 | |
provided by:
For Dummies is a registered trademark of Wiley Publishing, Inc. in the United States and other countries. Used here by license.Eureka! Wine! Beer!
Very quickly, the goatherd’s friends, neighbors, and acquaintances far and near grasped the idea that squeezing rotten, sorry, fermented, fruit released a pleasantly intoxicating beverage called wine (from the Greek vinos, the Latin vinum, the Old English win, and the Germanic winam).
And then they discovered that fermenting grains released an equally pleasant intoxicating beverage called beer (from the Latin bibere [to drink], the German bier, and the Old English beor, pronounced beer).
After that, a jolly good time was had pretty much everywhere fruits and grains were grown. And it was a profitable time, as well: The oldest known Sumerian tablet is a receipt for a shipment of beer from Mesopotamia to some lucky merchant in Northern Greece.
Advancing the art
At first, folks were content with wine and beer. But being human and naturally inquisitive, they began to experiment with ways to standardize the fermentation process because they wanted to manage the production and improve the quality of alcohol beverages.
The first step was to take control of fermentation by adding specific microorganisms (yeasts) to the fruit and grains rather than simply allowing miscellaneous little buggers to waft in and ferment the fruit by accident.
The second step was to distill alcohol from the liquid released by the fermented food.
Unlike the discovery of fermentation, which seems to have been a happy coincidence, learning how to distill alcohol was the result of a deliberate series of experiments conducted by an Arab scholar named Abu Musa Jabir ibn Hayyam (?–803 CE). Most modern scientists generally accept Jabir, known in the West as Geber, as the Father of Modern Chemistry.
Sometime during the eighth century CE — these dates are never quite as clear as one might like them to be — Geber was puttering around with his al-ambiq, a round pot with a tall spout rising from the top, sort of like an oversized tea kettle. When liquid was heated in the pot, the vapors rose through the spout to be cooled, condensed, and collected as a liquid in a vessel conveniently positioned under the spout.
The al-ambiq was standard equipment for alchemists, the medieval practitioners who spent their lives trying to turn base metal into gold and, as a sideline, looking for the magical “elixir of life” that would make men immortal.
But Geber, who may have been a wine aficionado, took a different tack. He wondered what would happen if he poured wine into the al-ambiq and boiled it.
In other words — “Eureka!” will do nicely — the man was about to invent distillation.
Distillation arrives
It’s a physical fact that alcohol boils at a lower temperature than water, so when Geber poured his wine into his al-ambiq and set the pot over a fire, the alcohol in the fermented grape juice or the fermented grain and water mixture used to make beer vaporized before the rest of the liquid in the pot.
The alcohol vapors rose through the spout on the al-ambiq, were collected and condensed, and, just like that, Geber produced the world’s first distilled spirit. And it needed a new name.
The solution was simple: While some alchemists were playing around with longevity tonics, early cosmeticians used their al-ambiqs to boil up powdered antimony in water, producing a dark liquid called kohl or al-kohl.
Al-kohl became alcohol. The al-ambiq became the alembic still, also known as the pot still. And that’s how your favorite distilled spirit drink was born.
The secret gets out
Geber died in 803 CE, but his distillation process lived on among his Arab compatriots who used the distillate they produced not as a beverage but as a medicine.
The Arabs kept distillation to themselves for several centuries, taking their secrets with them to the Iberian Peninsula when they conquered Spain. When Spain expelled its non-Christian citizens in 1492 and Portugal followed suit in 1597, the secrets of how to make grain and fruits into a potent medicine remained behind to be taken in hand by those doctors of the Middle Ages — monastery monks. Like the Arabs, the monks prescribed the distillates, including some that they originated — such as Benedictine and Chartreuse liqueurs — for medicinal purposes.
The missionary/medicine men met with enough successes to convince the European pagans that these liquids carried the blessings of God to assure a long, healthy life. Around the year 1300, Arnald of Villanova, a professor of medicine at Montpellier (France), one of the earliest European medical schools, compiled the first (hand) written instructions for distilling alcohol from wine.
Arnald christened distilled alcohol aqua vitae (Latin for “water of life”), which translated to eau de vie in French, uisege beatha among the Celts, akavit in Scandinavia, and vodka/wodka (“dear little water”) in Russia and Poland. By any name, the distillate was reputed, in Villanova’s words, to “prolong life, clear away illhumors, revive the heart, and maintain youth.” Others claimed it also alleviated diseases of the brain, nerves, and joints; calmed toothaches; cured blindness, speech defects, and paralysis; and warded off the Black Death.
Not surprisingly, nobody at all complained about having to take Arnald’s medicine instead of the crushed leaves, boiled grains, and pressed herbs it came from.
The process goes global
Serendipitously, the spread of distillation occurred just as Europeans began to seriously explore and colonize the world, establishing regular trade routes between Europe and the East and Europe and the New World.
The Spanish and the Portuguese were leaders in the exploration game, bringing back new products and taking their alcohol beverages with them. Spirits, in particular, were a win-win trade-off because they were
Virtually unknown in the lands the explorers explored
Easy to produce
A really smart way to turn an excess crop, such as grain, into a cash product rather than leaving it to rot in the field
A stable beverage that resisted spoilage and turned tastier a it aged in wooden barrels
Best of all, distilled spirits were a totally natural product that — after distillation became common knowledge — could be produced from virtually any local plant anywhere in the world. As a result, by the 19th century, distilled spirits of one sort or another were available pretty much anywhere a traveler traveled.
| |
provided by:
For Dummies is a registered trademark of Wiley Publishing, Inc. in the United States and other countries. Used here by license.