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Read An Excerpt About Scurvy from Doctors and Distillers on LitHub

LitHub published an excerpt from Doctors and Distillers, a section on scurvy. Coincidentally, they did so on National Daiquiri Day.

Read it here.

July 19, 2022
An Excerpt from Doctors and Distillers in the Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal published a short excerpt from Doctors and Distillers this weekend!

Read it here – subscription required.

July 17, 2022
New York Times Review of Doctors and Distillers

Here's the review of Doctors and Distillers in the New York Times!

Here’s to Your Health

In “Doctors and Distillers,” Camper English explores the long-running interconnection between medicine and alcohol in daily life.

Some review excerpts:

In “Doctors and Distillers,” English, a San Francisco-based cocktails and spirits writer, has collected many similar stories of alcoholic beverages used as treatments for what ails the mind and body. It’s a mostly chronological journey through major milestones, spanning the B.C. days of fermented Chinese rice drinks and therapeutic wine use during the Indian Vedic period, to the 21st century: “In Ireland, the practice of giving blood donors a free pint of Guinness only ended in 2009.”

“Doctors and Distillers” comes off as a cheerfully informative highlights tour — the literary equivalent of a bowl of tasty bar snacks to consume between sips of social history.

Perhaps it’s the current proximity, but English’s inclusion of previous pandemic practices gives “Doctors and Distillers” an extra dose of insight into human nature. Ever mindful of certain tendencies to seek alternatives to established science, he offers his wisest words in the book’s opening disclaimer: “If you need medicine, talk to your doctor. If you need a cocktail, see your local mixologist.”

July 7, 2022
The Virtues of Aqua Vitae, from a 1512 Book

A very important early book on distillation is Hieronymous Braunschweig's The Virtuous Book of Distillation.

It is otherwise known as the Large Book on Distillation, and it was first published in 1512, after the Small Book in 1500. I believe it was first printed in German, then translated into Dutch, then translated into English I think in 1527 but I'm not positive.

You can read some about it in Doctors and Distillers.

The full title of the book is actually: The vertuose boke of distyllacyon of the waters of all maner of herbes with the fygures of the styllatoryes, fyrst made and compyled by the thyrte yeres study and labour of the moste co[n]nynge and famous mayster of phisyke, Master Iherom bruynswyke. And now newly translate[d] out of Duyche into Englysshe Nat only to the synguler helpe and profyte of the surgyens, phisycyens, and pothecaryes, but also of all maner of people, parfytely and in dewe tyme and ordre to lerne to dystyll all maner of herbes, to the profyte, cure, and remedy of all maner dysseases and infirmytees apparant and nat apparant. And ye shall vnderstande that the waters be better than the herbes, as Auicenna testefyeth in his fourthe conon saynge that all maner medicynes vsed with theyr substance, febleth and maketh aged, and weke. Cum gratia et preuilegio regali.

And as you can tell, it can be a challenge to read in this old English style and spelling.

But in preparation for my Tales of the Cocktail seminar this year, I decided to "translate" from olde English spelling into modern spelling an important section: The Virtues of Aqua Vitae.

The old English text is archived here. For the page scan of this page, it is here.

The Virtues of Aqua Vitae

The aqua vitae is commonly called the mistress of all medicines for it eases the diseases coming of cold. It gives also young courage in a peron and causes them ot have a good memory and remembrance. It purifies the five whites (?) of melancholy and all of the uncleans when it is drunk by reason and measure. That is to understand five or six drops in the morning fasting with a spoonfull of wine using the same in the manner afforsaid the evil humors cannot hurt the body for it will dry them out of the veins.

It conforts the heart and cause a body to be merry. It heals all old and new sores on the head coming of cold when the head is anointed therewith and a little of the same water held in the mouth and drunk of the same.

It causes a good color in a person when it is drunk and the head anointed therewith the space of 20 days. I heals alopecia or when it is drunk fasting with a little treacle it causes the hair well to grow and kills the lice and flees.

It cures the Reuma (?) of the head when the temples and the forehead therewith are rubbed and a spoonful taken in the mouth. It cures Litargiam (lethargy?) and all ill humor of the head. It heals the rosome (rosacea?) in the face and all manner of pimples. It heals the fistula when it is put therein with the luce of Celandine (?).

Cotton wet in the same and a little wrung out again and so put in the eyes at night going to bed and a little drunk thereof is good against all deafness. It eases the pain in the teeth when it is a long time held in the mouth. It cause a swell breath and heals the rotting teeth. It heals the canker in the mouth in the teeth, in the lyps, and in the tongue when it is long time held in the mouth. It causes the heavy tongue to become light and well speaking. It heals the short breath when it is drunk with what when (?) as the figs be sodden in and vanishes all flumes (?)

It causes good digestion and appetite for to eat and takes away the bulking. It dries the winds out of the body and is good against the evil stomach. It eases faintness of the hart, the pain of the milte (?), the yellow jaudice, the dropsy the ill limbs, the gout in the hands and in the feet, the pain in the breasts when they are swollen, and heals all diseases in the bladder and breaks the stone.

It withdraws venom that has been taken in meat or in drink with a little treacle is put thereto. It heals the flanks and all diseases coming of cold. It heals the burning of the body and of all members when it is rubbed therewith by the fire 8 days counting.
It is good to be drunk against the sodein dede (sudden dead?). It heals all scabs of the body and all cold swelling anointed or washed therewith and also little therof drunk. It heals all shrunk sinews and causes them to become soft and right.

It heals the tertian and quartan fevers when it is drunk an hour before, or the fevers become on a body. It heals the venomous bites and also of a mad dog when they be washed therewith. It heals also all stinking wounds when they be washed therewith.

June 27, 2022
SCIENCE Magazine Reviews Doctors and Distillers!

I'm so thrilled that Science wrote a review of Doctors and Distillers. Science is one of the most important academic journals in the world, and if you're a scientist it is a career goal to get into the publication. I didn't get in for doing any science, but for writing about the history of science. I'll take it!

It is still six weeks before the publication date of Doctors and Distillers (July 19, 2022) but it has already achieved my ultimate goal of critical success.

Doctors and Distillers

Reviewed by Maddie Bender

Doctors and Distillers, Camper English’s exploration of the medicinal history of libations, is jam-packed with factoids about the history of distilling and medicine and arranged in thematic and roughly chronological order. The writing is lively and accessible, easily enjoyed by a medical anthropologist, home mixologist, or seasoned bartender. Interstitials, meanwhile, provide relevant cocktail recipes that range from the quotidian to the obscure.

Progressing from fermentation and the early medicinal use of grain and grapes by the ancient Greeks and Romans, to the pursuit of alchemy (and eternal health) in the Middle Ages, and then on to the invention of various tonics in the 19th and 20th centuries, the book reveals the fascinating backstory of the spirits that sit on our bar shelves. All forms of alcohol, as well as the characters who brew them, get their 15 minutes of fame. Monks, we learn, for example, played key roles in the development of at least two beverages that are commercially popular today: Chartreuse and Dom Pérignon champagne. Delightful descriptions of ludicrous concoctions abound, such as Buckfast Tonic Wine, a caffeinated, fortified wine that, according to the author, has become the drink of choice for Scottish hooligans.

English discerningly points out when the medicinal value of alcohol-based remedies is likely to be low or nonexistent (the brandy allegedly toted by Alpine mastiffs to revive avalanche survivors, for instance). He describes how absinthe got its reputation
for inducing madness, delving into ill-fated public demonstrations on live guinea pigs,
and recounts how Rose’s Lime Juice originated as a treatment for scurvy.

Science—in the evidence-supported, peer-reviewed sense—waits in the wings for the first part of the book, making a grand entrance in chapter 4, where English introduces the early chemists and physicists who sought to understand carbonation and the connection between microorganisms and fermentation. Here, we peer into Louis Pasteur’s laboratory as the microbiologist delivers a death blow to the theory of spontaneous generation, in the process drawing attention to the strains of yeast responsible for fermenting alcohol safely.

Medicine and the scientific method remained loosely associated, at best, for millennia, English reminds readers. Moreover, what is considered “medicine” and what is a “cocktail” remain fluid, overlapping categories to this day. For reasons that range from well supported to actively misguided, alcohol consumption and health are tied together.

This book is best savored, not shotgunned, with a drink in hand and among company who will not mind frequent interruptions to hear passages read aloud.

June 4, 2022
Alton Brown Recommends Doctors and Distillers
Sharing this write-up about my book from Alton Brown:

"Alton Brown has given us season after season of food television goodness with multiple shows, including the iconic Good Eats and most recently Good Eats: Reloaded and Good Eats: The Return. He’s also written his fourth Good Eatscookbook, Good Eats: The Final Years, a compilation of five seasons of applications (recipes) from Good Eats: Reloaded and Good Eats: The Return, including one season’s worth that Brown developed during the pandemic but hasn’t made into shows (and he’s not sure he ever will). It’s a hefty volume that will make you want to go back and binge watch Good Eats shows—after you’ve made yourself a nice snack, of course.

We asked Brown about the books he’s read and loved lately, and it’s a fun collection that includes a history of spirits (alcohol, not ghosts) and a book he calls the last word on written English."

He writes of my book Doctors and Distillers:

Mr. English, a leading writer on spirits and cocktails, has written a fascinating book examining the history of beer, wine, and spirits from a medical point of view. The scholarship here is as remarkable, but above all, this is great storytelling that clearly reveals the histories of medicine and spirits as intertwined and inseparable.

Buy the book here!
May 28, 2022
Review of Doctors and Distillers in Publishers Weekly

My book Doctors and Distillers got a nice review in Publishers Weekly!

Cocktail and beverage writer English makes a spirited debut with this vibrant cultural history of alcohol’s transition from medicine to social lubricant. Gin and tonic, a popular concoction consumed by British soldiers in the 1800s to stave off disease and illness, for instance, incorporated “lime for scurvy, the fizzy water for anemia and other conditions, the quinine for malaria, and the gin as a diuretic.” English also looks at the ways in which “beer, wine, and fizzy spa water inspired great progress in medical science”: 12th-century physician Moses Maimonides prescribed wine for mad-dog bites, while the plague was combated with special beers. English knows his stuff, but he also knows how to have a good time. Cocktail recipes provided throughout are cheekily positioned: after a discussion of the maladies suffered by absinthe addicts, including “seizures, dementia, vertigo, hallucinations, violent outbursts… and epilepsy,” English offers up an absinthe and champagne drink called Death in the Afternoon. Distillations made by monks (including the Carthusians with their Chartreuse liqueur) and aperitifs and digestifs also get their historical due. For the curious imbiber, or simply those looking for a few choice trivia tidbits to drop at cocktail parties (sadly, Saint Bernards never wore little barrels of brandy around their necks to revive those lost in the Alps), this is a winner. (July)

May 19, 2022
An Alcademics Study of Liquor Bottle Weights
Since 2009 I have been weighing liquor bottles before recycling them. I was up to 1226 bottles weighed and decided it was about time for me to analyze the data.

At the bottom of the post I'll include a link to my spreadsheets. Note that I dated when I weighed the bottles because bottles often change. In my final analysis I took only the more recent bottle weights if I had them, but it's likely that some of the data in my spreadsheet represents older bottles that have since been changed.

This data obviously doesn't include every bottle on the market, and there may be some mistakes in it, such as a typo when I was putting in weights or I didn't weigh the box/tube that a scotch whiskey came in, etc. So take it with a grain of salt.

Some things I learned:

I did weigh duplicates of the same bottle. The variance in bottle weights was about 10 grams. This is probably mostly due to me leaving a touch of liquid in the bottom of the bottle before weighing. Some varied by up to 15 grams but this was rare. So we can round our data to within 10 grams.

Here are some duplicates so you can see:

The larger the bottle, the less weight per volume of liquid. Some times by a lot! Some times by not so much.

This is fairly obvious but nice to show. If you want to be better for the environment you should buy your booze in bulk.

Brands change their bottles, and often not for the lighter. In recent years some brands have started moving to lighter bottles, but the common wisdom is that heavier bottles reflect a more premium (and expensive) product. That's the more typical direction.

Some changes include:
- When Aviation gin moved from a wine-style bottle to a custom one, the weight jumped up by 100 grams.
- When Don Julio changed the bottles in 2011, the blanco may have become lighter but the repo and anejo gained weight. Now Don Julio bottles are weighted in order, getting heavier from blanco, repo, anejo, to 70.
- Highland Park jumped up by 70 grams
- Junipero gin increased by OVER 300 grams
- There were a few other changes that were within 30g that I don't think are worth mentioning.
A weighed a few of the more egregious bottle caps. The Padre Azul skull comes in at over 300 grams.

Somehow I only ever weighed St. Germain one time and not the bottle cap separately. The bottle is not as heavy as it feels though coming in at 800 grams.

I then reduced the data down to avoid repeats, and to only include 750ML bottles so I was comparing apples to apples (or rather, applejack to applejack).

My "final" clean data represents a total of 798 bottles.

There are repeats of bottles, for example a flavored vodka versus the unflavored, and different ages of some whiskies, but I kept those in on purpose.

The lightest bottles overall:

400 grams or lighter is about the lightest we seem to get with glass bottles. It's a lot of the American value bourbons and blended scotch whiskies as the lightest bottles.

Here are the next batch:

Heaviest Bottles:

And now for the heaviest, ordered from heaviest down. In some cases like Double Cross Vodka that may include the box. I had intended to mark when I included boxes or not but didn't do a great job at it.

The next batch:

Now let's look at it by category!

Amaro, lightest to heaviest:

Brandy: Note that Laird's has since moved to a new (assumedly heavier) bottle.

Lightest gins:

Heaviest gins (heaviest on bottom):

Lightest Liqueurs:

Heaviest Liqueurs:

Lightest Rums:

Heaviest Rums:

Lightest Tequilas:

Heaviest Tequilas:

Lightest Vodkas:

Heaviest Vodkas:

Lightest Whiskeys:

Heaviest Whiskeys:

I hope you enjoyed this analysis. Do you want to look at the data and maybe even subcategorize it into things like bourbon vs scotch rather than just whisky?

You can find a copy of the sheet here. I have it set so that you should have to copy it in order to make your own changes. Let me know if you further analyze it!

There are certainly duplicates and other errors in my data, no need to point out anything minor.
May 7, 2022
Measuring the Rate of Freezing of an Ice Block in my Freezer
I decided to measure the rate of freezing of an ice block in my (pretty crappy) freezer at home. It's just a standard apartment freezer.

For all four times, I began with the same set of parameters:
- Igloo Legend 12 cooler
- 6 liters of cold tap water (this fills up the cooler a little more than halfway), in the freezer with the top off
This is the typical set-up to make crystal clear ice slabs via directional freezing.

Then I froze the water for 24 or 48 hours, setting the temperature on the coldest of warmest setting.

I kept checking what those temperatures were, and found that there was a huge variation of temperature when set on setting.
- Warmest setting = 0F to 11F, average about 5F (-17C to -11C, average -15C)
- Coldest setting = -15F to 10F, average about 0 to -5F (-26C to -12C, average -17C to 21C)
The rates were

Temperature Setting Length of Time Thickness (cm)

Warmest 24 hours 2 – 2.25

Warmest 48 hours 5.75 – 6.5

Coldest 24 hours 2.5 to 3

Coldest 48 hours 8.5

So if I want to make a slab of ice that is a little more than 2 inches thick, I can fill a cooler to 6L and leave it in for 2 days at the warmest setting. For me, this is ideal thickness to make big ice cubes.

What is interesting here is that leaving the water in the freezer for double the length of time more than doubles the thickness of the slab, while we'd expect the rate of freezing to slow down. There is extra energy required to cool down the water to freezing temperature before it begins freezing, but most of the energy used should be in converting the water to ice. Perhaps this has to do with the insulated container, that cooling from one direction only is more energy intense than from all sides. Makes sense to me.

Maybe I'll try 3 days to see how thick it gets.
February 23, 2022
Books That Cite Camper English’s Work
The other month I came across a citation of something I wrote in a book that I'd not previously known about. This lead me to do a Google Books search to see if there were any more, and there were – a lot! So this post is more or less an item for my resume. I don't think I included books that only cite my work in the bibliography but in the body of the text in some way.

Books That Cite, Quote, or Otherwise Mention Camper English
1. Batch Cocktails: Make-Ahead Pitcher Drinks for Every Occasion
2. Disco Cube Cocktails
3. Just the Tonic
4. A Proper Drink
5. Craft Cocktails at Home
6. Vintage Spirits & Forgotten Cocktails
7. The Cocktail Seminars
8. The Gin Dictionary
9. Slippery tipples : a guide to weird and wonderful spirits & liqueurs
10. Beer cocktails : 50 superbly crafted cocktails that liven up your lagers and ales
11. The New Craft of the Cocktail
12. The Cocktail Manual
13. Eatymology: The Dictionary of Modern Gastronomy
14. Spirits of Latin America
15. Cocktail Culture: Recipes & Techniques from Behind the Bar
16. The Tippling Bros – A Lime and a Shaker
17. The Everything Bartender's Book
18. Burn the Ice: The American Culinary Revolution and Its End
19. The Japanese Art of the Cocktail
20. Schofield's Fine and Classic Cocktails
21. Ladies Who Drink: A Stylishly Spirited Guide to Mixed Drinks and Small Bites
22. Gaz Regan's 101 Best New Cocktails 2012
23. Home Bar Basics
24. The Cocktail Companion
25. The Oxford Companion to Spirits & Cocktails
26. Return of the Artisan: How America Went from Industrial to Handmade
27. Road Soda: Recipes and techniques for making great cocktails, anywhere
28. Holy Waters: Searching for the Sacred in a Glass
29. The Way of the Cocktail: Japanese Traditions, Techniques, and Recipes
30. Ice: From Mixed Drinks to Skating Rinks–a Cool History of a Hot Commodity
31. Tropical Standard: Cocktail Techniques & Reinvented Recipes
32. Modern Caribbean Rum: A Contemporary Reference to the Region's Essential Spirit
33. The Bartender's Pantry: A Beverage Handbook for the Universal Bar
34. Strong, Sweet and Dry: A Guide to Vermouth, Port, Sherry, Madeira and Marsala
35. Martini: The Ultimate Guide to a Cocktail Icon
36. Cocktail Theory: A Sensory Approach to Transcendent Drinks
37. This Is A Cocktail Book
38. How to Be a Better Drinker: Cocktail Recipes and Boozy Etiquette
39. American Whiskey Master Class: The Ultimate Guide to Understanding Bourbon, Rye, and Other American Whiskeys
December 30, 2021

Temperature Setting	Length of Time	Thickness (cm)
Warmest	24 hours	2 – 2.25
Warmest	48 hours	5.75 – 6.5
Coldest	24 hours	2.5 to 3
Coldest	48 hours	8.5