INTRODUCTION & DEFINITION
Distilled spirit, often known as distilled liquor, is an alcoholic beverage (such as brandy, whisky, rum, or arrack) made from wine or other fermented fruit or plant juice, or from a starchy material (such as various grains) that has been brewed first. Distilled liquor has a higher percentage of alcohol than beer or wine.
HISTORY OF DISTILLING
Because the two elements required for alcoholic fermentation are widely distributed and always appear together, civilizations from practically every corner of the globe created some type of alcoholic beverage early in their history. By 800 BCE, the Chinese were distilling a beverage from rice beer, and sugarcane and rice were used to make arrack in the East Indies. The Arabs invented a distillation technology for making a distilled beverage out of wine. A rudimentary distillation technique was documented by Greek philosophers. Although no references to distilled beverages can be discovered in texts before to 100 CE, they were undoubtedly created by the Romans. Before the Roman occupation, distilled spirits were produced in Britain.
Grape brandy and distilled mead were the earliest distilled spirits derived from sugar-based ingredients, namely grapes and honey. It is unknown when starchy grains were first used to make distilled spirits, but it is certain that they were used in the Middle Ages. Some forms of government control extend back to the seventeenth century. The distilled spirits sector became a significant source of revenue as production processes improved and volume rose. Both the manufacturing and distribution of liquor were frequently subjected to strict regulations.
The first stills consisted of little more than a heated closed container, a condenser, and a receptacle for the condensate. These eventually evolved into the pot still, which is still used to make malt whiskey and some gins. The alcohol-containing liquid was then heated in a column made up of a succession of vaporisation chambers placed on top of one another. Large-scale continuous stills, quite similar to those used in the industry today, were functioning in France and England by the early nineteenth century. Aeneas Coffey, an Irishman, designed such a still in 1831, which comprised of two columns in series.
Since distillation requires that the liquid portion of a fermentation mixture be vaporized, considerable heat must be applied to the process. The fuel used in distilling spirits has always been that which has been most readily available at the particular time and place. Peat, coal, and wood were the fuels used historically, while the fuels of choice today are coal, natural gas, and oil. The high steam requirement for continuous-still operation inhibited the development of rectifying columns for production of spirits until after the Industrial Revolution.