Important: Safety Warning
This page describes trade processes that use dangerously toxic materials such as cyanide solutions, mercury amalgams, or strong acids. These processes require training, equipment, and precautions far beyond what the text describes.
This page describes additives or treatments for food or drink that are now known to be toxic and are prohibited in food today.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
Home › Brandy, Whiskey and Imitation Spirits › Butyric Ether
Butyric Ether
phuric and concentrated acetic acid. When pure it will not redden litmus paper. This ingredient is much used in the manufacture of domestic brandy, and as it gives the vinous flavor, and is one of the principal constituents in genuine Cognac, its presence in an imitation of that article is very important.
Acetic ether is not only valuable as a flavor for brandy, but because it neutralizes any fusil oil that may remain in the spirit used as a basis for the liquor. The addition of acetic ether, or, indeed, any of the ethers recommended in our recipes, is not at all prejudicial to the health. Use as recommended in the various recipes given by us. Acetic ether when combined with orris root is used to flavor fine gin; it is also used to flavor rum and whiskey when combined with other ingredients.
Enanthic Ether.
This is the oil obtained towards the end of distillation of fermented liquors, particularly wines, and is considered to be identical with pelargonic acid. It is colorless, and has a powerful, intoxicating, vinous odor, resembling that of an empty wine cask, or a bottle that has been exposed to the air for some time. Its taste is at first slight, but afterwards very acrid. It is soluble in alcohol. This is, also, a constituent of Cognac, and, therefore, important as an ingredient in its imitation. Use 1/2 oz. for 50 gals.
Butyric Ether.
This ether is readily made by mixing 100 parts of butyric acid with 100 alcohol, and 50 concentrated sulphuric acid, and agitating the mixture for a short time. Butyric ether is sparingly soluble in water, but very so-
This is not a kitchen procedure but a nineteenth-century flavour-house formula: an esterification carried out with concentrated sulphuric acid, intended to be dosed into neutral spirit sold as Cognac. The following notes explain why the page cannot be followed.
- The reagent is not a food ingredientConcentrated sulphuric acid at 50 parts to 200 parts of acid and alcohol is a bulk industrial dehydrating agent, not something with any food grade or handling instruction here. Mixing it with alcohol releases a great deal of heat very quickly, and the text as printed gives no cooling, no vessel, and no washing or neutralising step.
- No purification is describedThe crude mixture would contain residual sulphuric acid, unreacted butyric acid and some sulphur dioxide. Ester manufacture depends on washing, neutralising and redistilling the product, and none of that appears in the portion printed here, which breaks off mid-sentence. What comes out of the flask is not yet the finished flavouring compound.
- "Not at all prejudicial to the health" is a trade claimThe assurance in the preceding paragraph is the author defending his own recipes, not a finding. Flavour esters are regulated substances today, permitted only at specified purities and levels set by food authorities; a shop-made batch of unknown composition meets none of that.
- Butyric acid itselfIt is the compound responsible for the smell of rancid butter and vomit, corrosive to skin and eyes in concentrated form, and its odour lingers in a room. It is normally handled as a laboratory chemical.
- Oenanthic ether and the missing doseThe instruction reads "Use oz. for 50 gals" — the number has dropped out of the text entirely, so the page as printed gives no usable figure.
- What the fusel-oil argument is really doingAcetic ether does not "neutralise" fusel oil; at best it masks it. The passage is describing how badly rectified spirit was made palatable.
- If you want the flavourBuy a spirit made by a distiller. Cognac's ethers form during fermentation and long barrel ageing and cannot be assembled from a bottle of acid.
Books of this kind flourished between roughly the 1850s and the First World War, when organic chemistry had just identified the individual esters that give aged spirits their aroma — acetic, oenanthic and butyric ethers among them — and a trade grew up around reproducing them from cheap grain or beet alcohol. Oenanthic ether, the "empty wine cask" smell described here, was isolated from wine distillation residues in the 1830s and became a byword for vinous character; butyric esters give the pineapple and overripe fruit notes found in long-aged brandy. The compounding manuals sold these as legitimate craft, and in many jurisdictions they were, until food and drink adulteration law caught up: Britain's Sale of Food and Drugs Act of 1875 and the United States Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906 are the usual markers for the end of this trade in its open form, and appellation rules later fixed what could be called Cognac at all. The confident aside that these ethers are "not at all prejudicial to the health" tells you exactly what such books existed to reassure their buyers about.