That Cocktail You’re Drinking Has a Lot of Alchemy Mixed In – The San Francisco Standard

Humans never truly succeeded at turning lead into gold, but weve managed to turn all sorts of things into alcohol. Distillations dual meaningsthe use of heat to purify a liquid and the more metaphorical reduction of something to its essenceare in fact one and the same, and when it comes to the history of alcohol, it turns out that cocktails arent so far off from the quest to find eternal life.

SF-based spirits writer Camper Englishs latest book, Doctors and Distillers: The Remarkable Medicinal History of Beer, Wine, Spirits, and Cocktails traces that history from the era when medicine consisted of balancing the bodys four humors to the Dutch East India Companys rapacious imperialism.

Distillation, English says, is the grand achievement of 1,000 years of alchemy. In fact, the attempt to turn dull, heavy lead into radiant gold is a parallel process to refining an alcoholic spirit.

Its about perfecting each thing in its own nature, English said at Lower Nob Hill wine bar Key Klub, a few days before he departed for Tales of the Cocktail in New Orleans. You apply the philosophers stone to lead to get gold, and you apply the quintessence to a person to make them live forever.

Attempts to isolate the soul and harness the life energy of the universe have brought us to Red Bull and vodka, its true. But as science advanced, the offshoots of patent medicine and other debunked ideas yielded a fascinating book thats far more than just a collection about boozy trivia.

For instance, syphilis was quite likely brought to Europe by Columbus crew, soldiers for hire who rapidly spread it around the continent. Within 15 years of the so-called discovery of the New World, asylums had filled up with late-stage syphilitics, and everyone was desperate for a cure.

What they thought was going to cure syphliis was a medicine found in the same place the disease was from. They had to have a New Workd medicine, English said. Guaiacum, which is a tree I dont think is used for anything anymore, along with sassafras and sarsparilla, were thought to be the cure for syphilis.

Those latter two botanicals continued to pop up in the following centuries, hawked as cure-alls for this and that, even as the bottled cure became the foundation for modern root beer.

But it was Europeans encounters with malaria, an even deadlier scourge than syphilis, that really powered the fusion of medicine and modern cocktail culture. Quinine, which kills the parasite that causes malaria, was derived from the cinchona tree found in Peru and Bolivia. Jesuit missionaries exported it back to Rome, and from there, it fueled the drive to convert, exploit and enslave indigenous peoples of the tropics, whose territory had been so remote and inhospitable that expeditions lost huge numbers of men before even getting there.

Cinchona, then, became a mechanism furthering 19th-century colonialist exploits, with all the strife and butchery it entailed. It is the history of malaria that formed the nucleus of Doctors and Distillers, led by gin-drinking Brits stationed in India who sought a palatable quinine-delivery system.

I tried to find the creation date for the gin-and-tonic, English said. I thought, because medicine is so much better documented than cocktails, that I was going to find the earliest creation date for the gin-and-tonic in a medicine book, and absolutely did not.

No one had written it. And over three years of research into the medical applications of distillation, he found that virtually every scholarly tome focused on distilled watersrosewater, juniper water, and the likewould have at least one distilled wine tacked on to the end. These how-tos are, essentially, the forerunners of modern cocktail recipes, only with whispered promises of health and vitality that connect them to medieval theories of yellow bile.

Recipe books for women always included distillation recipes to make medicine for your home, English said. Into the 1700s, as recipes got larger, they have sweeteners in them and theyre going to be consumed for recreation. But they still list the medicinal properties. This is the recipe and what you use it for. And if you take it every day, youll live to be 100.

SF's most important stories, delivered straight to your inbox.

Link:

That Cocktail You're Drinking Has a Lot of Alchemy Mixed In - The San Francisco Standard