Explore Gin, Tequila & Vodka

IF ALL SPIRITS LEAVE THE STILL CLEAR AS WATER, WHY THEN ARE VODKA, TEQUILA AND GIN CALLED WHITE SPIRITS? THIS ODD DESCRIPTOR REMAINS A MYSTERY.

WORDS CHRIS MIDDLETON

WHETHER THEY ARE CALLED WHITE, light or clear spirits, that’s how all spirits began. When potable or drinkable spirits (not to be confused with white spirits like mineral turpentine or methylated spirits) were first drunk, they were not put into casks to mellow in taste and extract wood colour. They were stored in earthenware containers and consumed quite quickly. That’s one of the benefits of white spirits; they’re immediately ready for drinking and flavouring.

The zero date for the first potable spirit was Salerno in 1150. This distilled spirit was christened aqua vitae, the water of life. Some described this distillate as aqua ardens, strong or burnt water. As distilling spread from Italy, colloquial terms were linguistically adopted to describe this white spirit, whether the liquor was from distilling wine, beer or another fermented beverage. In France, they called it eau de vie, Gallic for water of life. In Ireland and Scotland it was called uisgebaugh or uisge beatha, being the Gaelic for the water of life, in the 18th century it was abbreviated to whisky. Branntwein in Germany or brandywijn in the Netherlands meant burnt wine or ardent spirit. Akavit in Scandinavia is the Nordic for the water of life. Vodka Russia, vod is water and wodka in Poland. Aguardiente on the Iberian Peninsula means firewater.

Local agricultural production dictated which raw material was available to make white or clear spirit. In the southern parts of Europe, the climate favoured grapes. Across the Continent, seasonal fruits such as apples, pears, cherries and plums were fermented and distilled. Different cereal crops cultivated in Europe were another plentiful source of fermentable sugars. Alcohol is produced when yeasts convert sugars into ethanol and carbon dioxide. Another source for obtaining sugars is starch or carbohydrates. Using enzymes, they converted starch into sugars, so cereals, tubers and other carbohydrate produce can make spirits, even wood. Wood’s toxic alcohol compounds made it far too dangerous to drinking. The varying European climates, suited cultivation of different cereal crops for making essential foodstuffs for human and livestock nutrition. Wheat for baking, barley for beer and oats were crop staples that soon found their way into the still. In colder climates hardier cereal crops like rye and barley adapted to the harsher cultivating conditions. Nineteenth century advances in converting starches to sugar made sugar beets and potatoes a new major source of raw materials for distilling.

In Asia, rice was distilled, as well as palm sap and the coconut in South East Asia. In China, African sorghum and millet thrive. These cereals produce their national spirit, baijiu. Parts of central Asia used milk, the lactose providing the sugars for the yeast to make alcohol. Some vodka brands today still use milk whey. The most extreme spirit was released a few years ago. An Englishman distilled the urine from elderly diabetes patients calling it faux-whisky. Getting pissed took on a whole new meaning. Wherever there is sugar, natural yeasts will immediately start fermenting it. It only requires an intrepid distiller to turn it into a drinkable spirit.

In the New World, another two raw materials broadened the spirits pantheon; succulents and cane grass. Tequila and mezcal are made from agave succulents.

OPPOSITE: Copper pot still at Jose Cuervo tequila distillery The Spanish refer to the white spirits as blanco, from which tequilas and mescals are made. Rum is made from sugarcane, or the by-product of making sugar, molasses. Rum’s an excellent place to draw the line between white, brown and coloured spirits. But here’s where it also gets a bit strange; all rum must be aged in wood, otherwise it’s called cane spirit. So what’s white rum?

Cane distilled to 95% ABV purity is classified as a neutral cane spirit. To become white rum, it must been aged in casks, then filtered through charcoal to remove colour and strip out much of the flavour, turning it back into a mellow, restrained white spirit. Since 1907, Australian law requires rum to spend at least two years in wood storage; otherwise it cannot be classified rum. Following the white rum example, there are other odd anomalies distillers and legislators have created. Such as in the US, where white whiskey made back in the 1970s was charcoal filtered after being aged in barrels. Designated white or light whiskey, it was developed by bourbon distillers losing business to white rum and vodka. Needless to say, white whiskey proved an expensive flop.

With the exceptions of filtering white rum and the one-off white whiskey experiment, all white spirits are not stored in wood. This will quickly add colour and dramatically enhance the flavour through wood extraction and complex chemical interactions between in cask and air. When white spirits spend time in wood most transmute into another category; eau de vie becomes brandy, grain spirit turns into whisky and cane spirit into rum.

In the beginning, white spirits were administered as medicine and poorly made, hence the need to mask the crude

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tasting spirit with flavouring additives. These were the days when the barber was the surgeon and doctors used leeches. It was not until the late 18th century when wood maturation and improved distilling technologies began that the world of spirits made significant steps in palatability and spirit quality. The 18th century also witnessed the first appearance of patent medicines. These quack remedies became a massive faux-medicine industry, leading to the infamous snake oil salesmen selling flavoured spirits as elixirs and therapeutic tonics. Pure Food and Drug laws in the early 20th century brought this fraudulent industry to account. Until the early 19th century even cask maturation for most spirits was uncommon. It was a world dominated by white flavoured spirits.

Flavoured spirits were well established by the 16th century. Genever and gin added juniper to their raw spirit. Uisgebaugh added honey, heather, other herbs and spices to make its ancestral proto-whisky drinkable. Polish wodka’s celebrated zubrowka, added the herbal bison grass for flavouring, an archaic folk medicine. Until the late 19th century, Russian vodka was famed for its wide variety of aromatised vodkas. Caraway was the additive for akavit. In the Mediterranean, countries flavourings of anise and aniseed proved enduringly popular as their cultural drinks today still remain pastis in France, ouzo in Greece, raki in Turkey and arak in Lebanon.

Leaving the subject of where some spirits start to bleed into new categories, let’s look into the question of flavour differences. A good question to ask is ‘are there any noticeable flavours between white spirits?’

The answer is yes, and it’s because they use different raw materials and different strains of yeasts to produce unique flavours during fermentation, plus different types of distilling plant, which results in each product having noticeable flavour variances. Should the distillation be to the highest purity (under 95.6% ABV, beyond this point there is insufficient water for vaporous ethanol to bind with) there are barely any residual flavour compounds remaining in the raw spirit. When all the flavour compounds have been stripped out in the column, it is called a neutral spirit. Some spirit distilleries use traditional pot stills which allow the distillers to capture a soup of flavour compounds in a lower strength distillate, usually around 70 - 80% ABV. This white spirit, called high wines or new make (in whisky), has some of the production flavours still present when it leaves the still. These flavours can be tasted in the modern ‘moonshine-style’ brands. White spirits like vodka and gin seek a more rectified, cleaner spirit, so most brands are made from neutral spirit.

Even in vodka, which is meant to be tasteless and odourless, each brand and variant has discernibly different taste characteristics. You’ll gain a better understanding how this happens in the vodka chapter. This is why white spirits can be so interesting, and why gin and tonics are not the same as vodka and tonics, nor tequila and tonics.

WHITE SPIRIT COCKTAILS

While Russian and Chinese banqueting rituals involve numerous shot toasts of vodka and baijiu, we in the West prefer to drink our white spirits mixed with juice, carbonated beverages or in cocktails. In fact, over 90 per cent of all spirits we consume are mixed drinks, cocktails or diluted with water or ice. These more nuanced white spirits benefit from collaboration with other drinks and ingredients. This mixing of complementary flavours, from juices to tonics supplements, enhances and synergises the spirit. Classics are gin and tonic, vodka with orange juice and white rum and cola. These pairings laid the groundwork for the modern cocktail movement and for new adventurous drinkers to enter the white spirits market.

WHITE SPIRITS IN AUSTRALIA

In Australia today, 25 per cent of all the spirits consumed are white, with the balance being brown, such as whisky, rum and brandy. Vodka leads the white spirit pack, with nearly 70 per cent of the volume, followed by gin at around 16 per cent, with white rum, tequila, ouzo, plus some white liqueurs and schnapps making up the balance. The story of white spirits is tied to the history of Australia’s immigration. Gin being the quintessential English spirit was our first and most popular white spirit following white settlement. Gin’s early fortunes were bound to the working class female population. Over time, gin’s share of spirits rose from 10 per cent in the 1820s to over 25 per cent during the nineteenth century; it had no competition. The only other white spirit was another gin, genever, known as Holland’s gin and also called schnapps back then. Genever was an older style of aromatised malt gin made in the Netherlands. In AngloSaxon Australia, the four spirits we drank were rum, brandy, whisky and

gin. By the end of the 19th century, our diverse agricultural environments and manufacturing capabilities meant all of these spirits were made in Australia. Queensland was the primary source of rum, Victoria for whisky and South Australian for brandy.

Post-World War II, Australia opened its doors to European refugees and Mediterranean immigrants. East Europeans brought vodka; Greeks brought ouzo and the Italians grappa as their preferred white spirits. Local distilleries and importers soon catered to this new demand by making most of these spirits locally. White rum also began to trickle in from the Caribbean during the 1950s. When Bacardi arrived in 1965, white rum positioned itself as the party mixer, surging amongst young urban Australians. A decade later, Bacardi was Australia’s favourite spirit brand, selling 400,000 cases. Tequila made its arrival in the 1970s with the new cocktail, the Margarita and the novelty of the lick-sipsuck shooter. Tequila’s growth has been slow and steady, climbing to around 2 per cent of total spirits consumed.

IN THE BEGINNING: Evidence of distillation reaches back millennia. The first potable, or in other words, the earliest record of drinking spirits was by Magister Salernus. Around 1150, at the Benedictine Salernitan medical school near Naples where he distilled wine into ‘beneficial waters’. Salernus was later charged with poisoning Robert Bellisino after he administered a rosewater flavoured potion, a distilled elixir. This was the first recorded death where spirits were alleged to have been responsible. Salernus was charged and died in Palermo prison 1167. Whether this patient’s illness was terminal, or the remedy proved lethal, is not known.

HOLY SPIRITS: Ever wondered who was responsible for changing aqua vitae, to spirits? We know who the chap is; it was Philippus Hermanii of Antwerp in 1552 when he published Een Constelijck Distileerboec. This was the golden period of Dutch distilling. Latin scholars had previously observed the distillation phenomenon of the separation of alcohol and water, making analogies to the resurrections. Inspired by this euphemism, Hermanni described gaseous ethanol bound within the liquid distillate as spirit, noticing it was being forced out by heat. Not so spiritual, just simple physics of chemical bonds being broken by energy.

REINVENTING GIN: In 1848, Udopho Wolfe introduced Wolfe’s Aromatic Schiedam Schnapps to America. Wolfe was a first generation American, who saw the benefits of rebranding his gin as medicinal schnapps. He packaged it in pint bottles for home use and promoted it as a diuretic and carminative tonic. By 1861, he was selling 13 million bottles, entering the Australian market two years earlier. In 1909, Wolfe’s schnapps sold 1,377,852 bottles in Australia. The original formula was developed by a Hamburg distillery using barley malt spirit and Italian juniper. He subcontracted this recipe to a Schiedam distillery, Blankenheym & Nolet to reproduce it. At the time Schiedam was the Dutch gin capital with 392 gin distillers in 1880. Schnapps, which in German meant to gulp down, from snap, as in a shot of spirits. Schnapps was also known as German gin. ❧