Home › Brandy, Whiskey and Imitation Spirits › To Clarify Stained Gin
To Clarify Stained Gin
being careful to stir it up well, and in one week it will be found to be perfectly purified.
This method must not be tried when the gin to be purified is much below proof, as in that case the potash and alum will combine with the water in the spirit, and impart to it a still more disagreeable flavor. There is also another objection to be urged against this fining, and that is, -the potash sometimes becomes attracted by the oil of juniper (for which it has an affinity) and necessarily saponifies the latter. In nine cases out of ten, however, the above recipe will answer the desired purpose, and thus we recommend it.
To remove the Blackness from Gin.
RECIPE No. 13.
Some gin has a particular blackness; to remove which, take 1 oz. of pulverized chalk, and 2 or 3 oz. of isinglass, dissolved; put this into your gin and it will become transparent. The above is enough for 50 gallons. The blackness which gin sometimes contracts by coming in contact with iron, may also be carried down by putting a solution of 2 oz. of isinglass and 1 quart of skimmed milk into the spirit. When the color is very black, which will happen by merely an iron nail having fallen into the liquor, there is no remedy, but to have the commodity distilled over again. To Clarify Stained Gin.
RECIPE No. 14.
When gin has once become much stained, the only remedy is to redistill it; when it is only slightly stained, the addition of a few pounds of acetic acid to a pipe or butt, a spoonful or two to a gallon, or a few drops to a decanterful, will usually decolor it.
This is not a drink recipe but a trade formula from a rectifier's manual — instructions for salvaging spirit that has gone off-colour in the cask. Several of its steps are unlawful, unmeasured, or both, and the passage is worth reading as a document rather than following as a procedure.
- Redistillation is the core instruction, and it is the illegal oneBoth this entry and the preceding one on blackness fall back on "distill it over again" as the real remedy. Distilling spirits at home is a federal offence in the United States without a distilled spirits plant permit, and is tightly licensed almost everywhere else. Nothing about the age of the text changes that.
- Acetic acid "a few pounds to a pipe"A pipe or butt of gin is roughly 105 to 126 gallons, so a few pounds is in the same range as the spoonful per gallon the text gives. The "acetic acid" of the trade was very likely a concentrated acid rather than table vinegar -- dosing in drops per decanterful implies as much -- and concentrated acetic acid burns skin and lungs and is not a food ingredient in that form. There is no way to translate the instruction into a safe household quantity.
- The potash and alum fining referenced aboveThe opening fragment appears to belong to Recipe No. 12. Potash means potassium carbonate, or as caustic potash the hydroxide, added to drinking spirit; the surviving fragment gives no purity grade and no neutralisation step, and any quantities fell in the portion that is cut off. The author's own objection - that it saponifies the juniper oil - is a flavour complaint, not a safety one.
- Isinglass, chalk and skimmed milkThese are genuine historic fining agents: isinglass is collagen from fish swim bladders, still used in brewing, and casein from milk still clarifies some wines. Their presence alongside potash and acetic acid shows how freely the trade mixed benign fining with harsh chemical correction.
- Blackness from ironThe staining is most likely iron tannate, formed when iron from a nail, hoop or pipe reacts with tannins picked up from the cask. The book is right that a badly blackened batch cannot be fined clear; it is also a signal that the spirit has been sitting on metal, which is reason to discard rather than rescue.
- No standards of identity behind any of itThe excerpt is undated, but a manual of this kind predates the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 and the federal standards that followed. "Below proof" gin could be watered, coloured and corrected before sale, and the reader is plainly assumed to be a rectifier handling bulk spirit, not a cook.
- If you want clear ginBuy it. There is no domestic version of this process, and a current, licensed producer's product is the only sensible substitute.
Nineteenth-century rectifiers rarely distilled from grain themselves; they bought neutral spirit in bulk, cut it, flavoured it with juniper and other botanicals, and sold it on, which meant a great deal of their craft consisted of fixing what went wrong in transit and storage. Manuals of this kind, written for the wine and liquor trade rather than the household, read as troubleshooting guides: how to strip a haze, how to kill a taint, how to disguise the fact that a butt had been standing too long or had a nail in it. The candour is striking, particularly the admission that potash will saponify the very juniper oil that makes the gin gin. Books like this are part of the paper trail that led to the pure-food agitation of the 1890s and early 1900s, when the routine chemical correction of drink moved from being a trade secret to being a public scandal, and eventually came to be constrained and disclosed by regulation.