Category: history
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Monks can’t make enough of this famous spirit. Can an alternative from S.F. replace it?
For the San Francisco Chronicle, I wrote about the Chartreuse shortage and how some bartenders are looking locally to Brucato Chaparral as a stand-in.
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Distillation in Ancient India? Not So Fast
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 head stills were found along…
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Vanity Fair: The Glaciers May Be Melting—But Status Ice Is Trending
I was interviewed for this terrific story in Vanity Fair that brings together the modern manifestations of clear ice with its history as a luxury item that quickly transforms into an everyday necessity over and over again. I think the writer did a great job with it. Read it here.
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Women in Distilling, 1500s-1700s
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. Some of these alchemy books…
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Aqua Vitae Opinions from a 1540 Book on Metallurgy
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 in Venice in 1540.…
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The Cool New Ice Trend In London, 1873
I was searching for some information on Wenham Lake Ice and stumbled across this article in The Food Journal, published in London in 1873. Wenham is a lake in Massachusetts and its ice was famous and exported to London (I have some interesting info about that in Doctors and Distillers), but by the time this…
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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…
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The 2021 Best Drink Books Round-Up
For the past bunch of years, I've done a round-up of all the drink books (mostly cocktails and spirits) that have come out during the year, in consideration for gifting. I'm not doing that this year, as there are too many cocktail books, and if you want to see them all, you can visit these…
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All the Cocktail and Drink Books from 2020 for Reading or Gifting
It's time for the annual Alcademics drink book round-up! Below are all the books that have come to my attention in 2020. I don't follow wine/beer closely so there are only a few in that section. The links below are to Amazon and to Bookshop.org. If you buy stuff after clicking on a link, I…
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Kold Draft Ice Machine History from Dale DeGroff
I was emailing with Dale DeGroff about the new edition of his book The New Craft of the Cocktail: Everything You Need to Know to Think Like a Master Mixologist, with 500 Recipes and ice came up, as it does. It turns out he was using the big 1.25 inch (32 mm) Kold-Draft cubes at…