/
- Learned a bit about "other" from a different coolguides post the other day.
- I'm not sure about Africa specifically. These categories are vague enough that it's kinda hard to say with confidence.
  I know fermented milk is popular in Mongolia and central Asia. There's also palm wine, from the sap of palm trees, rice wine like soju, mead and cider.

I gotta say, I'm pretty skeptical about how gerrymandered "Western Pacific Region" and "South-East Asian Region" are. They cross each other!
- Morroco is included as eastern Mediterranean, but Algeria isn't? (91% of population near coast), Turkiye isn't? Greece isn't?

I really doubt this info. Sake is popular in Japan and would be (or should be) categorized under wine, yet wine is at zero in southeast Asia. So either wine literally means "grape wine" or the data is fucked up.
- That's because they put Japan in "Western Pacific Region."
  
  Ah good point
- Sidenote: Sake isnt actually popular on Japan, as it's seen as a "old man's drink". Saki sales locally have been dropping for decades. But the popularity of Saki internationally (thank you weebs!) gave it a major boost.
  Source: saki weeb.
  
  I'll never understand how it's an "old man's drink". That stuff is the best alcohol I've ever had.
- It could be categorized as "other" or "beer". "Wine" usually means grape, and when it isn't grape, it's usually fruit. Obviously, sake and other rice wines are called "rice wine", but if you are going to put them into a broader category, they probably fit better as a "beer". Non-distilled fermented grain

I'm skeptical that most of SE Asia drinks "spirits". How are they defining spirits, wine, and beer? I would have thought of spirits as being things that were distilled after fermentation, and I don't think that most of common alcoholic beverages in SE Asia are distilled.
- You'd be wrong then
- Whiskey is an incredibly popular drink in India. It's often mixed down into something lower ABV (mostly water) and it ends up closer to a typical wine's ABV as the consumed product, but it still spirits that arr being bought/sold.
  There are several whiskey distillers in my part of California and 3 of them were started by Indian men that like to talk shop.

Weird how wine has fallen behind in the US