Important: Safety Warning
This page directs the use of hazardous substances — such as benzine, gasoline, lye, or strong acids — for household tasks. These materials are highly flammable, corrosive, or poisonous, and the practices described have caused fires, burns, and poisonings.
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.
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Filter for Brandy (Green color it is a sure sign)
green color, it is a sure sign that the oil so tested is pure. Another way of preparing this "bead" is as follows:-take one ounce oil of sweet almonds (pure and tested), one ounce sulphuric acid; put them in a stone mortar, and add, by degrees, two ounces white lump sugar, rubbing it well with the pestle till it becomes a paste; then add small quantities of spirits of wine, till it comes into a liquid. This quantity is sufficient to give a bead to 100 gallons.
THE BEST "BEAD," and the only one used or recommended by the author of this work, is the Orange Flower Water Bead. It has the advantage over either of the above, inasmuch as its virtues are not affected by the presence of either acids or alkalies, in the liquor to be beaded. There are three kinds of orange flower water: the single, double, and triple; the latter has triple the strength of the former, and is the kind we recommend. To give a fine bead, use 100 drops to forty gallons brandy-one drop to each gallon. WHITE GLYCERIN improves liquor, it is a good beading and imparts age and smoothness. Use one pound to forty gallons.
To give the Appearance of Age to Brandy.
To give age to brandy, use ammonia, or spirits of Hartshorn, one to three drops per gallon; this will immediately give the appearance of two years' age to brandy; but as ammonia is very volatile, its effects or virtues soon disappear, and should therefore only be used as wanted. Glycerin is also good.
Filter for Brandy.
This filter is employed to give a clear, light appearance to domestic brandy, which object is effected by passing
This page is a fragment from a trade manual on faking aged spirits, and most of what it describes is adulteration rather than cookery. The notes below explain the vocabulary and then why none of it can be carried out.
- What a "bead" isIn the nineteenth-century liquor trade the "bead" was the behaviour of the small bubbles raised when spirit was shaken or swirled, taken by buyers as a rough indication of strength and quality. Everything on this page is aimed at counterfeiting that appearance in young, thin, domestic spirit.
- Concentrated sulphuric acidThe first preparation calls for one ounce of sulphuric acid ground in a mortar with one ounce of oil of sweet almonds and two ounces of sugar. This is oil of vitriol, a corrosive that reacts violently and exothermically with sugar and with water, chars organic matter on contact, and has no place in anything intended to be swallowed.
- Ammonia and spirits of hartshornSpirits of hartshorn is an ammonia solution, historically distilled from deer antler and later simply aqueous ammonia. Household and commercial ammonia is a caustic poison, and dosing drinking spirit with it at one to three drops per gallon to fake two years of barrel age is exactly the sort of practice that pure food legislation was written to stop.
- Oil of sweet almonds and "spirits of wine"Oil of sweet almonds is the fixed oil pressed from almond kernels, sold today mainly as a cosmetic though edible grades exist; spirits of wine is high-proof ethanol, roughly what is now sold as neutral grain spirit. Neither is the hazard on this page.
- Glycerin at a pound to forty gallonsGlycerol does add body and sweetness and is a permitted food additive in many contexts, but a pound to forty gallons of brandy is a blending trick to imitate the viscosity that long cask ageing produces. Sold as aged brandy, the result is a misrepresented product regardless of the additive's safety.
- Orange flower water strengthsThe single, double and triple grades the author distinguishes are not a current graded trade line, and modern orange flower waters vary in concentration, so dosing by drops against the author's "triple" cannot be reproduced reliably.
- The text is truncatedThe final section, on the brandy filter, breaks off mid-sentence at "which object is effected by passing." There is no complete procedure on this page even setting the chemistry aside.
- If you want aged brandyAge in spirits comes from time in wood, and there is no additive that reproduces it. Buy a spirit that has been aged, or follow a current, regulated recipe for infusions and liqueurs.
This comes from the mid-to-late nineteenth-century genre of "manufacturer" manuals, books sold to grocers, rectifiers and saloon keepers explaining how to turn cheap neutral spirit into something that could be passed off as imported French brandy, Irish whiskey or Jamaica rum. Colouring with burnt sugar, sweetening with glycerin, and faking the bead are all commonly said to have been widespread in that trade, and the fact that a printed book could recommend sulphuric acid and hartshorn for drinking spirit gives some sense of how unregulated the business was. In the United States the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, and the long fight over what could legally be labelled "whiskey" that followed it, made most of this page illegal to act on; in Britain the Sale of Food and Drugs Acts had been chipping away at the same practices since the 1870s. The book survives as evidence of what honest buyers were up against rather than as a working manual.