The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails Definition of arrack, coconut

arrack, coconut is the most widespread and historically significant representative of one of the earliest categories of spirits, those distilled from palm sap. (Besides the coconut palm—Cocos nucifera—the nipa, date, and African raffia or oil palms are also of commercial and historical importance as sources for distillation. See akpeteshie, nipa, and ogogoro.) Spirits distilled from the coconut palm are or have been made throughout the tropics, from South and Southeast Asia to the Indonesian and Philippine archipelagos, Central America, the Caribbean, and equatorial Africa. Their earliest appearance, however, is in Asia.

In the absence of a detailed history of distillation in Asia, we cannot say precisely (or even imprecisely) when the first palm spirits were made, or where. While evidence of a spirits trade in the India of antiquity is fragmentary, what there is does not suggest palm spirits were known, nor is there any evidence that they were known in China. The earliest, rather ambiguous, notices of the spirit appear in the 900s ce, when Abu Zeyd Hassan, a Basra-based chronicler, records an Arab sailor’s notice of a Sri Lankan drink made from “palm-honey, boiled,” and Chinese merchants may have been importing it from Siam via ports on the Andaman Sea. Less tenuously, in the 1410s the Chinese navigator Ma Huan (1380–1460) recorded that Siam was producing coconut-palm spirit, and Bengal coconut- and nipa-palm spirit. In any case, by 1510, when the Portuguese established their colony in Goa, they found coconut-palm “arrack” (the Arab word for “distilled spirit” was used) being made, drunk, and traded throughout eastern and southern India.

The traditional way of making palm arrack is by climbing mature coconut palms, cutting the “spathes”—the stalks from which the tree’s flowers grow—and collecting the sap that runs out. This ferments quickly with environmental yeasts, yielding a palm wine or “toddy,” as it is known, of about 8 percent ABV, which must be distilled within twenty-four hours, before it goes sour. Traditionally, a clay external-condensation pot still is used identical to the Gandharan one of antiquity. See still, pot. In Goa, there were three grades of arrack, depending on if it was single-, double-, or triple-distilled (ranging from under 30 percent to over 60 percent ABV). See feni.

The Europeans took to the spirit right away. In 1518, the Portuguese trader Francisco Corbinel, who had been in Goa from 1510 through 1515, returned to Lisbon and was released from his debts in return for an impressive list of Indian goods he had shipped home, including 2,426 jars of “orraca.” With these initial intercontinental shipments began the global spirits trade.

The Portuguese, however, never developed their commerce in arrack, as it was in conflict with the royally protected wine trade. It fell to the English to make Indian coconut arrack a standard item of commerce a century later. With the establishment of “factories”—trading posts—at Mumbai and elsewhere on the Indian coast, the East India Company (founded 1600) began provisioning its ships with coconut arrack. Eventually, this created a market in England for what was not consumed, spurred by the English embrace of punch—originally, arrack with sugar, citrus, water, and (usually) spices. See punch. By the late 1600s, “Goa arrack” or “Colombo arrack,” as Indian or Sri Lankan coconut arrack was known (as opposed to “Batavia arrack,” the Dutch-imported palm-and-molasses product from Java), was bringing a premium price on the London market. See arrack, Batavia. In 1712, for instance, one London merchant was selling Colombo arrack for a princely 14 shillings a gallon, with Batavia arrack bringing 12; the only other spirit that brought comparable prices was the oldest French brandy. As that peerless observer of the world around him, the explorer William Dampier (1651–1715), noted in 1697, no other arrack was “so esteemed for making Punch” as the Goa kind, although the “most delicate” punch made with it “must have a dash of brandy to hearten it,” as it was not strong enough to make good punch on its own (clearly the triple-distilled version was not getting around). Eventually, Batavia arrack, all of which was fairly high proof, largely drove the Indian version out of the market, and by the beginning of the nineteenth century it was a rarity.

In the meanwhile, the production of coconut-palm spirit had spread to the Philippines, where it was common by the 1570s, and from there to Mexico with the fleets that tied Spain’s vast maritime empire together. Today, a great deal of coconut lambanog, as it is known, is still made in the Philippines, but Mexico has moved on to other spirits. See lambanog and Mexico. Some coconut arrack is still made in Goa, although it is rarely exported.

The leader of the modern industry is undoubtedly Sri Lanka, which has turned coconut arrack into a modern spirit (some spirit is also made from palmyra and kitul palms). Both pot and column stills are used, the latter having been introduced in the 1920s. Their products are (generally) blended and then aged in large teak or halmilla-wood (Berrya ammonilla) vats for anywhere from six months to seven years; after two years it can be called “old arrack.” The resulting products are generally mild and subtle, with a slight lactic tang and a hint of funk. The contemporary bump in interest in spirits with local traditions and historical resonance has cracked the door of the global spirits market for Sri Lankan arracks, and they can now be found in the United Kingdom and some markets in the United States.

arrack, coconut

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