Whiskey

Whiskey, spelt whisky everywhere but Ireland and the United States, is a distilled spirit made from a fermented mash of grain such as barley, maize, rye or wheat, which may be malted first. The spirit leaves the still clear, at 70 to 80 per cent alcohol, is usually diluted, and is then aged in wooden casks, most often of charred white oak, which give it colour and much of its flavour; bottled, it is usually at least 40 per cent alcohol and runs from pale gold to dark amber. The name is an English rendering of the Gaelic uisce or uisge, water, by way of uisce beatha, a translation of the Latin aqua vitae, water of life; early English spellings include usquebaugh. The earliest records of distilling alcohol come from thirteenth-century Italy, where it was made from wine and spread through monasteries mainly as medicine. Distilling had reached Ireland by the twelfth century and Scotland by the fifteenth, where a royal account of 1495 records malt sent to a friar to make aqua vitae. In Hoodoo, whiskey or rum is fed to conjure bags and luck balls once a week, since they are held to have a spirit that must be kept alive, a custom traced to the Guinea Coast of Africa. It is also poured as a libation, beside offerings of food and water, for the dead and other spirits, at graves or under a tree.