Distillery equipment.
Lewis Feuchtwanger’s 1858 Fermented Liquors is much more than the subtitle implies: a treatise on brewing, distilling, rectifying, and manufacturing of sugars, wines, spirits, and all known liquors, including cider and vinegar. Also, hundreds of valuable directions in medicine, metallurgy, pyrotechny, and the arts in general.
His opening chapters on distilling and brewing would allow almost anyone with some extra space and and a few pipes and tubs at his or her disposal to take up some form of home-brewing, whether it be for beer, wine, hard liquor, or vinegar. Feuchtwanger supplies complete — if somewhat idiosyncratic — directions for the creation of tipples varying from cider to champagne to koumiss. He also provides detailed drawings and descriptions of stills and other brewing and distillation apparatus, including the mathematics for figuring out the proof of a liquor. He also provides a brief “bartender’s guide,” giving the recipes for, among other things, the three beverages mentioned in the title of this post. (Who wouldn’t want to drink contentment?)
Feuchtwanger goes above and beyond the needs of the home distiller in the rest of his short manual, however. In Part II, he leaves brewing and distilling behind and moves into home-based medicine, giving a brief run-down of therapies for diseases and ailments ranging from worms to nervous irritability to cholera. Some of his remedies, indeed, make a certain amount of sense: for the nervous irritability, for example, he recommends a compound including foxglove which contains a crude form of digitalis.
Part III Feuchtwanger has titled “Polytechny, etc., etc” and included such things as the creation of the baths for the ambrotype process — an early form of photography — as well as how to create false gems, sealing wax, fireworks, and cosmetics.
Overall, Feuchtwanger’s book gives good value for money even if the reader is not particularly interested in starting up a home distillery!
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