CHAPTER 5: Mini-stories from the history of drinking – Whisky – Bukowski & Baudelaire bars

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CHAPTER 5: Mini-stories from the history of drinking – Whisky

Welcome to our book series „Bukowski SHOTS“ – Digital Edition.

We’ve decided to make the book „Bukowski SHOTS – A Guide to Mixed Drinks“ available to the public for free. It was created during the pandemic as a way to survive tough times—both financially and mentally—and today, we are gradually releasing it in an online format.

Each installment = one chapter or section from the book, adapted for the web. At the end of every article, you’ll find a link to the next part so you can keep reading seamlessly.

And once we get to the actual shots, you can look forward to our personal recommendations and those classic „bar bizarre“ notes that are simply part of the Bukowski experience.

Whisky

Before he became a Franciscan monk and missionary, the Catalan Ramon Llull wrote perverse poems to his beloved. However, after Jesus appeared to him, he began living a completely different life. Yet, something of his spicy past must have remained within him, as he became one of the first people in the world to distill alcohol.

Ramon Llull was also a well-known alchemist. And as anyone who has seen the movie The Emperor’s Baker – The Baker’s Emperor knows, the task of alchemists was, among other things, to invent the elixir of eternal youth—a sort of „water of life.“ Just like in the aforementioned film, they invented all sorts of things along the way—in the Czechoslovak movie it was plum brandy (slivovica), while Ramon Llull created an unknown distillate, a predecessor to whisky, which he named „water of life.“

As the art of distillation began to spread across Europe through monks, the variety and flavor of distilled spirits grew. In Scotland, they began distilling from malted barley or wheat and followed custom by naming their drink „water of life“—or uisge beatha. If you try to pronounce that first word, it might remind you of the modern term: whisky. However, it took a long time for the original word to evolve into its modern form, passing through intermediate stages such as usquebaugh, whisquybeath, and whiskybae.

It is fascinating that a drink first documented in Ireland as early as 1405 didn’t enter Slovak written texts until the 20th century. Slovakia had to wait an entire additional century before creating its own whisky. It found its home in the village of Hniezdne, building on the tradition of the oldest preserved distillery in the country, which was established there in the second half of the 18th century.

Let’s return to Scotland for a moment, because while we have been writing „whisky,“ the name is often spelled with an „e“—as whiskey. Why is that? The different spellings usually indicate the origin:

Whisky: Scotland, Canada, and most of the rest of the world (including Slovak whisky).
Whiskey: Ireland and predominantly the United States.

In the United States, if the spirit is made primarily from corn, it is referred to as bourbon.

By the way, when the state began to restrict production with various bans, another term emerged that was originally tied to this spirit: moonshine. The reason is quite simple—distilling was done illicitly at night so that the smoke from the distillery chimneys wouldn’t be seen. Thus, they distilled by the light of the moon. The expression began to be used in this sense in Britain starting in 1785; today, it is more commonly used to describe cheap, unaged homemade spirits produced in rural America.