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FEATURE DOCUMENTARY: Addicted to pleasure – Whisky

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Over the years, whisky has become a hot commodity and a guilty pleasure.
Over the years, whisky has become a hot commodity and a guilty pleasure.

Hundreds of years ago, the first people who turned simple grain into alcohol were not distillers, and there wasn't actually a whisky industry.

Brian Cox reveals how a few farmers, who simply had surplus of barley after the harvest, turned the basic ingredient into their water of life.

He also shows how the alcohol has shaped Scotland's hard-drinking reputation and how troubled a past the beverage had, along with how the country's history was tangled up in it.

A simple grain was transformed by human labour and has subsequently become a hugely profitable, global commodity. See how the creation and trade of this product has transformed society, our bodies and our minds.

It has become an increasingly guilty pleasure, which many still indulge in to this day. The question is, however, how did we become so hooked in this pursuit of pleasure?

Image credit: BBC

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