I am reading The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails in order with the Alcademics Book Club, which you may join on Facebook if you wish. (We're on the A's in early January.) I've already learned so much new information and also old information I'm seeing in a new light.... Read more →
I watched a video by Philip Duff on the history of gin - is gin the British interpretation of Dutch genever? Or does it come from a more or less independent distilling tradition since British spirits were usually based on a neutral base distillate? I watched a seminar by Jared... Read more →
Here is a list of 31 drink books coming out near the end of 2023! This isn't every cocktail book coming out (and there are plenty of beer and wine ones I didn't include) but a selection of them. Happy reading or gifting or just putting them on your coffee... Read more →
After reading my book Doctors and Distillers, Harold McGee (On Food and Cooking) pointed out to me that proof of distillation in ancient India (supposedly from the fifth century BCE) is not as well established as previously thought. Many histories on distillation cite work from 1979 that claims that elephant... Read more →
This is a quick post on some books I've read on women distilling in olden times. Distillation of spirits came out of medical alchemy (which is to say medical proto-science), and early alchemy books included lots of recipes for distilled medicines with stuff like gold and silver included in them.... Read more →
I read about a reference to distillation in the Pirotechnia, so I decided to look up the book. According to Wikipedia, "De la Pirotechnia is considered to be one of the first printed books on metallurgy to have been published in Europe. It was written in Italian and first published... Read more →
If you attended Tales of the Cocktail - virtually or in person - you have access to some recorded seminars. I watched and this post reports on one of those seminars: From Usquebaugh to Aqua Fructum: The Early Modern English Origins of English Gin By Jared Brown and Anistatia Miller... Read more →
Wine was (probably) first distilled into eau de vie in the practice of trying to make medicines and perfumes like rosewater and wormwood water. Distilling these herbs would make a preserved medicine that would last beyond the herbs' seasons. Today we'd call them hydrosols and essential oils. These were water... Read more →