Origin

This character combines a component for alcohol or brewing (the left side, which looks like a wine bottle or fermentation vessel) with a sound hint on the right that tells you it's pronounced roughly like "shaku." The meanings grew from the original sense of serving or pouring alcohol — when you're bartending or ladling sake, you're scooping and drawing liquid. Over time, the character came to mean both the action of serving drinks and the tool or scoop used to pour them.