The Ancient Origins of Distillation
What is distillation?
Distillation is essentially the separation and purification of substances. Alcohol is naturally produced by the fermentation of sugars by yeasts, a fact long exploited by people in many parts of the world as they prepared numerous types of fermented beverages from grapes, other fruits, grains and vegetables.
But alcohol is toxic to yeast—limiting how much alcohol can be produced before the process grinds to a halt. Today, even the most alcohol-tolerant yeasts cannot survive once the alcohol content reaches about 20% in volume. Alcohol tolerance was probably much lower in the past.
As alcohol evaporates at 78.4°C, which is significantly lower than the 100°C at which water boils, careful heating of a water and alcohol mixture, such as wine, in a still able to recapture and condense the alcohol vapours, can produce a drink with a higher alcohol content.
Where did it come from?
Although the origins of Scotch whisky itself can be traced back to travelling monks in the 11th and 12th centuries, whisky’s lineage as a distilled spirit goes back many millennia.
‘The essence of cedar’, as it was described on a 5,000-year-old Sumerian tablet, was almost certainly produced using some form of distillation, and there is archeological evidence of early stills from ancient Mesopotamia, China, India and Egypt.
Aristotle provided a detailed description of the process in 340 BCE, whilst Zosimos of Panopolis, a third century Alexandrian alchemist, provides us with the earliest known illustration of a still.
Distillation equipment detailed by Zosimos of Panopolis, from the 15th century Byzantine Greek manuscript Codex Parisinus 2327. Thought to be the work of Maria the Jewess, the first known living alchemist.
Fast forward to around 800 AD, and we see Islamic Alchemists developing the early stills into what they called the al-anbîq. Most likely used to make medicines, there is no explicit evidence that distillation was yet used to create spirits, but the technology existed long before and, well, it is likely!
The al-anbîq is now known as the Alembic Still. It is widely used today in craft gin production and was the basis for the traditional Pot Still.
Credit for the development of the Alembic Still is often given to the eighth century Arab chemist Abū Mūsā Jābir ibn Hayyān, known as the ‘father of chemistry’.
Credited with the creation of many types of laboratory equipment, his work contributed to the knowledge of distillation, sublimation, crystallisation, calcination, and evaporation.
In time, the ancient scientific knowledge and methods developed in the Islamic world made its way into Europe. From this point, it becomes indisputable that the process of distillation was being used to distil alcohol.
The first documented evidence comes from Salerno, Italy, around 1150, whilst the earliest recipe - for distilling ‘thick, strong and old black wine’ into aqua ardens - was written by Albert Magnus of Cologne in the late 13th century.
From the 12th century onwards, the Latin terms for distilled alcohol, aqua ardens (flaming water) and aqua vitae (water of life), appear increasingly frequently.
It’s most likely that the Alembic Still was brought to the British Isles by travelling monks, the shift from distilling a grape-based alcohol to one which used malted barley reflects an adaptation to the local climate. To this day, malt whiskies are distilled from a mash of malted barley, but the spirit known as aqua vitae would have been very different.
Maturation, now a vital part of making Scotch whisky, isn’t thought to have become common practice until the end of the 1800s, and aqua vitae was habitually mixed with berries, nuts, or spices to mask the harshness of what was probably quite an unpleasant drink!
Find further reading links below or explore the subtle differences created during distillation with The Science of Distillation blind tasting set.
Sign up to our newsletter for insightful stories like this one delivered to your inbox every month.
Further Reading;
• The Art of Distillation - John French, 1651
• The Art of Distilling, Revised and Expanded - Bill Owens, 2019
• Blog - The Secrets of Alchemy - Science History Org
• Blog - What is an Alembic? - Alembic Rare Books