Bourbon

“ Some of these cheap whiskies are as combustible as that Bourbon spirit of which a man once partook, and found so inflammable that—blowing his nose directly afterwards—he found his pocket-handkerchief in flames. Such whiskey, they say in the States, kills dead at ten paces, and no human being drinking it ever lives to pay his debts. ”

“ On the threshold stood that short, stout, but imposing figure of a King, the pale blue ribbon of the Saint-Esprit across his breast, his gouty legs encased in red velvet gaiters, wearing powder in his grey hair, which was still dressed in the fashion of his youth, with a curl behind each ear and a short queue. . . . Bourbon all over, from the prominent light blue eyes, the aquiline nose, the disdainful mouth, to the heavy double chin . ”

“ The offshoots of the Bourbons carry on a very proud tradition in the person of the King of Spain, although France, which has been ruled by so many members of the family, will probably never again behold a Bourbon king. ”

“ Per Baccho! it is neither beef, pork, nor bacon, but whisky—old Bourbon whisky! The next 368 mule totters along under two half barrels. Speculation is rife. Every man with a stomach and an appetite for wholesome food is interested. ”

“ Whiskey is ethyl alcohol and natural flavor. Brandy is ethyl alcohol and natural flavor. The difference is the difference in flavor. The flavor of genuine whiskey comes from the grain, secondary products—fusel oil—distilled over with the ethyl alcohol and ripened into the flavors of 'rye' and 'Bourbon' whiskey. The new whiskey with its unripened secondary products is like the green peach, unfit for consumption. ”

“ Chemistry seems to agree with the temperance society, that wine, beer, brandy, gin, whiskey, and rum are alcohol and water, mixed in different proportions, and with some slight differences of flavoring and coloring matter. In all these drinks, teetotalers maintain, alcohol is power, the other ingredients being mere dilution and flavoring. Wine, they assure us, is alcohol and water flavored with grapes; beer is alcohol and water flavored with malt and hops; Bourbon whiskey is alcohol and water flavored with corn. ”

“ Squeeze into a pitcher the juice of four large fresh lemons. Now add two or three large pieces of ice and one pint of good bourbon whiskey. Mix thoroughly by stirring vigorously a few minutes. Now add two bottles of Cantrell & Cockran's ginger ale and while pouring it in, three tablespoonfuls of granulated sugar. ”

“ Nothing can exceed the interest and excitement that all these proceedings create here, and unless there is a reaction, which does not seem probable, the game is up with the Bourbons. They richly deserve their fate. ”

“ The Bourbons are credulous; they believe the assurances which they get from schemers who deceive them respecting the real state of the public mind of France, and they will send a lot of victims over here. ”

“ Such are the followers of the Bourbons: their best traits, their highest daring, their most long-suffering endurance, only elicited in the pursuit of some paltry object of personal ambition. They have tasted the cup of adversity, ay, drained it to the very dregs; they have seen carnage and bloodshed such as no war ever surpassed: and all they have learned by experience is, to wish for the long past days of royal tyranny and frivolity back again ”

“ Never mind! Vive le vin! I, the old soldier, order another bottle, and half a pound of bonbons with it!”
“No, no, ex-brave; never—ancient grenadier! Your bottle last time; my bottle this. Behold it! Toast away! The French Army! the great Napoleon! the present company! the croupier! the honest croupier’s wife and daughters—if he has any! the Ladies generally! everybody in the world!”
By the time the second bottle of champagne was emptied, I felt as if I had been drinking liquid fire—my brain seemed all aflame. No excess in wine had ever had this effect on me before in my life. ”

“ The principal component parts were burnt wine and rosemary, passed through an alembic; a drachm of it was to be taken once a week, “etelbenn vagy italbann,” in the food or the drink, early in the morning, and the cheeks were to be moistened with it every day. The effects according to the statement, were wonderful—and perhaps they were upon the queen; but whether the water has been equally efficacious on other people, is a point which I cannot determine. ”

“ Though the English upper classes, as I have said, drink with a certain moderation, their moderation really embraces a quantity of liquor which would send the artisan quite off his head. Whiskies-and-sodas at noon, Burgundy at lunch, with cognac to one's [Pg 152] coffee, three kinds of wine at dinner, followed by liqueurs and whisky, make no appreciable mark on a man who is living at his ease and can sleep as long as he likes ”

“ The ways of our lords were ever riddling and obscure. To the right a celestial bottle, stretching from the horizon to the zenith, appears, is uncorked, and scatters the worlds with the foam of what ambrosial liquor may have been within. ”

“ What Armstrong said one hundred and thirty years ago I entreat my medical brethren to believe now. I repeat it: if you want to prescribe spirits, do so; if you want to give wine, give pure wine. One bottle of good Burgundy will give twice the flavour and half the spirit that port does. [223]
In 1735 was published A Friendly Admonition to the Drinkers of Brandy and other Distilled Spirituous Liquors. The author laments that man has found means to extract from what God intended for his refreshment, a most pernicious and intoxicating liquor. ”

“ To ameliorate very new, or very old Wine—mix a bottle of the one with a bottle of the other—or to a bottle of very old Port add a glass or two of good new Claret—to very new, a glass of Sherry.
Of all our Senses,—the Taste, especially for Liquids, is the most sophisticated Slave of Habit—“De gustibus, non est disputandum.” ”

“ Champagne, which the cunning Mussulmans do not consider as wine, washes the meal, and coffee and pale perfumed tobacco supplement it. But when the appetite has retired and permitted some sharpness to the ordinary senses, the travelers are amazed at the gradual and silent increase which has taken place in their numbers. ”

“ Give us such whiskey as we call for of thy best, with lemons and sugar, but in place of hot water in the kettle, see to it that as often as it is replenished, it be filled with thy newest and palest rum. ”

“ Edibles were represented only by a single dish of fruit; the tablecloth, stained with wine and cigar ash, seemed crowded with every sort of bottle and every sort of glass. A magnum of champagne, empty, another half full, stood in the middle of the table; whisky, brandy, liqueurs of various sorts were all represented; glasses—some full, some empty, some filled with cigar ash and cigarette stumps—an ugly sight! ”

“ We extract from Fruits, at least from some, Colour, Taste, &c.
From aromatic Plants, the Distiller draws Spirits, Essences, simple and compound Waters.
60
From Spices are procured Essences, or in the Language of the Chemists, Oils, and Perfumes, and also pure Spirits.
From Seeds or Berries are drawn simple Waters, pure Spirits; and from some, as those of Anise, Fennel, and Juniper, Oil.
The Colour of Flowers is extracted by Infusion, and likewise by Digestion in Brandy or Spirit of Wine: The Smell is extracted by Distillation; the simple Water with Brandy or Spirit of Wine. ”

“ There were three of us—a soldier, a flâneur and myself, who am neither but would like to be either. We were talking about the strange appearance—a phenomenon of the day—of French wine in German bottles, and this led to the re-expression of my life-long surprise that bottles should exist in such numbers as they do—bottles everywhere, all over the world, with wine and beer in them, and no one under any obligation to save and return them. ”

“ I wish I could write it in letters of fire over the door of every liquor saloon.
It may be the climate; it may be the high-pressure, fever-heated rate of modern living; it may as well be that those honest men who made their own apple whiskey and peach brandy, by their daily dram-drinking transmitted the taste which adulterated liquors, in the generation following, were to lash into uncontrollable appetite. ”

“ There is old Scotch or old Burton for the lover of strong beer, porter for the labouring classes, stout for the weakly, and last, but far from least, that splendid liquid, pale ale, which, when bottled, vies with champagne in its excellence and delicacy of flavour, and beats it altogether out of the field when we take into consideration its sustaining and restorative powers. ”

“ Also raw, cooked, boiled, broiled, fried, smoked, or roast-beef, and they swallow with keen relish wines of all brands and vintages, beer, whisky, gin, and brandy, and evince a loving fondness for all grades of oil, from the dirtiest, coarsest whale's blubber to the finest olive. ”

“ Any fermented liquor, that, in distillation, yields an inflammable spirit miscible with water, may be called wine, whatever vegetable matter it is produced from.—As beer and ales contain a spirit exactly answerable to this definition, brewing may justly be called the art of making wines from corn. Those, indeed, which are the produce of the grape, have a particular claim to the name, either because they are the most ancient and the most universal, or that a great part of their previous preparation is owing to the care of nature itself. ”

“ The good wine from thy master’s cup,
Made of thy father’s head.”
IV.
The king’s red face grew pale with ire,
He smote upon the board:
“Pour up the wine which flames like fire,
And drink damnation to thy sire,
And glory to thy lord! ”

“ Our ancestors, wiser in their generation, appointed ‘ale-tasters,’ who did their duty without fear or favour. Why cannot ‘spirit-tasters’ be introduced in our day? Or, why cannot whiskey come within the limits of the Food Adulteration Act? The quantity of bad whiskey made in Great Britain is amazing. To use the word ‘whiskey’ is an outrage of the term. ‘Patent spirit’ is the Excise description for this fluid, which is made by a special apparatus, known as the Coffey Patent Still, from maize, rice, damaged barley, &c. ”

“ Meantime numberless bottles of precious wine were flung into the blaze, which lapped up the contents as if it loved them, and grew, like other drunkards, the merrier and fiercer for what it quaffed. Never again will the insatiable thirst of the fire-fiend be so pampered. ”

“ Pray bring me some immediately, for I am anxious to drink ale of your brewing.’
‘Your honour shall be obeyed,’ said Tom, and disappearing returned in a twinkling with a tray on which stood a jug filled with liquor and a glass. He forthwith filled the glass, and pointing to its contents said:
‘There, your honour, did you ever see such ale? Observe its colour! Does it not look for all the world as pale and delicate as cowslip wine?’
‘I wish it may not taste like cowslip wine,’ said I; ‘to tell you the truth, I am no particular admirer of ale that looks pale and delicate ”

“ Rum and brandy, glenlivet and guava jelly, limes, green tea, and a slight suspicion of preserved ginger,—nothing else, upon honor,—and the most simple mixture for the cure, the radical cure, of blue devils and debt I know of; eh, Doctor? You advise it yourself, to be taken before bed-time; nothing inflammatory in it, nothing pugnacious; a mere circulation of the better juices and more genial spirits of the marly clay, without arousing any of the baser passions; whiskey is the devil for that. ”

“ When wine is heated, there is first an escape of an inflammable vapor that burns with a bluish flame. A person needs only to have seen once this preparation of hot wine to recall that curious flame flickering over the boiling liquid and darting up little blue tongues. ”

“ I had experienced such beneficial effects from the ale I had drunk on that occasion, that I wished to put its virtue to a frequent test; nor did the ale on subsequent trials belie the good opinion which I had at first formed of it. After each visit which I made to the public-house, I found my frame stronger and my mind more cheerful than they had previously been. ”

“ The oil of brandy or grape spirits, is obtained during the distillation of the fermented residuum of expressed grapes; being produced immediately after the spirituous liquor has passed over. It is very fluid, limpid, of a penetrating odour, and an acrid disagreeable taste. It grows soon yellow in the air. ”

“ Some are planted in a very light and strong Soil, and they yield a bright and fragrant Wine; others are placed in a more nourishing Tract of Land, and they produce a Wine of a greater Body. The reasonable Combination of these different Fruits will produce an exquisite Liquor, that will have all the Advantages of a sufficient Body, a Delicacy of Flavour, a Fragrancy of Scent, and a Liveliness of Colour, and which may be Kept for several Years without the least Alteration. ”

“ By the Excise laws at present existing in this country, the various degrees of strength of brandy, rum, arrack, gin, whiskey, and other spiritous liquors, chiefly composed of little else than spirit of wine, are determined by the quantity of alcohol of a given specific gravity contained in the spiritous liquors of a supposed unknown strength. ”

“ Do you realise that in all the wide belt of earth where vineyards flourish, only the dry hills of Champagne ripen the delicious effervescent wine that refigures in modern civilisation—at least for those who are fond of wine—the nectar of the gods? ”