Burn your guts!

The history of gin: from divine emanation to satanic potion

Richard Barnett. Gin. History of the drink. Per. from English S. Silakova. M.: New Literary Review, 2017.

At the dawn of the craft beer revolution in Russia, I sat with a fellow philosopher in one of the taverns selling all kinds of IPA, DIPA and RIS - today there are such on every corner, but in the early 1900s they seemed like an overseas rarity, whose value was not obvious. When we looked at the epic—almost Homeric list of ships—list of items on the bar menu, the question naturally arose: but why? Why so much beer? As my father puts it, there are a hundred names in the smoked sausage section of the grocery store, but they always take one - Brunswick. It’s the same here: beer has never seemed like a product that requires variety, unlike, say, wine. Why should there be diversity for something that is flesh of the flesh of a lowbrow? I picked up a bottle of fresh Zhigulevsky from a local bottler and off I went. Well, or Czech pilsner, if the heart asks for something more reliable, rooted in centuries. So I thought, stoically sipping a Russian imperial stout from Norway, a cross between instant coffee and oil waste.

My comrade did not share my skepticism - later I myself tempered it: the phenomenon of the craft beer revolution was filled with truly revolutionary meaning. It’s been great to see small, experimental breweries proliferating, just as it’s great to see any large-scale grassroots initiative—especially in Russia, where the 2010s saw only two examples of large-scale grassroots consolidation: the failed Snow Revolution and the successful craft beer revolution (the parallels between politics and beer are not unfounded — it’s not for nothing that the recent brew of Buxton Yellow Belly comes with an anti-racist manifesto, and Brew Dog released an anti-homophobic beer with Putin on the label; another question is, what’s the point of that). Ten years earlier, I would have considered it absurd that I would happily drink an amazing gose from Tula, because Russian soil is barren and incapable of giving birth to anything independent and nasty, be it philosophy, politics, the auto industry or beer. Well, at least the Russians have learned to make beer.

That evening, a philosopher friend divided alcohol consumption into two types: nomothetic and ideographic. These are neo-Kantian terms that distinguish different scientific methods. Nomothetic (ancient Greek νόμος - law) generalizes particulars and establishes the laws governing them; ideographic (ancient Greek ἴδιος - special), on the contrary, studies particulars in their originality. Mindlessly drooling is unreflective, nomothetic drunkenness, subject to the simple law that ethanol is absorbed into the blood and causes corresponding physiological and psychological changes. This is how, say, the most drunken characters in “Peculiarities of National Fishing” drink. But you can drink ideographically: as the philosopher put it, “not because alcohol enters the body, but because of the greatness of the drink and the anthropology behind it.” This is exactly the approach that craft beer requires, because along with the bottle we buy the nuances of brewing, the history on the label, the ideology of the brewery, etc. In other words, unlike the faceless “Zhigulevsky”, craft is initially extremely individualized in its originality. We drink - therefore, we reflect. But in the case of many other drinks, effort must be made to rise from their nomothetic to ideographic consumption. Jin is one of those.

What do you know about gin? Even two facts lying on the surface are contradictory. On the one hand, it is the national Dutch drink. On the other hand, the label of one of the most famous gins depicts the recognizable figure of a man in a red suit and black hat - a beefeater decorating the Tower. How did a traditional London character end up on a drink from the Netherlands? Okay with the history - even the organoleptic properties of gin are unknown to us. Have you ever seen a person drinking straight gin? If you have seen it, it is a completely unconventional method of consumption: modern society knows gin primarily as an integral component of gin-tonic and martini cocktails, while the phenomenon of cocktails itself became widespread only in the 20th century. Back in the first half of the 19th century, gin was drunk undiluted, which is, of course, surprising for us today. And finally, no - gin is not distilled from juniper cones. It is the same grain alcohol as whiskey.

“Gin” by Richard Barnett is a great way to solve all the mysteries associated with a drink that is now going through a not-so-glorious era of its centuries-old history. As the blurb on the British publisher’s website says, this “journey into the anatomy of pleasure and pain” is a very apt description of humanity’s relationship with alcohol. In general, Barnett is a doctor by training, teaching cultural history of diseases and the theory of evolution at Cambridge. It is difficult to say how a book about gin was inserted into his historical and medical bibliography ; Considering the attention to detail with which the book was written, perhaps there is only one reason - the author’s love for the drink itself.

A journey into the anatomy of pleasure and pain begins in the depths of time: Barnett traces the history of juniper (which, at the end of the last Ice Age, began to spread north along the retreating glaciers and found its way into the diet of Neolithic tribes) and distillation (which, according to legend, was invented by Mary, who lived at the beginning of our era Jewish and documented by the ancient Roman physician Pedanius Dioscorides). Two storylines converge, famously passing through the history of alchemy, and much earlier than one might assume: the treatise Compendium Salernitanum (dating from the 11th-12th centuries), written by representatives of the Salerno medical school, mentions a recipe for a remedy that was distilled from wine alcohol infused with juniper cones. Protoginine of Salerno was a medieval tonic whose strict rules for use date back to ancient medicine. The 13th-century philosopher Raymond Lull believed that wine spirit is “an emanation of divinity, an element recently revealed to man, but hidden from ancient times, for in former times the human race was too young to need this drink, intended to resurrect energies in the present decrepitude.” . The distillate was considered a health remedy - and for a long time protogins were made precisely as a medicine that had a beneficial effect on the heart. How far has humanity come from the idea of ​​alcohol as an emanation of divinity...

Barnett carefully traces the complex evolution of the healing proto-gin through the Dutch genevre to its satanic doppelganger - the culprit of the English "ginomania" that claimed thousands of lives - and then into an ingredient in elegant cocktails, peppering the narrative with vivid evidence from sources ranging from pharmacopoeias and political acts to the novels of Thomas Carlyle. Other facts are striking. How do you like, for example, this innovation, born of unbridled ginomania and described by the Bishop of Sodor and Manx Thomas Wilson in 1736: “Somewhere not far from East Smithfield a certain merchant kept a back room, spacious and empty, in which, when his visitors the drunkards get drunk, they are piled up indiscriminately, men, women and children, until they come to their senses, after which they resume drinking.” Who among us would not refuse such a comfortable convenience - to sleep it off without leaving the pub!

However, many contemporaries were, of course, frightened by such gin and gin palaces, just like the Bishop of Sodor. According to the writer Henry Fielding, “Gin houses are undoubtedly the nurseries of all kinds of vice and depravity.” Of course, there was something to fear, and not only the rampant drunkenness caused by specific political decisions regarding the alcohol market and the advent of a new era of the Industrial Revolution, but also the composition of gin itself, which was sometimes absolutely destructive. The History of Medicinal Substances (1751) also talks about gin made from juniper buds, but, as a rule, it is made from “so bad an ingredient as oil of turpentine, which is poured into a still, adding a little common salt and alcohol of the lowest quality.” . In pursuit of quick profits, distillers replaced juniper, which was expensive to collect, dry and process, with chemical additives that imitated its taste. In the mid-18th century, the distillery Beaufoy, James & Co. she distilled gin from oil of vitriol, almond oil (instead of sometimes adding coriander) and... “vitriol” - that is, sulfuric acid, which, together with pepper and ginger, gave the “gin” a burning taste. No wonder it was called “gut burns.” And to prevent it from being too hot, sugar was added to the hellish mixture - by the way, the classic London Dry Gin, which we drink today, arose only in the 19th century with the invention of the distillation column.

But the philippics of moralists and champions of sobriety cannot be taken uncritically. Of course, based on the opinions of magistrates, medical treatises and reports by Charles Dickens (who has a report on gins), we can conclude that at some point gin finally acquired the status of “infernal origin” and “liquid madness.” But there is also an opposite side to the history of gin - in fact, the victims of mania, which are also worth listening to, and here Barnett makes a Foucauldian turn, which is not at all expected from an entertaining book about an alcoholic drink. Gin haters, Barnett writes, “described in flowery and lengthy terms the vileness of gin-makers and the evil-doing of gin-sellers, but in the sources that have survived to this day there is little evidence of the opinions of the gin sellers and buyers themselves.” Hence the sharp criticism of the German sociologist Jürgen Habermas, who contrasted gin houses with another institution of the 18th century - coffee houses: “For Habermas, the coffee house is an outpost of thoughtful debates and polite conversations, one of the places where a free, rather democratic “public sphere” was born, which played a central role in the European Enlightenment. And the gin houses, Habermas believed, were little better than the pits where bears were poisoned for fun: all swearing and drunken fights. Well, if you study coffeehouses according to their preconceived descriptions of the 18th century, then Habermas is absolutely right, but in reality the line between high-flown talk and base cruelty was much less clear." Coffeehouses, Barnett notes, also served gin, and some ginhouses allowed you to drink coffee in peace, so the idea of ​​coffeehouses as the cradle of the Enlightenment is simply an idealized whim.

“Gin” is full of such details (the rich appendix with selected texts from different eras concerning gin deserves special praise), in the totality of which the individuality of a drink that was previously just juniper-scented vodka emerges more and more clearly. By ordering a gin and tonic at a club, we are implicitly aligning ourselves with medieval monks and alchemists; by English soldiers who introduced the fashion for Dutch gin, genevre, after helping the Dutch during the Dutch Revolution; the proletarians of the Industrial Revolution who found solace in sparkling gin palaces. As Barnett sums it up, “Gin has survived ginomania and Prohibition, which means it will survive anything.” Let's respect a drink with such a rich destiny - say no to thoughtless nomothetic drunkenness and drink it ideographically, remembering the numerous turns in the fate of such a simple product at first glance, alcohol from juniper cones. As the poet rightly wrote three centuries ago,

What better way to console humanity?
What is this almighty Bottle?
There is no equality in the world, but there is it -
Truly the Great Equalizer
all Ranks and Ranks.
Poor Plebeian thinks himself a King
- Then Jin placed him on the throne...