Just as drinkers vary in their responses to liquor, so readers will vary in their tolerance for Mr. Rogers’s pert, gee-whiz tone. He acknowledges the problem: “The word ‘actually,’” he writes, “is why people don’t have drinks with me anymore.” But his descriptions of the science behind familiar drinks exert a seductive pull. In the name of research, I drank a lot more than usual while reading this book, just to connect the text with the complex flavors Mr. Rogers was writing about.

To a surprising degree, those flavors come from aging. When you store wine or spirits in oak barrels, the wood leaches tannins and other chemicals into the mix, turning the barrel itself into an essential ingredient in the finished product — as if all of your cookware were carved out of garlic. What’s more, oak has its own terroir, with different regions and different climates producing different flavor profiles. American oak-aged whiskeys are more perfumed, the book says, while French oak tastes more of vanilla and butterscotch.

After walking us through the making of alcohol, Mr. Rogers turns to the science of its consumption. That means psychology, mostly, because it turns out our experience of alcohol has a lot to do with our expectations. French researchers, for instance, served subjects a white wine dyed red and then watched them describe it with all the adjectives they had just attributed to a real red wine. Similarly, a Seattle psychologist found that given the right social cues, subjects showed signs of intoxication — flushed faces, slurred words, relaxed inhibitions — even when they were drinking a nonalcoholic placebo.

Other researchers have found that people don’t actually like the taste of alcohol, which is why they try to doctor it with all kinds of other things. What they do like, sometimes too much, is the way it makes them feel. (Mr. Rogers cites evidence that people with a sweet tooth and people unaffected by hangovers are more likely to become alcoholics.)

For all that we have discovered in the last 150 years about the science of alcohol, there’s still much to learn: Why does it affect our brains the way it does? What causes hangovers? Scientists aren’t sure.

“Ethanol is one of the few legal drugs of abuse,” Mr. Rogers writes, “and the only one that nobody really understands at the functional level.”

You can drink to that.