Punch (4 page)

Yet it wasn’t until the seventeenth century, a full five hundred years after the alchemists’ first experiments, that someone discovered a way to make spirits-drinking not just acceptable but even delightful. To understand just what a feat that was, we have to pause for a moment to consider the nature of early spirits and how they were made. First of all, distillers had to compete for raw materials with long-established professions and guilds—vintners, vinegar-makers, bakers, brewers. As a result, actual wine and beer were rarely distilled, and if they were, it was likely to be wine made from reconstituted raisins or beer made from spoiled or otherwise unsalable grain. More commonly, the still would be charged with wine lees or brewer’s draff (the term of art for the leftovers of beer-making). Even when treated with unusual care, such materials—basically, industrial waste—would yield spirits of inferior flavor, as (for instance) Konrad Gesner readily acknowledged in his influential 1556 treatise on spirits,
Euonymus
. What’s worse, though, the stills of the day were directly heated over an open flame, and the lees and draff were thick with suspended particles that would settle out and scorch on the hot spots produced by putting a pot on a fire, thus communicating an “empyreumatic,” or burned taste, to the spirit, which was often commented on—never favorably. Even when wholesome materials were used, they were seldom so pure as to avoid this problem entirely, particularly when they were grain based.

Then there’s the matter of cuts. While early works on distillation devote a fair amount of space to the need to cut off the distilling run before it comes to the “tails,” or “phlegm”—the watery, oily stuff that begins to pass through the still once the bulk of the alcohol has been drawn off—there’s no similar attention paid to segregating the “heads,” the very first part of the still run, whose elimination forms one of the bases of modern quality spirits-making. Indeed, as late as 1753, we find one Antoine Hornot, a French distiller, insisting that those who discard the first drops off the still do so at their own loss, as they are the “most spirituous” portions of the run. The need to eliminate the heads would not be a regular precept in distillation manuals until the nineteenth century. Of course, people do a lot of things that don’t make it into books, but if early distillers were regularly doing this, one would expect some notice of the practice somewhere, and I have found none (again, the lack of a detailed history of distilling is a problem). With the heads included, the distiller’s handiwork would have hit the drinker with a nasty spike of methyl alcohol, acetone and other highly volatile, and toxic, aldehydes.

Taken all together, these conditions would have made for spirits with, let’s say, little to offer the discriminating palate. This isn’t to say that nobody was making tolerable spirits—there are scattered notices of people distilling quality ingredients in well-designed equipment over indirect heat. But such things must have been unusual. At its all-too-common worst, aqua vitae would have been a stinking, oily potion that burned like Sherman’s march going down and left you the next morning with a head as pulpy and tender as a rotten jack-o’-lantern.

Fortunately, spirits-making doesn’t stop with distilling. There are ways to change raw spirit into something more drinkable. They are not infinite, as a half hour of reading labels in your local Liquor Barn will demonstrate. There are really only four. You can try to mask the offending congeners (whatever’s in there that isn’t water or ethyl alcohol) by compounding: that is, spending days and weeks infusing your raw spirit with aromatic and pungent substances to mask the flavors of the congeners, redistilling (usually) the result and perhaps dosing it with sugar or honey to bank some of the remaining flames (examples: Chartreuse, Jägermeister). Or you can try to remove them by filtration, most commonly by passing your distillate slowly through a thick bed of charcoal and thus stripping off pretty much all of the congeners, be they good, bad or indifferent (vodka in general, Bacardi). Or you can try to “barrel out” the problem, as they say in Kentucky. Long aging in relatively small wooden casks allows some of the more volatile congeners to evaporate, mellows others and transforms still others through slow interaction with air and oak into something pleasing (Martell Cordon Bleu, Highland Park, Woodford Reserve, anything else that gets aged). For the fourth method, though, you’ll have to leave the Liquor Barn and go to the nearest bar, since it involves mixing the raw spirit with a little of this and a little of that and drinking it down.

Unfortunately for the Renaissance spirits-drinker, these techniques required a good deal of trial and error to perfect, some of their principles being not nearly as obvious as they seem to us today, and only the first of them was fully understood. From the very beginning of European distilling, alchemists and physicians had been making what were essentially herbal liqueurs, pungent alcoholic elixirs that were flavored with multiple botanicals and, usually, sweetened. Although their production was originally (and still is) an Italian specialty, before long it became more or less general throughout the continent and its outlying islands. To pluck out one example among many, the late-fourteenth-century aqua vitae recipe contained in the British Library’s manuscript Royal 17 A iii—if not the earliest, then one of the earliest in the English language—calls for distilling wine lees with cinnamon, cloves, ginger, nutmeg, galangal, cubeb and thirteen other herbs and spices. Drinks made thus were pungent and cloying on the palate—not the sort of thing you’d want to build an evening around. That’s probably just as well, since, being in fact no purer than their base spirit, they would have induced hangovers worse than death itself. What’s more, they were enormously expensive to make, lees or no, since many of the spices used were, quite literally, worth their weight in gold. The Germans had at least that problem solved by 1505, when a Vienna physician published a formula for “cramatbeerwasser”—wine (or wine lees) redistilled with juniper berries, which were plenty pungent and undeniably cheap. Once its base was switched to the more easily available grain, this ur-gin would become the spirit of the south German countryside, whence it radiated north and west until it went to ground in the Low Countries, where it has lived happily ever since. It could not, at first, have been very pleasant to drink, and its consumption did not approach social respectability until the eighteenth century, when careful Dutch hands had learned to distill a relatively clean spirit from grain.

As for the other techniques, by the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Russians were seriously exploring the possibilities of filtration, while the brandy-distillers of southwest France were in the early stages of their love affair with long barrel-aging. Yet neither practice would be even close to perfected before the end of the eighteenth century (as late as the 1730s, even the best cognacs spent no more than two or three years in oak), and hence we can set them aside and proceed to our last option, mixology. For that, we must look to England.

“A HORSE THAT DRINKS OF ALL WATERS”

The English have always considered themselves reliable drinkers. Iago’s words in Act II of
Othello
pretty much sum up the prevailing opinion in his day: “In England . . . indeed they are most potent in potting. . . . [Your Englishman] drinks you with facility your Dane dead drunk; he sweats not to overthrow your Almaine; he gives your Hollander a vomit, ere the next pottle can be filled.”

Iago has his issues, to be sure, but at least he got the players right: in any tippling contest, the Latin countries, while hardly dry, would have finished far behind the Dutch, the Germans (Iago’s “Almaine”) and the Scandinavians, much as they would now; and while in any man-on-man swilling match a great number of individual Russians and other Slavs would have certainly finished in the money, factors such as serfdom, Ottoman rule and the backward state of commerce would have kept eastern Europe’s per capita scores low. But as for the relative superiority of the Englishman to Dutchman, Almaine and Dane, well, it’s a charming theory. Sure, as Richard Unger argues in his
Beer in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance
, what data exist suggest “drinkers in the Low Countries to have been consistent but less avid than German beer drinkers, while English drinkers kept pace with their German counterparts.” And it must also be conceded that the English aristocracy and merchant class supplemented their quarts with many a pint, bottle and bowl of imported wine. But Germans and Dutchmen drank plenty of wine, too. So far, pretty much of a draw. But throw in aqua vitae and England comes up decidedly short. In 1603, when
Othello
was written, the rest of northern Europe had been sticking it away in quantity for a century and a half and was already well into the Repression phase, while England essentially abstained.

Knowing the Englishman of today, that seems scarcely possible. To merely slide your fingernail under the tab that peels the foil off a bottle of good single-malt Scotch whiskey
^f
is to find one materialized at your shoulder, looking on with fond interest (or so it seems, anyway). But it’s a curious fact—one of the anomalies of bibulology—that England, the very country for whom most of the world’s best spirits were developed, came very late to serious aqua vitae-drinking.

It wasn’t due to a failure of knowledge. The basic technology crossed the Channel at more or less the same time it reached the rest of northern Europe. There are records of English monasteries buying stills in the mid 1300s, when aqua vitae was first breaking out of the Investigation stage. Grain-distilling followed soon after, if we may judge by the passage in the
Canterbury Tales
(written in the late 1380s) where Chaucer has his Canon’s Yeoman include among the many skills and knowings of his “elvish craft” the use of “cucur-bits” and “alembykes” (both pieces of distilling equipment) and a familiarity with “berm” (yeast), “wort” (basically, unfermented ale) and “fermentacioun.” And, to be sure, spirits were not entirely ignored: the upper classes were not slow to use them medically—it’s worth bearing in mind that along with opium, alcohol was practically the only effective pain reliever in the pharmacopoeia—and distilling herbal “waters” became another of the myriad responsibilities of the mistress of a large house.

Yet by and large, while their Germanic cousins were guzzling gin and brandy on a daily basis, the English were taking it in cautious sips when feeling queasy. True, we read of Irish distillers crossing the Irish Sea in the time of Henry VIII and setting up shop in Pembrokeshire, on the coast of Wales, and Flemish ones operating in London a few years later (I should emphasize here that Ireland and Scotland were not England, and both took to spirits-drinking considerably earlier; see Whiskey Punch, Chapter XIV). But neither group seems to have gained all that much commercial traction, and it’s safe to say that spirits-drinking in England didn’t progress much beyond the Self-Medication stage until the 1600s—indeed, in William Harrison’s 1587
Description of England
, we find him much exercised at the inebriety of his countrymen (e.g., regarding strong ale, “it is incredible to say how our maltbugs lug at this liquor, even as pigs should lie in a row lugging at their dame’s teats, till they lie still again and be not able to wag”), yet there’s nary a dram of brandy or genever or usquebaugh to be found among the many drinks he lists with which they’re continually fuddling themselves.

Why did the English, a determinedly bibulous people, wait so long to embrace the efficiencies of recreational spirits-drinking? For one thing, there was really no place to do it. From roughly 1300 to 1600, every time an Englishman nipped out for a drink, he had a choice of venues. Well, not every time—in most of the land, no matter who you were, you would have had to make do with the plain old alehouse—a humble, mom-and-pop sort of place, where you drank ale and beer and nothing but ale and beer, without so much as a packet of crisps (or whatever the contemporary equivalent was) to nibble on while you drank your pint or quart. Since the average Englishman/woman/child was already drinking a gallon or so of ale or beer a day at home and on the job (nobody drank water if they could possibly help it, and tea and coffee didn’t appear on the scene until the mid 1600s), the alehouse offered little in the way of novelty. If you lived in one of the principal towns, though, had money to spend and looked presentable, you could also go to an inn, which had rooms to let, or a tavern, which didn’t. Both sold ale (as a matter of course), but they also offered imported wines and food and a faster, more cosmopolitan clientele. The tavern was regulated with particular strictness—wine was considered more disruptive than ale, and the kind of people who could afford to idle away the hours drinking it and gambling (not traditionally a feature of the alehouse) and whatnot seemed far more likely to cause trouble than the business travelers who frequented the inn or the workingmen who filled the alehouses. Even London, the great metropolis, licensed no more than forty or so taverns, while most towns were lucky to have even one (in 1577, England had over 14,000 licensed alehouses, as opposed to 1,600-odd inns, most clustered in the major market towns, and a paltry 329 taverns).

This two-tier system was cumbersome, perhaps, but in a country where animals were called one thing by the people who raised them and another by those who could afford to eat them, it was not incomprehensible. It’s no coincidence that “alehouse,” like “pig,” “calf” and “bull,” is a word of Anglo-Saxon origin, while “tavern,” like “pork,” “veal” and “beef,” comes from the Norman French. The two institutions faced each other across a cultural gulf that, over the centuries since the Norman Conquest of 1066, had evolved into a class one. And distilled spirits had no class. While their natural place would be in the more cosmopolitan precincts of the tavern, spirits-drinking elsewhere in Europe was too much of a plebeian activity to recommend it (spirits’ early adoption by the “uncivilized” Scots and Irish didn’t help things here). For the alehouse, on the other hand, well, it was enough that spirits were foreign. Even as England shook herself out of her medieval slumber and began opening herself to the larger world, her common people remained militantly, sometimes shockingly, xenophobic, even in London. A natural corollary was the deep resistance they displayed toward any novelty perceived as foreign, no matter how useful or enticing. It did, after all, take them some two hundred years to accept hops in their malt beverage, even though that addition made it keep far longer without spoiling and improved its flavor to boot.