life,” a term that lives on in Scandinavia
(aquavit), in France (eau de vie), and in
English: whisky is the anglicized version of
the Gaelic for “water of life,” uisge beatha or
usquebaugh, which is what Irish and Scots
monks called their distilled barley beer.
Throughout the Old World, alchemists
thought of distilled alcohol as a uniquely
powerful substance, the quintessence or fifth
element that was as fundamental as earth,
water, air, and fire. The first printed book
devoted to distillation, Hieronymus
Brunschwygk’s Liber de arte distillandi
(1500), explained that the process achieves
the separation of the gross from the subtle
and the subtle from the gross, the
breakable and destructible from the
indestructible, the material from the
immaterial, so as to make the body more
spiritual, the unlovely lovely, to make the
spiritual lighter by its subtlety, to penetrate