Supposedly there is Dandelion wine--Dandelions are edible after all so why not a poppy wine???

But perhaps they make a form of grape wine they put poppies in. Evidently they do include bits of a variety of fruits in some types of wines. I would imagine the same thing could be done with beer. Mix the blossoms with beer barley. And you could say that the best wine and/or beer used only the blossoms while some of the cheapest used the whole plant.

From the various responses it sounds like y'all aren't aware there are two distinct, unrelated types of poppies, plus a subtype. I'm not an expert on 'em either but here's a rundown on the basics:

The classical opium poppy -- this is a hairy-leaved, deep-rooted cold-climate plant. It's most often seen as a hardy perennial (it grows well in Montana); this is the type with the big red tulip-like blossoms and large round seedpods. Once established it's an extremely reliable, tough, all-summer bloomer. It does "bleed" milksap where damaged; this is the base material for opium production.

The perennial is tough enough to handle being used as a decoration -- the long flower stems are fibrous, and the petals hold their shape and colour somewhat as they dry. However, they're quite loosely attached to the pod and fall off easily once dry. The hairy leaves can give you a nice itch. ;>

The opium poppy also comes in annual varieties -- smaller, more-delicate plants with blooms in many colours, smaller less-sturdy seedpods, and shallow roots. I don't know if they have any commercial uses.

I've had no success getting the perennials started here in the hot dry high desert (our temp range is -10F to +122F, with less than 1 inch of rain a year), but have had good results with the annuals, tho they need a lot of water and perish as soon as the weather heats up.

These all tend to keep their seeds in the pod as tho hollow it is fairly strong for its size, with openings around the top. Seeds gradually shake out, but are easy to harvest pod and all. BTW the perennial's seeds are what you've often eaten as poppy-seed decorations. (Yummy! But can cause you to fail a drug test.)

The California poppy -- this is a small, lacey-foliaged plant, mostly seen as an annual (tho I'm told there is a small patch of a perennial variant across the road from the Reserve), native to the high desert, but it is not cold or drought hardy and only grows/blooms during the desert's short rainy and temperate season. After a brief but profuse bloom it rapidly develops long thin pea-like seedpods which soon dry, curl/burst, and fling seeds across the soil, where they lie dormant until after the next winter and rainy season.

The California poppy is an extremely fragile plant, and is reduced to shreds by all but the most careful handling. The petals are also fragile and dry down to nothing recognisable only hours after being dropped by the plant.

BTW this year they're confused and started sprouting much too early -- we had January's cold in November followed by warm rain, so the poor things think it's March and are coming up all over.

If you want to see what California poppies look like at their peak -- here's a picture I took in 2008, from two miles SW of my house, during the best bloom of the past decade:
http://www.doomgold.com/misc/poppies/OffworldPress-PoppiesAren%27tForever.pdf
(warning, large PDF file, 700k or so).
Yes, that's my house in the distance.

Liquor takes an investment of time, expertise, and equipment that a frontier town might not have, so would be imported (or a single person's product), thus expensive.

Which your people drink might thus be more dictated by their local economy than by their preferences. If they're in a gold rush (of whatever local material) then there'd be lots of money. If they're just barely established, or the gold rush is absent or has run out, then probably money is rather lacking.

Drinks made from materials with more and simpler carbohydrates tend to produce more alcohol faster and therefore be more popular. That's why dandelions haven't left a trail of drunken destruction in their wake wherever they've taken root. Dandelion wine has about half the alcohol of a typical beer. You *could* get rip-roarin' stiff on the stuff, but it's not exactly a manly drink unless it were distilled into some kind of brandy.

If you are talking of desert oases, one plausible drink would be date palm wine. That's produced by some cultures, and my understanding is the sugary juice comes up to high alcohol content pretty fast, which would be desirable, even if it might have a kind of paint-stripper quality to it. You might want to look that up.

I've made mead, and that *definitely* tastes like you're drinking an acetone cocktail until it has aged for at least two years. Mead is a plausible drink since you have flowers to pollinate.

If the poppies in question are opium poppies, I like the idea of spiking alcohol with opium. That's almost certain to be done recreationally, and might make a pretty good recipe for a "mickey" if slipped into some harsh new rotgut.

Side note: has anyone tried making mead from corn syrup? It's chemically identical to honey; the only real difference is in honey's micro-contaminants (pollen, dead bits of bees, etc. If you could see the stuff at the extraction stage, you'd never eat it. )

The chemistry of that 3.5% is quite complex and not fully understood. It is responsible for among other things honey's remarkable antiseptic qualities, which meadmakers sometimes exploit by not boiling the "must" (the unfermented liquid, similar to the beermaker's "wort"). This is especially desirable to preserve the characteristics of varietal honeys.

I'm not a beekeeper, but I suspect that feeding bees sugar water to increase the honey yield is probably a relatively recent practice used in industrial scale honey production. The meadmakers of antiquity certainly did not practice this, since honey was the most concentrated source of sugar available to them.

The same goes for the idea that you need a great deal of investment to make fortified wines or whiskey. That's true if you practice it on a large enough scale to produce something like a five dollar, ten ounce bottle of Old Mr. Rotgut Cherry Cough Syrup Flavoured Brandy. The monks of the middle ages managed to get by with primitive copper stills. People all over Europe produced apertifs and fortified medicinal wines this way, and in every case these were premium products. Fortified wines don't take a huge capital investment,but they take a great deal of time and labor. You only need industrial facilities to produce a distilled product that's cheaper to get drunk with than beer or wine.

I'd say that date palm or other drinks fermented from fruit are probably going to be popular alternatives to beer in places that don't produce lots of grain. Even where grain is grown, orchards mean cider. In New England, hard cider was far more common than beer until the economy shifted away from agriculture. Cider was the main *point* of growing apples. I'll bet places that had cherry orchards probably had some kind of cherry cider/wine.

I've been figuring the poppy derived libation would be primarily served during the festival and that's about it. As the town is the only source of water across the desert, it is a main stopping point for all the caravans. So, there is money and supplies from pretty much everywhere there.

Overall, I'm getting the impression that no one here would be thrown for a loop if the festival drink was a wine.