Distillation Through History

The earliest indication of distillation dates back to a terracotta distillation apparatus discovered in the Indus Valley of Pakistan around 3000 BC. Mesopotamian Babylonians also engaged in distillation, as demonstrated by King Zimrilim's perfumery in 1810 B.C., where the method was utilized to produce significant quantities of balms, essences, and incense on a monthly basis.

Crude forms of distilled alcoholic beverages, crafted from ingredients like rice and mare's milk in Asia circa 800 B.C., preceded more refined spirits such as Grey Goose. This knowledge of distillation made its way to Ancient Greece by the first century A.D., with Greek physician Pedanius Dioscurides documenting the process after observing condensation on the lid of a vessel containing heated mercury.

In the 4th century A.D., credit for the development of the tribikos or three-armed pot still goes to "Maria the Jewess," the first documented Western alchemist. However, it wasn't until the 8th century A.D. that the Arabic alchemist Abu Musa Jābir ibn Ḥayyān invented the alembic pot still, enabling the effective distillation of alcohol. Jābir ibn Ḥayyān's writings emphasized the increased flammability of vapors achieved by adding salt to boiling wine, heightening its relative volatility.

The true pioneer of distillation, Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi, emerged in the 9th century during the Islamic Golden Age. Razi perfected the art of distilling alcohol, following in the footsteps of the polymath Jabir. Meanwhile, in China, archaeological evidence suggests that genuine alcohol distillation began during the 12th century Jin or Southern Song dynasties.
Distillation Through History

History of hopped beer

Beer is a popular alcoholic beverage worldwide, traditionally made from water, barley and hops. Compared with the other raw materials, hop is a minor, but indispensable, ingredient in beer production.

Before hopped beer there was “gruit” beer‐ an herb mixture to provide flavor and bitterness. Archbishop of Cologne, Germany held monopolistic rights to gruit.

It is assumed that ancient Caucasian people brewed hopped beer, and that this technology came with their migration to Northern and Eastern Europe.

The first recorded use of hops in brewing in Europe originates from the ninth century. In 822 AD, Abbot Adalhard of the Benedictine Monastery of Corbie issued a set of instructions for his abbey.

Brewers use hops primarily to get bitterness, flavor, and aroma. Hops can be added at several points in the brewing process to enhance one or the other of those things.

The use of hops in Western monasteries has been further documented in Fontanelle and St. Denis during the eighth and ninth centuries AD.

Evidence suggests that commercial hop cultivation began in northern Germany during the 12th or 13th century and that the Germans were exporting hopped beer from the 13th century onward.

In the 1300’s, the Dutch began importing hopped beer and then began brewing their own. Hops were planted in England by the early 1400’s and in 1436, Henry VI praised hopped beer as “notable, healthy, and temperate.”

The first evidence of hopped beer being brewed in England is from 1412 and for a time English brewers produced both un-hopped “ale” and hopped “beer.” Brewers started to import dried Flemish hops but these contained so much extraneous matter that an Act of Parliament was passed in 1603 imposing penalties on merchants and brewers found dealing in hops adulterated with ‘leaves, stalks, powder, sand, straw and with loggetts of wood dross’.

On April 23, 1516 the Bavarian Reinheitsgebot was put into effect declaring hops one of the three allowable beer ingredients.

By the 17th century ale (i.e.: un-hopped beer) was no longer popular and beer was the established drink and by 1655 hop cultivation grew rapidly in fourteen counties of England. In 1710 the English parliament banned the use of non-hop bittering agents, at least in part to prevent brewers from evading the new penny-per-pound hop tax.

In United States, in 1629, the hop cones were used for beer brewing. The young shoots in the spring were eaten as a special treat in salads. While, the first commercial hops harvested in Massachusetts in 1791. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries New York produced about eighty percent of the nation’s hops.
History of hopped beer

History of distillation process in Europe

The first distillation apparatus found in Mesopotamia (today´s Iraq) comes from the period 3500 BC. Nicander (183—135 BC), a Greek poet and physician, spoke of the extraction of perfumes from plants by what should now call as a process of distillation.

The earliest certain chemical distillations were by Greeks in Alexandria in the 1st century AD but these were not distillations of alcohol.

The medieval Arabs adopted the distillation technique of the Alexandrian Greeks, and written records in Arabic begin in the 9th century, but again these were not distillations of alcohol.

Al-Kindi (801-873, wrote in the 9th century a book on perfumes which he named ‘Book of the Chemistry of Perfume and Distillations’. It contained more than hundred recipes for fragrant oils, salves, aromatic waters and substitutes or imitations of costly drugs. The book also described one hundred and seven methods and recipes for perfume-making.

Although there are rare Arab references, towards the end of the first millennium, to the distillation of wine, it seems probable that for religious reasons they did not exploit it. Distillation of alcohol for drinking seems first to have developed in Europe in the twelfth century and thereafter.

The derivations of the words ‘alcohol’ and alambic, from the Arabic word al-koh’l and al-anbiq, indicate that it was from the Islamic word that the practice of distillation first entered Europe. Until the end of the 15th century, distilled wine (aqua vitae) seems to have been used largely as a medicine.

But in 1493, a Nuremburg doctor noted everyone in the city had got into the habit of drinking. As a result, three years later the city authorities forbade the sale of alcohol on feast days. One of the first books on distillation written by J. French has been published in London in 1651.
History of distillation process in Europe