England has done more than perhaps any other country to shape the worlds of distilled spirits and the drinks mixed with them. This is ironic, since it came to distilling late and, for the most part, abandoned it early.
In the 1400s, when the art of distilling spirits from grain swept through northern Europe from Ireland to the Urals, it left England basically unmarked. It was not for want of knowledge: Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale,” written around 1400, mentions “alambikes” along with “berme” (yeast), “wort,” and “fermentacioun” as parts of the alchemist’s stock-in-trade. And indeed medicinal spirits were distilled in the abbeys and great houses (where distilling was the province of the mistress of the house), but spirits did not enter recreational use, as they did in Scotland and Ireland. See Scotland and Ireland.
This is strange, given that, as the playwright Thomas Dekker wrote in 1623, “an English man is a horse that drinks of all waters.” Beers from Hamburg and Rotterdam, wines from Spain, Italy, and even Persia were readily available, particularly in London, but for whatever reason—aristocratic conservatism, island-nation xenophobia, lack of exposure—through the middle of the seventeenth century spirits were confined mostly to nautical use. There, the fact that they took up much less space than beer or wine and did not spoil made them a fixture. But it was only with the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 that spirits drinking began to spread widely among the general run of English drinkers.
At first, it was French brandy that dominated the market; the fact that France was a perpetual enemy did not seem to affect the trade, which grew with incredible rapidity. In 1689, however, England and France went to war, and King William III cut off the supply. In exchange, Parliament passed, with royal encouragement, “an act for encouraging the distilling of brandy and spirits from corn [i.e., grain],” in the hope of encouraging improvement in the notoriously poor quality of English grain spirits (William was Dutch, and he knew grain spirits). See genever. This did in fact lead to a remarkable rise in English grain distilling, although the brandy trade had to be restored for revenue purposes. At the same time, English traders were bringing in increasing amounts of arrack from India and Indonesia and rum—an English elaboration of the raw sugar-cane spirits so common in the New World—from the new colonies in the British Caribbean. See arrack and rum. By the 1720s, England was awash in spirits: “geneva,” or simply “gin” for the poor, indifferently distilled from whatever grain could be scraped up that had escaped the brewers and bakers, and the finest imported spirits for the rich. Drunkenness was rampant.
The English solution to the problem of “Gin Lane” (as William Hogarth dubbed his famous portrayal of the desperate alcoholism that gripped London’s extensive slums) was already largely in place, in the form of the British excise system. Excise taxes on spirits were of course nothing new, but England approached them with an unusual attention to detail and an iron determination to see them enforced. See excise, taxes, and distillation. In a series of acts beginning in the 1730s, Parliament imposed a tax structure on the freewheeling distilling industry that made it very difficult and very expensive to make spirit from scratch and relatively easy to buy it from one of the firms that had the capital to distill. This divided the industry into “malt distillers” and “rectifiers,” who redistilled their purchased spirit into gin. See gin and rectifier. Around the margins, there were also some who made spirit from imported molasses, which was often blended with imported rum, and others who made cider brandy.
Between 1750 and 1764, English spirits consumption declined from a brutal 25 liters per capita annually to eight liters (today it fluctuates around four liters). At the same time, the quality of what was manufactured increased greatly. So did the quality of what was imported, as English merchants learned to let their stocks mature in oak in the soft, moist climate of the London, Bristol, and Liverpool docklands. See
Today, the eighteenth-century structure still more or less applies: England makes a lot of gin and imports a lot of everything else (now including such formerly exotic things such as vodka, American rye whisky, and Mexican tequila and mezcal), although the micro-distilling movement has spawned a number of new whisky and cider brandy distilleries. See craft distilling.
England’s role in the history of mixology is equally important. Whether English sailors adopted punch from India or invented it there, they certainly saw to its global spread, the first mixed drink based on spirits to gain worldwide popularity. See punch. In the mid-nineteenth century, England was also one of the early adopters of the new, American school of mixing drinks, and London has a correspondingly long history of cocktail bars (although perhaps not quite so long as Paris), and of famous bartenders to serve behind them. See Calabrese, Salvatore; Coleman, Ada; Dorelli, Giampiero “Peter”; Engel, Leo; and Savoy. Another London bartender, Dick Bradsell, was in the vanguard of the twenty-first-century cocktail renaissance, which has seen a long list of bars in the city celebrated for the wild creativity they bring to inventing and presenting drinks. See Bradsell, Dick; and cocktail renaissance.
See also Diageo and spirits trade, history of.
Harper, William T. Origins and Rise of the British Distillery. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1999.
Mendelsohn, Oscar A. Drinking with Pepys. London: Macmillan, 1963.
Wondrich, David. Punch. New York: Perigee, 2010.
By: David Wondrich