The Ultimate Book of Cocktails [antikvár]

NTRODUCTIONAt what point in history someone first used an alcoholic substance to fulfil what would become its time-honoured role as intoxicant is a question that may never be answered. What is certain is that the first such use arose from the discovery of the effects of fermentation on either fruit, honey or sticky-sweet palm sap.First alcoholThe ancient Egyptians used fermented grains for making prototype forms of beer. These grains also enabled them to refine the techniques for producing raised breads. They found that adding beer sediment - which was still full of live yeasts - was the quickest and easiest method of encouraging the start of fermentation in a new batch of dough.Below: This Egyptian figure dates from c.2450-2290 BC. and shows a woman at a mixing tub making beer.Wine came after beer, but was to become of crucial cultural and religious importance to the civilizations of Egypt, and classical Greece and Rome. It was used as a sacrament in orgiastic celebrations of the festivals of Dionysos, the Greek god of nature (Bacchus to the Romans). From such ancient rituals, the first public performances recognizable as drama are said to have evolved.In addition to its ceremonial and cultural role, wine was also used for culinary purposes. Not only was it capable of making tough meat more supple, but wine marinades would have removed excess salt from meats that had been encrusted with salt, or soaked in brine, for preservation. Wine vinegar, its alcohol lost to acetic acid, may have been the first recourse, but wine itself appears in sauce recipes in the historically important late Roman cookbook of Apicius (3rd century ad). The wine itself was commonly infused with spices to mask the rank flavours of oxidation or acetification.DistillationThe next important step was the discovery of the art of distilling. Distillation (from the Latin destillare-, to drip) is the extraction of higher alcohols from fermented drinks, which uses the action of heat to vaporize them. Compared to fermentation, distillation is a remarkably simple process, largely because it is much easier to control. Whereas freshly pressed grape juice needs the right ambient temperature to begin the process of turning into wine, a spirit can be produced from wine simply by applying heat to it.Alcohol has a lower boiling point than water (about 78°C/172°F, compared to 100-0/212°F), so it vaporizes into steam some time before the water content in the wine starts to boil. When the alcohol-laden steam hits a cool surface, it forms a dripping condensation, and reverts to a liquid with a much higher proportion of alcohol than the wine. Boil that liquidup again, and the same procedure will yield an even higher alcohol, and so on.Much academic debate has been generated in the last 30 years or so as to when and where distillation was first discovered. The Greek philosopher Aristotle, who lived in the 4th century bc, writes of distillation as a way of purifying seawater to make it drinkable. He comments in passing that the same treatment can be given to wine, which is reduced thereby to a sort of "water". He was tantalizingly close to a breakthrough, but his experiment did no more than prove that wine is just a form of modified water, and that a liquid can only derive flavour from whatever happens to be mixed with the water that forms its base.The documented beginnings of systematic and scientifically founded distillation, at least in Europe, come from the celebrated medical school at Salerno around ad 1100. Wine itself was held to have a range of medicinal properties (a view that found favour again in the 1990s), and the extraction of what was held to be the soul or spirit of the wine, through distillation, is what led to the naming of distillates as "spirits".Alcohol and alchemyAlcohol was believed to be the active ingredient in the healing powers of wine. Up to that time, the word "alcohol" was applied as a generic term to any product derived through vaporization and condensation. Its origin from the Arabic word al-kuhl refers to the Arab practice of producing a black powder by condensing a vapour of the metal antimony. The powder was then used as eye makeup, which is why eye-liner is still occasionally known as kohl. It was not until some time during the 16th century that "alcohol" was used specifically in reference to distilled spirits.Not only medicine but the ancient practice of alchemy were involved in the European origins of distillation. Alchemy was a respected branch of the physical