Elephants, like many of us, enjoy a good malted beverage when they can get it. At least twice in the past ten years, herds in India have stumbled upon barrels of rice beer, drained them with their trunks, and gone on drunken rampages. (The first time, they trampled four villagers; the second time they uprooted a pylon and electrocuted themselves.) Howler monkeys, too, have a taste for things fermented. In Panama, they've been seen consuming overripe palm fruit at the rate of ten stiff drinks in twenty minutes. Even flies have a nose for alcohol. They home in on its scent to lay their eggs in ripening fruit, insuring their larvae a pleasant buzz. Fruit-fly brains, much like ours, are wired for inebriation.
Check out the whole piece. It really is quite gorgeous.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
Wow, what a refreshing read. He's got it. Who is he?
I especially enjoyed: "(His thick eyebrows, rectangular glasses, and rapid-fire patter seem ideally suited to the parsing of obscure beverages.)"
Fantastic.
Also, his name is Burkhard Bilger. There has never been, nor will there ever be, a name containing so much awesome. And so appropriate for his line of work!
Don't much about him--except that he's out of my league. He's a great story-teller. Last year he wrote a piece about a guy who was trying to parachute to earth from outer space. It's no longer online, but it was just beautifully told.
The first elephant in America, owned by either Barnum or Bailey, was brought to Massachusetts from India. On the ship, the elephant was fed beer because the crew wanted to save fresh water for themselves. The elephant basically became an alcoholic, and one day got drunk, rampaged a farm, and was shot by the farmer.
I'm sleep deprived and it shows when I read "graff" as "gaff" and I read this and reread this and thought ... this is f'in amazing, what's wrong with it?
Now I gotta lose even more work time by reading the whole thing!
That was a great story; I read it in bed yesterday recovering from various ailments. One measure of its quality is that I don't drink beer, yet found it engrossing. (Like I enjoy Only a Game precisely because it covers curling and competitive woodwind hurling as as intrinsically interesting as baseball.)
Fruit flies sense alcohol because they feed on yeast, not because they like to get wasted.
Let this stand as an excuse for me to plug one of my all time favorite novels: Rosy is My Relative by Gerald Durrell.
It told me all I needed to know about the tippling habits of pachyderms.