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Flavors Used in Making Gin
To Reduce Pure Holland Gin.
RECIPE No. 15.
When it is desirable to lower genuine Holland gin, particular care should be taken to choose a good, clean, and bright spirit for the purpose. Boiled water in a cold state should be used and must be particularly clean. Add a sufficient quantity of lime water; and stir the whole well together for five or six minutes, that the ingredients may become incorporated. Should the liquor run ropy, or if the color is not satisfactory, run it through the filtering bag; and repeat the operation till it passes through bright; and this object may be greatly promoted by throwing some alabaster powder at the bottom of the filtering bag. Or the color may be improved by boiling alum and salt of tartar in a couple quarts of water, till it becomes milk-white, and when the mixture is nearly cold, stir the gin, and pour the mixture into it at the same time. The proportion of this kind of fining is, ½ lb. of alum and 1 oz. of tartar to a barrel of gin containing 30 gallons.
This is not a flavoring formula but a trade recipe for watering down genuine Holland gin and then chemically "fining" it so the dilution does not show. The chemistry involved puts it outside anything that should be attempted, and the points below explain what each ingredient actually is.
- Lime water is calcium hydroxide"Lime water" here is a saturated solution of slaked lime, strongly alkaline. The recipe gives no quantity at all beyond "a sufficient quantity," and there is no rinse or neutralization step afterward — whatever caustic residue remains stays in the glass.
- Alabaster powder is gypsumAlabaster powder is generally gypsum -- Ground alabaster is usually calcium sulfate, the mineral from which plaster of Paris is calcined, though the name was also applied to some calcite stones. It was sold in the period as a clarifying and whitening agent, and here it is thrown into the filtering bag to help the liquor pass through bright. There is no reason to assume nineteenth-century supplies met any purity standard we would now recognise.
- Alum and salt of tartar, unmeasured in useAlum and salt of tartar -- Salt of tartar is potassium carbonate, another strong alkali. Boiled with alum it throws a milky aluminium hydroxide precipitate, which is what the recipe is after when it speaks of improving the colour. The stated proportion, half a pound of alum and an ounce of tartar to a 30-gallon barrel, is a substantial dose of an aluminium salt into a drink, and this second method specifies no filtration step afterwards.
- "Ropy" liquor is a warning, not a defect"Ropy" liquor -- The original treats ropiness as a cosmetic fault to be filtered away. In fermented drinks ropiness is generally a sign of microbial growth, which running the liquor through a cloth bag would not address; it may also arise here from the lime treatment itself.
- No dilution ratio is givenThe recipe never says how much water to add, which tells you what it was for: the operator diluted to whatever margin he wanted and then used the finings to restore the appearance. There is no way to reconstruct an intended strength.
- If you want the drinkBuy gin at the strength you want, or use a current recipe for a compounded gin. There is no adapted version of this page worth writing.
Books of this kind — American and British "wine and liquor manufacturer" manuals, sold cheaply to grocers, saloon keepers and rectifiers through the second half of the nineteenth century — sat squarely in the trade of stretching and imitating spirits. Genuine Holland gin, the malty pot-still genever from the Low Countries, carried a real price premium over neutral grain spirit flavored at home, so reducing it with water and disguising the result was a familiar commercial practice rather than a secret. The fining agents named here, alum, salt of tartar and powdered alabaster, appear repeatedly in the adulteration literature of the period, and alum in particular was among the substances pure-food campaigners on both sides of the Atlantic cited when pressing for legislation; in the United States the arguments culminated in the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906.