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careful Dutch hands had learned to distill a relatively clean spirit from grain.
    As for the other techniques, by the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Russians were seriously exploring the possibilities of filtration, while the brandy-distillers of southwest France were in the early stages of their love affair with long barrel-aging. Yet neither practice would be even close to perfected before the end of the eighteenth century (as late as the 1730s, even the best cognacs spent no more than two or three years in oak), and hence we can set them aside and proceed to our last option, mixology. For that, we must look to England.

II
    “A HORSE THAT DRINKS OF ALL WATERS”
    The English have always considered themselves reliable drinkers. Iago’s words in Act II of Othello pretty much sum up the prevailing opinion in his day: “In England . . . indeed they are most potent in potting. . . . [Your Englishman] drinks you with facility your Dane dead drunk; he sweats not to overthrow your Almaine; he gives your Hollander a vomit, ere the next pottle can be filled.”
    Iago has his issues, to be sure, but at least he got the players right: in any tippling contest, the Latin countries, while hardly dry, would have finished far behind the Dutch, the Germans (Iago’s “Almaine”) and the Scandinavians, much as they would now; and while in any man-on-man swilling match a great number of individual Russians and other Slavs would have certainly finished in the money, factors such as serfdom, Ottoman rule and the backward state of commerce would have kept eastern Europe’s per capita scores low. But as for the relative superiority of the Englishman to Dutchman, Almaine and Dane, well, it’s a charming theory. Sure, as Richard Unger argues in his Beer in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance , what data exist suggest “drinkers in the Low Countries to have been consistent but less avid than German beer drinkers, while English drinkers kept pace with their German counterparts.” And it must also be conceded that the English aristocracy and merchant class supplemented their quarts with many a pint, bottle and bowl of imported wine. But Germans and Dutchmen drank plenty of wine, too. So far, pretty much of a draw. But throw in aqua vitae and England comes up decidedly short. In 1603, when Othello was written, the rest of northern Europe had been sticking it away in quantity for a century and a half and was already well into the Repression phase, while England essentially abstained.
    Knowing the Englishman of today, that seems scarcely possible. To merely slide your fingernail under the tab that peels the foil off a bottle of good single-malt Scotch whiskey f is to find one materialized at your shoulder, looking on with fond interest (or so it seems, anyway). But it’s a curious fact—one of the anomalies of bibulology—that England, the very country for whom most of the world’s best spirits were developed, came very late to serious aqua vitae-drinking.
    It wasn’t due to a failure of knowledge. The basic technology crossed the Channel at more or less the same time it reached the rest of northern Europe. There are records of English monasteries buying stills in the mid 1300s, when aqua vitae was first breaking out of the Investigation stage. Grain-distilling followed soon after, if we may judge by the passage in the Canterbury Tales (written in the late 1380s) where Chaucer has his Canon’s Yeoman include among the many skills and knowings of his “elvish craft” the use of “cucur-bits” and “alembykes” (both pieces of distilling equipment) and a familiarity with “berm” (yeast), “wort” (basically, unfermented ale) and “fermentacioun.” And, to be sure, spirits were not entirely ignored: the upper classes were not slow to use them medically—it’s worth bearing in mind that along with opium, alcohol was practically the only effective pain reliever in the pharmacopoeia—and distilling herbal “waters”