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say, little to offer the discriminating palate. This isn’t to say that nobody was making tolerable spirits—there are scattered notices of people distilling quality ingredients in well-designed equipment over indirect heat. But such things must have been unusual. At its all-too-common worst, aqua vitae would have been a stinking, oily potion that burned like Sherman’s march going down and left you the next morning with a head as pulpy and tender as a rotten jack-o’-lantern.
    Fortunately, spirits-making doesn’t stop with distilling. There are ways to change raw spirit into something more drinkable. They are not infinite, as a half hour of reading labels in your local Liquor Barn will demonstrate. There are really only four. You can try to mask the offending congeners (whatever’s in there that isn’t water or ethyl alcohol) by compounding: that is, spending days and weeks infusing your raw spirit with aromatic and pungent substances to mask the flavors of the congeners, redistilling (usually) the result and perhaps dosing it with sugar or honey to bank some of the remaining flames (examples: Chartreuse, Jägermeister). Or you can try to remove them by filtration, most commonly by passing your distillate slowly through a thick bed of charcoal and thus stripping off pretty much all of the congeners, be they good, bad or indifferent (vodka in general, Bacardi). Or you can try to “barrel out” the problem, as they say in Kentucky. Long aging in relatively small wooden casks allows some of the more volatile congeners to evaporate, mellows others and transforms still others through slow interaction with air and oak into something pleasing (Martell Cordon Bleu, Highland Park, Woodford Reserve, anything else that gets aged). For the fourth method, though, you’ll have to leave the Liquor Barn and go to the nearest bar, since it involves mixing the raw spirit with a little of this and a little of that and drinking it down.
    Unfortunately for the Renaissance spirits-drinker, these techniques required a good deal of trial and error to perfect, some of their principles being not nearly as obvious as they seem to us today, and only the first of them was fully understood. From the very beginning of European distilling, alchemists and physicians had been making what were essentially herbal liqueurs, pungent alcoholic elixirs that were flavored with multiple botanicals and, usually, sweetened. Although their production was originally (and still is) an Italian specialty, before long it became more or less general throughout the continent and its outlying islands. To pluck out one example among many, the late-fourteenth-century aqua vitae recipe contained in the British Library’s manuscript Royal 17 A iii—if not the earliest, then one of the earliest in the English language—calls for distilling wine lees with cinnamon, cloves, ginger, nutmeg, galangal, cubeb and thirteen other herbs and spices. Drinks made thus were pungent and cloying on the palate—not the sort of thing you’d want to build an evening around. That’s probably just as well, since, being in fact no purer than their base spirit, they would have induced hangovers worse than death itself. What’s more, they were enormously expensive to make, lees or no, since many of the spices used were, quite literally, worth their weight in gold. The Germans had at least that problem solved by 1505, when a Vienna physician published a formula for “cramatbeerwasser”—wine (or wine lees) redistilled with juniper berries, which were plenty pungent and undeniably cheap. Once its base was switched to the more easily available grain, this ur-gin would become the spirit of the south German countryside, whence it radiated north and west until it went to ground in the Low Countries, where it has lived happily ever since. It could not, at first, have been very pleasant to drink, and its consumption did not approach social respectability until the eighteenth century, when