The Storied History of Liquor in Marin: New Sausalito Whiskey Trail App Connects Marin to its Spirited Past

Worldwide, human culture often goes hand in hand with alcohol production. An article a few years back in Smithsonian Magazine posited that “true” civilization began with the production of beer, arguing that simple farmers can produce more than enough food for themselves on a single acre of land, but in order to produce beer, a concentrated form of fermented grain, you needed a much larger operation. And that operation needs protection and organization, eventually culminating in large human settlements, and inevitably, government. For better, or for worse. Marin County’s human history goes back thousands of years. The so-called “grandfather midden,” a burial site in Larkspur that was paved over in 2014, dated back 4,500 years — about the same age as the Great Pyramids of Egypt. But in a strange aberration, native tribes in California don’t really have a pre-contact history of alcohol consumption. “The native Coast Miwok who lived here for millennia, did not produce, or ferment or use