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 information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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To Flavor Common Gin
2 drachms oil of nutmeg, 2 " " lemon, 3 “ " juniper, 3 “ N 3 " caraway, " coriander, 3 fluid oz. essence of orris root, 3 “ " " cardamom, 3 pints orange flower water, 56 to 60 lbs. lump sugar dissolved in 4 gals. pure water.
The essences and oils should be cut or dissolved in two quarts pure alcohol 95 per cent, and added gradually to the gin until the requisite flavor is produced. Then mix in the dissolved sugar, and add a sufficient quantity of soft or distilled water (having previously dissolved 4 oz. of alum in it) to make up in all 100 gals. When the whole is perfectly mixed, add 2 oz. salt of tartar, dissolved in 2 or 3 quarts of hot water, then stir up and mix the liquor well once more, and allow it to repose. In a week, or less, it will have become brilliant, and may be either racked, or drawn from the same cask.
To Sweeten Gin of any kind.
RECIPE No. 9.
To 95 gals. unsweetened gin, add : 40 or 45 lbs. lump sugar dissolved in 3 gals. clear water. Fine it down with roche alum and salt of tartar as above directed, and let it stand for one week.
To give Common Gin the Flavor of Aromatic Schiedam Schnapps.
RECIPE No. 10.
To 25 gals. common gin, 5 o. p., add :
TO CLEAN GIN THAT MAY BE TAINTED. 15 pints strained honey, 2 gals. clear water, 5 pints white sugar syrup, 66 5 spirit of nutmegs mixed with the acetic ether (see "Nutmeg and Mace"), 5 pints orange flower water, 7 quarts pure water, 1 oz. acetic ether, 8 drops oil of wintergreen dissolved with the acetic ether.
Mix all the ingredients well; if necessary, fine with alum and salt of tartar. The manufacturer must bear in mind that the common gin used in this recipe must be entirely free from any disagreeable taste or flavor. Finings for Gin.
RECIPE No. 11.
To 100 gals. gin, take 4 oz. roche alum, and put it into a pint of pure water; boil it until it is dissolved. then gradually add 4 oz. salt of tartar; when nearly cold put it into the gin, and stir it well with a staff for ten minutes. The liquor must not be covered until it is fine; when this is accomplished, cover it up tight to prevent its losing its strength.
To Clean Gin that may be Tainted.
RECIPE No. 12.
In cases when gin has any disagreeable taste, such as a musty or faint flavor, to remove it, use, for 100 gals., 4 oz. potash and 4 oz. roche alum; mix them with 2 quarts of water, and boil until they are dissolved; then add 4 oz. salt of tartar. Mix this in the tainted gin,
This is a trade formula from a nineteenth-century rectifier's manual: a scheme for turning 100 gallons of neutral spirit into something that could be sold as gin, followed by companion recipes for sweetening, imitating Schiedam schnapps, and chemically stripping off-flavors. It is documentary rather than usable, and several of its components have no place in anything anyone drinks.
- Oil of wintergreenThe schnapps variation calls for eight drops of oil of wintergreen, which is essentially pure methyl salicylate. The neat oil is acutely toxic by mouth -- a teaspoon is a documented poisoning dose -- so the danger lies in handling and measuring the concentrate, even though the eight drops here are dispersed through 25 gallons.
- Alum and potash as finingsRoche alum (potassium aluminium sulphate) and potash (potassium carbonate) are added here to precipitate haze and to scrub "musty or faint" taint out of spoiled spirit. The book does give quantities -- 4 oz of each per 100 gallons -- and the floc is meant to settle, with Recipe No. 8 allowing the liquor to be racked off; but salt of tartar in quantity is strongly alkaline, modern beverage clarification does not work this way, and correcting a tainted product by chemical treatment rather than discarding it is the sort of practice later food law was written against.
- Essential oils at trade doseDrachms of oil of juniper, nutmeg, caraway and coriander cut into two quarts of 95 percent alcohol are compounding-house quantities. Oil of nutmeg carries myristicin, and oils of this kind are often sold as fragrance material rather than food grade. The original gives no assay of the oils it assumes, so the proportions cannot simply be scaled down and trusted.
- Scale and legalityThe batch is 100 gallons. In the United States and most other jurisdictions, blending, flavoring and bottling spirits for anything but personal experiment requires a federal rectifier's or distilled spirits plant permit, and the tax consequences of the sugar and water additions here were the whole point of the trade.
- What the units meanFor reading rather than making: a drachm is one eighth of a fluid ounce, roughly 3.5 ml; "5 o. p." is five degrees over proof on the old British Sikes scale, about 60 percent alcohol by volume; salt of tartar is potassium carbonate; roche alum is rock alum, the ordinary potassium alum sold in lumps.
- Orris and orange flower waterThese two survive in modern gin and in the perfumer's cupboard. Orris root, the dried rhizome of the iris, is a fixative that rounds and holds the volatile citrus notes; orange flower water is still sold in Middle Eastern groceries. They are the least objectionable things in the formula, and the only ones a present-day cook is likely to recognize.
- If you want ginBuy it, or follow a current recipe for a compounded gin using food-grade botanicals and a licensed base spirit. Nothing on this page should be used as working instructions.
Books of this kind — and there were dozens of them through the second half of the nineteenth century — were sold to publicans, grocers and wholesale liquor dealers rather than to households, and they document a trade in which "gin" often meant neutral spirit bought by the barrel and flavored on the premises. The tell is Recipe No. 12: a formula for removing a musty or faint taint from 100 gallons of stock, which assumes the reader's problem is not how to make good spirit but how to sell doubtful spirit. The Schiedam entry points at the Dutch distilling town whose name was attached to Holland gin (genever itself takes its name from juniper), and to the heavily advertised Wolfe's Aromatic Schiedam Schnapps then being sold in America as a medicinal cordial — the manual is offering a way to counterfeit a branded product. Legislation such as the British Sale of Food and Drugs Act of 1875 and the U.S. Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906 was aimed squarely at the practices set out on pages like this one, and the genre largely disappeared once adulteration became a matter for inspectors.