The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails Definition of arrack

arrack , a word of Arabic origin meaning “distilled spirit,” is the first widely accepted umbrella term used to differentiate spirits from fermented beverages. From Morocco to Mongolia, India to Indonesia, during the centuries when Arabic was the lingua franca of trade in the Mediterranean, Red Sea, Indian Ocean, and beyond, the word ‘araq (translated variously as “sweat,” “sap,” “essence,” or “spirit”) was used as a general term but also beaten into many local shapes to fit many different tongues and many different distillates.

In Delhi in the 1280s, the ‘araq that wine sellers from Meerut and Aligarh were bringing into town was made from raw sugar; strong and sweet-smelling, it was said to be two or three years old. In 1326, it was two loads of arakı that the Ottoman sultan Orhan Bey sent Geyikli Baba, the great dervish who had just taken part of the Byzantine fortress of Bursa; that was almost certainly a grape spirit. In Mongolia, it became arkhi, and it was made from milk; that was in the 1330s. At some point that century, an anonymous Bulgarian scratched the words “at the feast I drank … rakinya” on his drinking cup; that rakia (as it’s now called) could have been from grapes or from any one of a number of other fruits. In Baghdad in the 1510s, the Azeri poet Fuzuli wrote it as arak. That same decade, in Goa it was being made from palm wine, and it was orraca, or at least that’s how the Portuguese heard it. The strong, clear rice-based spirit Antonio Pigafetta, Ferdinand Magellan’s Venetian assistant, came across in the Philippines in 1522 was arach. Whatever it was that the version they were making in Algiers in the 1580s was based on, the Spanish heard its name as arraquin.

In the 1600s, the word entered English as “rack” or “arrack,” and there it has stayed. At the same time, four of these local arracks entered the system of global trade in spirits that was then being established. The first was the palm arrack from Goa and other ports in southern and western India. As noted already, Portuguese traders had included this spirit, which had been in local and international commerce in India and Southeast Asia for over half a millennium, in their cargos since the very beginning of that country’s trade with India; the English and the Dutch would join them by the early 1600s. At first, the trade was simply a matter of selling off excess ships’ stores (the Portuguese, Dutch, and English all stocked their ships with the spirit for the long return journeys to Europe), but by the 1700s markets had been formed in Europe for “Goa arrack,” and it was in regular commerce. Some considered it to be the original spirit for making punch (which it almost certainly was), and the best (here there was room for debate). This trade lasted into the nineteenth century but faded out by 1900. Today the version made in Sri Lanka is the most common outside the region. See arrack, coconut; and feni.

The second type was the cane arrack from northeast India. As “Bengal arrack,” this spirit—stronger than Goa arrack, but also rougher—saw some trade with Europe, but was mostly shipped around Asia, where it was used to ration soldiers and sailors and the like. When Great Britain colonized Australia at the end of the eighteenth century, Bengal arrack, or “Bengal rum,” as it was commonly known, provided a large part of the colony’s early alcohol trade. See Rum.

The third was the protean spirit known to the Ottoman Turks as rakı, to their Balkan subjects as rakia (spelled variously), and to their Levantine Arab ones as ‘araq. This spirit, usually distilled from grapes or raisins but also from dates and, in the Balkans, from plums, cherries, or just about any fruit that grew in the region, was made and traded widely around the eastern Mediterranean, in spite of Islamic prohibitions on alcohol. Although the early versions were flavored with all kinds of different herbs, singly or in combination, or left unflavored, by the eighteenth century anise had become the dominant flavor, as it was around the Mediterranean, and the spirit had often gained a fairly stiff dose of sugar. See maraschino; raki; rakija; and slivovitz.

Finally, there was Batavia arrack. A Dutch modification of a Chinese spirit made in Indonesia and consumed mostly in Europe, Batavia arrack was the world’s first international luxury spirit. See arrack, Batavia. The spirit itself was a complex one, involving palm sap whose fermentation was started with rice-based qu in the Chinese manner and encouraged by the addition of molasses and other sugar byproducts. See qu. In its journey from Batavia—modern Jakarta—to Amsterdam, it spent many months aging in the large teak-wood leggers in which it was shipped. In London in 1730, a bowl of punch made with a quart of French brandy or Jamaican rum generally cost six shillings, while one with Batavia arrack cost eight. This price superiority lasted well into the nineteenth century, by which point the spirit’s palm component had fallen out of use. The market for Batavia arrack collapsed after the Second World War, but in recent years the spirit has received new attention from punch makers and tikiphiles. See punch and tiki.

All of these spirits preceded the rise of brandy, genever, rum, and whisky, the European (or European-controlled) spirits that would become mainstays of the global spirits trade. Although Batavia arrack provided a bridge between the old, predominately Asian spirits trade, or trades, that flourished from approximately the ninth century ce through the sixteenth and the new, European-dominated trade that has developed since the seventeenth century, in general the newer trade networks supplanted the older ones, and the various arracks fell back on their local markets (with the exception of Batavia arrack, which had given those up in the 1600s).

arrack

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