Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/92

82 azotized albuminous substance which produces spontaneous vinous fermentation, so that artificial yeasts or ferments are unnecessary. About fifty per cent more brandy can be made from ripe than from green fruit, and late fruit will produce much more brandy than early fruit. Brandy-distillers ought to devote more attention to filtration than they are in the habit of doing; it is a moral obligation which they owe to society.

Some people are so credulous that they believe all imported liquors are pure and perfectly straight. By paying a very high price, pure imported liquors can be obtained, but the superiority of the best article consists mainly in great age. Some imported liquors are mixed, compounded, and artificially flavored before shipment to this country, and are again mixed with so-called pure spirit after their arrival here. Trois-six French spirit, when originally produced, was the pure spirit of grape-wine; now it is mainly manufactured from potatoes and the cereals, and forms the basis of many of the liquors imported into this country under the brand of French brandies and wines, and sold to a credulous public as the product of the pure juice of the grape.

The duty on imported liquors is two dollars per proof-gallon, and on imported wines fifty cents per wine-gallon, while the United States internal revenue tax is only ninety cents per proof-gallon on domestic spirits, and none on domestic wines. People can judge for themselves whether the imported article is worth the difference in price.

Chemists, in their analysis of anhydrous, absolute, or pure alcohol (200), do not exactly agree in their results. However, there is only a slight variation from the following statement in the proportions of the three constituent elements:

Alcohol showing the foregoing analysis acts as a caustic on the living tissues of the body, and by injection into the veins it causes sudden death by coagulating the blood. By introduction into the stomach it generally causes death.

Commercial alcohol is principally made from Indian corn, and generally indicates twelve degrees less in strength, being 188°, than the preceding analysis. This commercial alcohol is reduced to any degree desired by the addition of water, and known to the trade as French, pure, cologne, or neutral spirits, while in fact it is nothing but dilute alcohol.

This spirit forms the bulk of nearly all the low-priced alcoholic liquors, whether called rum, gin, whisky, domestic or foreign brandies, that are placed upon the market, and this neutral corn-spirit enters largely into many of the better brands. Some wholesale liquor-