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Kino
gent quality or flavor so necessary to a perfect imitation of Cognac. Mix ¼ ounce tannin powder with sufficient alcohol, and use for flavor to 40 gals. brandy. Tannin powder may be procured of any respectable wholesale druggist (as indeed may all the ingredients recommended by us). Tannin should not be allowed to come in contact with any metallic substance, as it will deteriorate the color.
Catechu.
Catechu is an extract from the inner wood of a species of acacia tree, which is a native of the East Indies. Catechu, as it comes to us, is in masses of different shapes. The color is externally of a rusty brown, internally varying from a pale yellowish brown to a dark liver color. Catechu is inodorous, with an astringent and bitter taste, followed by a sense of sweetness. It is almost entirely soluble in a large quantity of water, to which it imparts a brown color, but when used as a brandy flavor it should be dissolved in alcohol 95°. The dark-colored catechu is the best for a flavor. Use 4 oz. for 100 gals. brandy.
Kino.
Kino is the juice from incisions in the bark of a tree which grows in the East Indies and the western coast of Africa. It is without odor, and has a bitterish, astringent taste, with a somewhat sweetish after taste. Dissolve 1½ oz. in clear cold water; this will be enough to give the astringent quality of tannin to 40 gals. brandy. All other flavors mentioned in our recipes for brandy such as wines of different varieties, rum, apple-brandy rum essence, etc., will be fully described under their various heads in other parts of this work.
This is a fragment from a trade manual on faking Cognac: three astringents dosed into neutral spirit to mimic the mouth-drying grip that real brandy picks up from oak. It cannot be reproduced today, and the reasons are worth spelling out.
- Kino is a drug material, not a food ingredientKino is the dried astringent exudate of Pterocarpus marsupium and related trees, sold in the nineteenth century through the drug trade as an astringent medicine. It is not a beverage ingredient, and material offered today is generally sold as a botanical or supplement rather than to any food specification; historic kino was notoriously substituted and adulterated in the shipping trade.
- Catechu is likewise not a beverage ingredientThe masses described here are boiled-down heartwood extract of Acacia catechu or the leaf extract sold as gambier, both tanning and dyeing materials. Some catechu appears in traditional betel preparations, but the bulk commercial article is a tannery commodity with no food specification.
- "Alcohol 95°" means undenatured neutral spirit"Alcohol 95°" means undenatured neutral spirit -- The manual assumes a supply of roughly 190-proof grain alcohol as both solvent and base. Much high-strength alcohol sold today is denatured and undrinkable, so anything used here would have to be verified as potable spirit rather than a solvent-grade product.
- The dose is guesswork at industrial scaleAn ounce and a half of a variable natural gum in forty gallons, or four ounces of catechu in a hundred, gives no way to know what is actually being consumed. Tannin content in these materials swings widely between lots, so the same recipe yields a different drink each time.
- The metal warning is real chemistryTannins do react with iron to form blue-black complexes, which is exactly the reaction behind iron-gall ink. The author's insistence on non-metallic vessels is one of the few instructions here that is sound.
- The purpose is fraudThe passage exists to make cheap spirit pass as aged Cognac by borrowing wood tannin without the wood or the years. Reproducing it would be misbranding as well as unsafe; anyone wanting a flavoured spirit should work from a current recipe using food-grade ingredients.
Books like this belonged to a large late-nineteenth-century trade in "rectifying" and compounding, in which wholesalers bought neutral grain or beet spirit and built brandy, whiskey, rum or gin around it with colouring, essences and astringents. Tannin, catechu and kino were among the materials used for imitating the drying finish that barrel ageing gives, and all three were bought from druggists rather than grocers, which tells you how thin the line between the pharmacy and the liquor house then was. Catechu and gambier were mainly tanning and dyeing goods out of Southeast Asia; kino, first marketed in Britain around the mid-eighteenth century as an astringent drug in the form of West African material from the Gambia, with the Malabar kino only later becoming the official pharmacopoeial article, was cheap and easy to dissolve. Manuals of this kind were sold openly, and the practices they described were among the abuses that pushed the United States toward the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 and the long fight over what could legally be labelled whiskey.