Important: Safety Warning
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 › Recipe No. 6
Recipe No. 6
Take 36 gallons proof spirit, 4 gallons highly flavored proof Bourbon, 1 gallon malt whiskey, 1 pint wine vinegar, 1 pint syrup, and 12 drops oil of cognac dissolved in 95 per cent. alcohol. Mix. Color with caramel.
To Improve Cheap Bourbon.
RECIPE No. 7.
Inferior Bourbon whiskey may be much improved in quality by the addition of the peach flavoring described in Recipe No. 2, page 117. One or one and a half a gallon of the flavoring should be added to each 40 gallons of whiskey. This will give a fruity taste.
Imitation Copper-Distilled Bourbon Whiskey.
RECIPE No. 8.
Dissolve 1 drachm sulphate of copper in 1/3 pint water, filter, and add it to 40 gallons proof spirit, with
This page runs three formulas together, all of them from the rectifier's trade rather than the kitchen: a compounded "Bourbon" built on neutral spirit, a flavouring trick for cheap whiskey, and an imitation copper-distilled whiskey. The last of these is the reason the page carries a warning, and the reasons are worth spelling out.
- The copper sulphate is the disqualifying ingredientRecipe No. 8 calls for 1 drachm (roughly 2–4 g, depending on whether the avoirdupois or the apothecaries' drachm is meant) of sulphate of copper — blue vitriol, a fungicide and emetic — dissolved and stirred into 40 gallons of spirit. The recipe's own title, "Imitation Copper-Distilled Bourbon Whiskey," indicates it was there to mimic the trace copper picked up from a pot still, and it has no place as an additive in a drink today. Copper salts cause vomiting and, in repeated doses, liver and kidney injury; there is no safe household version of this step.
- "Oil of cognac" is not brandyThe 12 drops called for in Recipe No. 6 refer to a commercial essence of the period, usually oenanthic ether or a compounded fruit-ester blend sold to rectifiers. Anything sold under a similar name today may be quite different in composition, and a drop measure across 41 gallons is not a quantity anyone can verify at home.
- The scale is a trade scaleThirty-six gallons of proof spirit plus 4 of Bourbon and 1 of malt is a barrel-sized batch, sized to the rectifier's cask, not to any domestic vessel. There is no meaningful way to divide the flavouring drops down to a bottle.
- Buying the base is the other obstacle"Proof spirit" here means bulk spirit at proof strength: about 57 per cent by volume under the British definition, about 50 per cent under the American, and the page does not say which is meant. The 95 per cent alcohol used to carry the essence is undenatured grain spirit. Both were trade goods sold to compounders; high-strength neutral spirit is restricted or unavailable at retail in many places, and blending and rebottling spirits for sale is a licensed activity in essentially every jurisdiction.
- Old units, for reading onlyA drachm is either the avoirdupois dram (about 1.8 g) or the apothecaries' drachm, one-eighth of an apothecaries' ounce (about 3.9 g); the text does not say which. A pint may be the imperial 20 fl oz or the American 16, depending on where the book was printed. "Syrup" means plain sugar syrup, and "color with caramel" means burnt-sugar colouring, the one element of the formula still in routine commercial use.
- If you want the result rather than the methodWhat these formulas were imitating — a fruity, faintly vinous straight Bourbon with pot-still character — is available off the shelf. Use a current recipe or a bottle; do not attempt these.
Books like this one existed because, around the turn of the twentieth century, a great deal of what was sold as whiskey and brandy had never been near a still that made whiskey or brandy. Rectifiers bought cheap neutral spirit, added flavouring essences, vinegar for "age", syrup for body and caramel for colour, and sold the result under the name of the real thing; manuals of formulas were a working trade literature, printed for exactly that business. The tricks here are of a piece with it — peach essence to give inferior Bourbon a "fruity taste", copper sulphate to counterfeit the trace of metal that marked genuinely pot-distilled spirit. The practice is what drove the fight over labelling in this period, from the American Bottled-in-Bond Act of 1897, which let distillers vouch for unadulterated whiskey under government seal, through the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 and the Taft decision of 1909 that finally set out what could be called whiskey and what had to be called an imitation or a blend. A page like this one is best read as evidence from the losing side of that argument.