distillation, history. There exists no accurate, comprehensive, and detailed history of distillation as it applies to alcohol, and without considerable primary archaeological and archival research in South and East Asia, Africa, Europe, and Central and South America one cannot be written. It may be impossible even with such work: at its most basic level, distillation is so simple an idea that its gist can be conveyed in a single sentence: “Bring wine or beer to a boil, collect the first part of the steam, and let that cool.” There are a great many ways to do this, few of them difficult to conceive and many of them not even requiring special equipment.
Indeed, it is possible to make crude spirits by cleverly arranging three ordinary clay pots, or even a pair of pots, a large roll of tree bark, and an agave leaf (as Carl Lumholtz found the Cora people of northern Mexico doing in the 1890s to make sotol). This makes the geographical origin of distillation and its early range very difficult to determine: as S. Mahdihassan asked in 1972, “When such objects are excavated who could interpret them as having been used in distillation?” It is thus at least technically possible that distillation goes back deep into the Bronze Age, if not earlier. Indeed, recent reevaluation of a style of pot widely distributed in second-millennium bce archaeological sites from Mesopotamia through to southeastern Europe, in which the mouth is surrounded by an annular gutter that is provided with a spout, suggests that it may have been intended as the bottom half of an internal-condensation still. See still, pot. Certainly, modern experimental archaeologists have succeeded in using replicas of these to obtain spirits of a relatively high proof.
Nonetheless, between archaeological and textual sources there are enough pieces of evidence, none of them decisive in their own right, that when taken together allow us to sketch out at least a rough and provisional picture of if not the birth of the art, then at least its childhood and adolescence. To do so we shall focus on three main regions, each of which had its own chain of development: South and East Asia, the Middle East and the Mediterranean, and Central and South America.
It is in the Indian subcontinent, China and its southern neighbors, and the East Indies that distillation seems to have been first fully adapted to the production of beverage alcohol. Certainly by the time European travelers first explored the area in numbers, they found it awash with distilled spirits, much of it being produced in stills identical to the ones used more than a thousand years before (what happened in between is largely unknown, due to the lack of a comprehensive history of distillation in Asia, one of the great holes in the scholarship of drink).
The strongest evidence of ancient distillation in India comes from the Gandharan civilization, in the Peshawar Valley at the headwaters of the Indus. At the Shaikhan Dheri archaeological site, the remnants of clay external-condensation “elephant’s head” stills, along with numerous condenser/storage jars and drinking cups, provide particularly strong evidence when combined with other sources that, as F. R. Allchin wrote in 1979, “Distillation was known and used for the strengthening of alcohol in North India … since the fifth century” bce. The elephant’s head itself is documented from the second century bce (a piece of such a still from the first century bce was also found in Mysore, in southwest India). This same type of still—a pot, a clay head with a spout, and a clay or bamboo tube that joins the head to a sealed clay receiver placed in a water-cooled basin, where the vapors condense into spirit—was used to make palm arrack on the east coast of India well into the twentieth century. See arrack and Gandharan still.
With the present state of archaeological research, it is unclear precisely what the Gandharans were distilling. The drinking cups found at Shaikhan Dheri were “marked with stamped corn-ears,” according to Allchin, which would indicate a grain distillate (as does the textual evidence regarding surã, the ancient Vedic name for distilled spirit)—unless those “corn-ears” were actually the tops of sugar canes; the Gandharans were early masters of the art of extracting sugar from cane (it was one of the things Alexander the Great’s troops found remarkable about them in the late fourth century bce). In the seventh century ce, anyway, Xuanzang, the great Chinese Buddhist traveler, found people in the region drinking what was apparently some kind of sugar-cane distillate, and cane spirits were ubiquitous enough during the time of the Moghul sultan ‘Ala’uddin Khalji (1296–1316) to earn his specific prohibition.
China, too, has an early history of using distilled spirits, although the approximate starting point is more difficult to fix. By the second century ce, at least, spirits made by freezing wine were common in the northwestern parts of China, while recent archaeological evidence suggests that spirits were also made through conventional distillation in the southeast. After some experimentation with an annular-gutter-type still (see below), China settled on a different, simpler style of internal-condensation still, where the spirit collected on the bottom of a concave basin of cold water that sealed the top of the still and dripped into a cup suspended or placed on a shelf beneath. By the Tang dynasty (618–907 ce), this “Mongol still,” as it is known—the Mongols were great consumers of kumiss arrack—was in wide use, although in southern China, at least, it was soon supplanted by an improved version, where the collecting cup is provided with a tube leading out through the side of the still, thus allowing the distillation to be monitored as it proceeds. (By this point, grape spirits had been largely replaced by ones distilled from grain.) It is unsure precisely when the side-tube Chinese still was introduced; Lu and the Needhams posit that it was in use by the tenth century Settled historical opinion holds that the distillation of alcohol was unknown in Greco-Roman antiquity and only reached Europe in the twelfth century ce, through Arab mediation. This hypothesis is predicated on one major assumption, that the well-documented use of stills by Hellenistic-era alchemists in Alexandria and elsewhere did not lead to wine distillation because those stills did not incorporate water-cooled condensation and thus ran too hot for recovering alcohol. This conclusion is backed up by the perceived absence in surviving Greek and Roman writings of references to distillation or its products. Neither of these objections is conclusive. The type of still most favored by those early Greco-Egyptian alchemists, usually made of glass, has a large, separate head (an ambix, whence is derived the Arabic word that is the source of “alembic”) with an annular gutter around the bottom that is fitted with an exit spout (in this case, the gutter and spout are part of the head of the still, rather than the pot as in earlier styles), so that the vapor rises through the narrow neck between the body and head, expands to fill the ambix, and, provided that the temperature is carefully controlled, partially condenses on its inside surface, running down the sides to collect in the gutter and drain out the exit tube. This is therefore an internal-condensation still, even though it has a separate head, but it is quite possible that the general idea of a separate still head with outflow pipe was derived from Gandharan stills, as the region was one of Alexander’s conquests and later maintained a regular trade with the Roman Empire. Furthermore, a careful examination of the written record discloses numerous anomalies that seem to describe distilled spirit or its manufacture, from Pliny the Elder’s claim about the famous Falernian wine that “alone among wines burns when exposed to flame” to a number of references to the use by religious mystery cults of a water that burns, a paradox according to the theory of the four elements prevalent at the time, and hence miraculous. As usual, though, none of these hints approach certainty, while it is incontrovertible that if spirit was being made, it was kept quiet, a trade secret or an alchemist’s trick, and did not openly influence the culture of the Mediterranean world at large. In Central America, the situation is similar in that if spirits were made in antiquity, they do not appear to have been in everyday use, being reserved rather for ritual or ceremonial consumption. The archaeological evidence is highly suggestive of the likelihood that distillation was indeed known, usually based on agave, with stills similar to the three-pot system used in ancient India, where the top pot or bowl is the cold-water condenser. Furthermore, in 1529, only eight years after the Spanish conquest of Mexico, Charles V issued an edict forbidding the natives from making agave distillates; that is far too short a time for a new technology to be adopted, mastered, and diffused to the point that it has become a problem, particularly considering the slow speed of communications at the time. There’s also the question of that technology. If the Mexicans learned distillation from the Spanish, one would expect that they would use Spanish-style external-condensation alembic stills. Yet even to this day, many rustic distillers in western Mexico make their mescal in Chinese-style, internal-condensation, side-tube stills (e.g., the bark-and-agave Cora still mentioned above). In the nineteenth century, some were even found still using the three-pot system. It has been posited that Mexicans learned this technology through the Spanish trade route between Mexico and the Philippines. Yet that was inaugurated only in 1564/5, which would mean that if the Mexican distillers condemned by Charles V learned to distill from the Spanish, they set aside that technology and arbitrarily replaced it with another, less efficient one. That makes little sense. If indeed the technology is pre-Columbian, the open question is whether the Mexicans developed it independently or learned it through pre-Columbian contact with Asia. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. The Muslim conquest reached the headwaters of the Indus in the seventh and eighth centuries; at the same time, Arab scholars in Baghdad and elsewhere began delving into the technological parts of alchemy, drawing on surviving Hellenistic texts. Eventually, their texts and experiments began filtering into Europe. While the Arabs did not focus on distilling wine, the Europeans seized on that minor part of the art, possibly because it reinforced something already known, albeit darkly: there is good evidence that In the late thirteenth century, finally, the focus of wine distillation moved from ritual to medicinal use. In this, it was sped along by a number of short treatises on the topic written in the Italian university town of Bologna. These (the most important of them was attributed to the Florentine physician Taddeo Alderotti) contained a number of other novelties. For one, aqua ardens was replaced by a new term, aqua vitae—“water of life.” Instead of a single distillation, they advocated two or three redistillations, at least for the most efficacious medicine. Most importantly, they introduced a new modification of the still. Heretofore, Europeans had been using the air-cooled ambix, with its internal gutter. To this, the treatises added a new component: a “canale serpentinum,” a serpentine outflow pipe that was cooled in a tub of water. (Michele Savonarola, whose detailed 1440s treatise on distillation deserves to be translated, distinguished between aqua vitae, made in the air-cooled still, and aqua vitis, “water of the vine,” made in the new still with its coiled, vine-like condenser; he believed both were ancient.) The coil greatly increased the efficiency of the still: the heat no longer had to be so tightly controlled, and now no vapor could escape without condensation. Before long, the annular internal gutter disappeared from most still heads, simplifying their construction. The air-cooled ambix did not disappear entirely until the eighteenth century, but when it was used, it was expanded into a very large cone, the so-called rosenhut, that was big enough for the pointed top to remain cool during even prolonged distillations; alternatively, some turned the air-cooled ambix into a water-cooled one by surrounding its top with a water chamber; this was known as the “Moor’s head” (that term was also later applied to a still head in the form of an inverted trapezoid). Ultimately, though, the simplicity and efficiency of external condensation won the day in Europe. By the early fourteenth century, distillation in northern Italy had moved out of its experimental stage and into the commercial one; indeed, before long Michele Savonarola would be bemoaning that “aqua ardente” was being sold in the piazzas “to poor and miserable people.” From Italy, it jumped the Alps and spread through the Rhine valley, in the process adding a new base material, grain, and also spread east and west around the Mediterranean. These early European spirits were not, as far as we know, sold unflavored. Rather, they relied on a “cover” to mask the taste of the raw spirit; a medicinally justified botanical that was pungent and, just as importantly, cheap. See cover. In the Mediterranean, this was generally aniseed; the Germans and Dutch preferred juniper, while the Scandinavians, when distillation reached there, went with caraway or cumin seeds. Through the seventeenth century, European spirits were not distinguished by base material: grain, grape, or other fruit spirits were all known as aqua vitae or aqua ardens (or the vernacular equivalents, e.g., the Gaelic usquebaugh and the Spanish aguardiente) or “strong water.” In the seventeenth century, copper decisively displaced glass and ceramics as the main material for the construction of European stills. The century was transitional for European distilling in other ways, too: in some regions, double distillation became the norm for commercial production, yielding purer spirits and higher proofs—indeed, the very concept of proof appears to date to that period. In others, producers began deliberately maturing their spirit in oak barrels. See cognac. This may have been prompted by the example of imported spirits, which spent months and even years in the barrel before reaching Europe. By this point, of course, Europeans had colonized or at least established extensive commercial connections with large parts of Asia and the Americas. Everywhere they went in Asia, they found distillation practiced and spirits an ordinary part of commerce. See arrack, Batavia. Through the medium of punch, spirits became the long-haul sailor’s drink: while beer and wine spoiled on long sea voyages, spirits mellowed, and they took up less space to boot. During the eighteenth century, most European distilleries worked roughly along the same lines: they were family-run; they made a range of products—usually the dominant spirit of the region plus a number of standard cordials—and they were relatively small-scale, with two or three stills, seldom larger than 200 liters. They sold their product locally through tied houses or to rectifiers and brokers who handled all further sales. The great exception to this model was Britain, which, after the so-called gin craze of the early eighteenth century, used excise laws to tightly control the number of distilleries. As a result, the few that existed were massive affairs; in 1792, for instance, the firm of Hatch, Smith & Co. was distilling almost 40,000 liters of grain wash a day. This industrialization and its demand for efficiency led to rapid technological change. With copper, stills could be built in enormous sizes and complex shapes, including extremely wide, shallow ones that boiled very quickly, so that the still could be charged many times a day (this was useful when distillers were taxed on the internal volume of their stills). The British industrial mentality soon caught on in America as well. There, however, innovation took a different turn: with copper expensive and spirits prices low, distillers began experimenting with wooden stills, coopered chambers into which live steam was injected and the alcohol collected by outflow pipes at the top leading to condensers (the Dutch-German chemist Johann Rudolph Glauber had already provided a diagram for a primitive steam-injection wooden still in 1646, although there is no evidence it was put in widespread use; it was, however, reproduced in John French’s influential 1651 Art of Distillation). By the 1830s, this had been refined into the simple but effective chamber still, which used stacked distillation chambers to perform multiple distillations in the same still before sending the distillate out for condensation. Normally, the spirit went through a “dephlegmator” (known in America as a “thumper”), a simple device of French invention that fed the alcohol-rich vapor into a precondensing chamber where enough reflux occurred for the hot vapor to bubble through a layer of its own condensate, stripping out alcohol and leaving behind water and other compounds. See doubler, thumper, keg, or retort. What reached the final condenser was thus twice distilled. Meanwhile, in Britain, France, and the rest of northern Europe the possibilities of steam received a thorough exploration, both for heating traditional pot stills via coils or jackets and for injection directly into the still. This culminated in the development of the continuous-operation column still. See column still. This was invented by Jean-Baptiste Cellier-Blumenthal, a Frenchman, and perfected by, among others, Aeneas Coffey, an Irishman. See Cellier-Blumenthal, Jean-Baptiste; and Coffey, Aeneas. In operation, it is complex, yet the concept is simple: use steam to strip the alcohol out of the wash, and use the cold wash, dripping down through pierced horizontal plates, to condense the alcohol-bearing vapor. In practice, these new stills proved revolutionary: not only could they be run continuously, but they could be used to produce a steady stream of nearly pure spirit, stripped of heads, tails, and congeners. This technology was so powerful as to be disruptive. Over the course of the nineteenth century it became clear that pot or even chamber stills could not compete in terms of price or absolute purity with the new “patent” stills, even with various efficiency-boosting tweaks. Yet they were not entirely replaced by the new technology: indeed, there are records of American rye whisky distilleries ripping out their column stills after a few years and reverting to chamber ones. Although through careful calibration column stills could be made to yield a rich spirit, that meant foregoing some of their advantages, and even then the resulting spirit was not as rich and flavorful as a well-made pot-distilled spirit. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the spirits industry had developed a rough three-tier system. At its base were the people who more or less kept doing things the way they had always been done: fermenting, distilling in whatever version of the pot still people used in their part of the world, and selling the resulting spirit to their neighbors. Producers tended to be fairly small, although in the aggregate distilling activity was often quite extensive, as in, for example, China or Brazil. See The same general conditions persist in the twenty-first century, although there is an uptick in the number of small pot distilleries in America and Europe, while most of the local markets have been incorporated into the global spirits trade, and some of those formerly-local spirits have become mainstays of the trade. See tequila. Distilling technology has changed relatively little, although computer control has allowed it to be operated more efficiently. The only true technological advance, vacuum distillation (which allows distilling at room temperatures), is actually not that new in principle, a less-extreme version having been used in Japan for shochu making for at least a century. See low-pressure distillation. For other spirits, its best uses have yet to become apparent. At the very least it allows us to say that technologies from at least three millennia coexist in making the spirits we drink. Allchin, F. R. “Stamped Tangas and Condensers: Evidence of Distillation at Shaikhan Dheri.” In South Asian Archaeology, ed. M. Taddei, 755–797. Naples: Istituto Universitario Orientale, 1979. Butler, Anthony R., and Joseph Needham. “An Experimental Comparison of the East Asian, Hellenistic, and Indian (Gandhāran) Stills.” Ambix, July 1980, 69–76. Forbes, R. J. Short History of the Art of Distillation. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1948. French, John. Art of Distillation. London: 1651. Habib, Irfan. The Economic History of Medieval India, 1200–1500. New Delhi: Pearson-Longman, 2011. Huang, H. T. Science and Civilization in China, vol. 6, part 5, Fermentations and Food Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Mahdihassan, S. “The Earliest Distillation Units: Pottery in Indo-Pakistan.” Pakistan Archaeology, 1972,159–68. Needham, Joseph, Gwei-Jen Lu, et al. Science and Civilization in China, vol. 5, part 4, Chemistry and Chemical Technology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Samorini, Giorgio. “Distillatori arcaici.” Giorgio Samorini Network. http://samorini.it/site/archeologia/varie/distillatori-arcaici (accessed March 2, 2021). Savonarola, Michele. I trattati in volgare della peste e dell’ acqua ardente. Edited by Luigi Belloni. Rome: Società Italiana di Medicina Interna, 1953. Wilson, C. Anne. Water of Life. Totnes, UK: Prospect, 2006. Zizumbo-Villarreal, Daniel, Fernando González-Zozaya, Angeles Olay-Barrientos, Laura Almendros-López, Patricia Flores-Pérez, and Patricia Colunga-GarcíaMarín. “Distillation in Western Mesoamerica before European Contact.” Economic Botany 63 (2009): 413–426. By: David Wondrich