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The "Gin Lane" reminded me summer 1992 in a small remote town in Russia. Ask any Russian older than 45 to tell you about alcohol "Royal" (спирт Рояль) or as we call that time "Summer of Royal" :)
At the beginning of 1992 the market reforms happened, and in particular almost complete alcohol deregulation. Very soon, in the Spring, Russia was flooded with those 1 liter bottles of very cheap, yet safely drinkable, 96% ethanol under trademark "Royal". Everybody was drinking it like a thirsty traveler in a desert coming upon water in a oasis. 1 such bottle of that ethanol with a 1.5 liter bottle of soda was making an equivalent of 5 standard 0.5l bottles of vodka at half the price.
In the Summer i went to work in a small remote town, and that is when the first delivery of "Royal" came into the town's grocery store. Next few days in that town is what the "Gin Lane" reminded me of. The things normalized only when the store ran out of "Royal". When 3 weeks later another delivery of Royal came in, this time double the amount, the situation repeated, only that time it was for almost 2 weeks, again until the store ran out.
The story in dry numbers https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Estimates-of-overall-lev... (in 1995 the regulations were brought back to some degree)
Same procedure back then. Get yourself some high proof alcohol. Add Juniper berries, and maybe some other herbs/spices. Water down. And that's Gin.
Large scale industrial production of spirits is pretty much like that - manufacture the alcohol and then add different flavourings and colours to produce a variety of drinks.
Edit: Obviously there are dedicated manufacturers producing whisky, gin etc. - but they are at a smaller scale.
In Romania there is a whole host of cheap liquors where the label will say in tiny print “alcoholic beverage with X flavouring”. For example, the label might show a pirate, leading consumers to think it is rum, but there in tiny print “alcoholic beverage with rum flavouring”. I always imagine a man in a white coat with an eyedropper adding a drop of flavouring essence to what is otherwise industrial ethanol and water. But EU labeling laws for many beverages are strict, so if it doesn’t use the weasel wording, you can trust that you are getting the real deal.
I've had stuff like that at cheap all-inclusive resorts in Egypt or maybe Spain before - really nasty hangovers!
Lidl sells lots of liquors like that. Usually water, alcohol, syrup, and some kind of flavouring.
It's disgusting to me because I have always seen alcoholic drinks as something holy - just adding ethanol to water sounds like something deserving of the wrath of the gods.
Not coincidentally, at this time the life expectancy of Russians dropped dramatically.
Looked it up in Google Images and it's funny how they made the label in German to mimic the feel of a luxury product. I guess German things must have been status symbols at the time.
"They" were a company in Hamburg, so I guess they made the label in German because they produced it in Germany. Their primary foreign market was apparently Russia and Poland, at the time.
The significance of 1992 is that Russia became the Russian Federation in December 1991 and the early years of the Russian Federation were defined by a massive market deregulation, massive privatization and extreme corruption but more importantly to this anecdote: an opening of the Russian market for international trade.
The "Feinsprit" (or "Primasprit") was safe for human consumption (if watered down at least) but it was essentially a cheap industrial product. It's also noteworthy that a similar product had been available in the GDR (which collapsed in 1990) but was apparently fairly expensive and hard to come by, so likely not produced at scale and for export.
It was like that in Russian Siberian villages with vodka since forever. The train would deliver vodka and it was payday and the whole town shot down for a few days.
If you want to read more about life in 1800s London, you should read The People of the Abyss by Jack London https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People_of_the_Abyss
It's his first-hand account of spending two weeks living in Whitechapel, East London.
On look at Mayhew's London Labor and the London Poor, which you can find at gutenberg.org
Thanks, will do.
In Our Time did an episode on the gin craze: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b084zk6z
Does anyone here remember an article comparing the Industrial Revolution to the internet, and the Gin craze to social media, and, incidentally, Wikipedia–wasted resources because those had become suddenly worth less: adult workforce in the 18th, intellectual in 20th?
I remember it was written in mid 2000s, by one of the public digital intellectuals, one who liked to talk about open innovation: Cory Doctorow, maybe Larry Lessig. I can’t find it, but I swear I’ve read it.
Maybe this from Clay Shirkey: https://livinginliminality.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/gin.p...
Yes! Thank you so much. I’ve been trying to remember where I read that for almost a year now.
> Originally imported from the Netherlands as genever
Juniper berries are called Jeneverbessen in Dutch, hence the name.
What I've always thought was odd about this gin versus beer distinction in England is that it treats gin as if it was the first high alcohol beverage available. But brandy was available centuries earlier. Why didn't it create its own panic?
I don't know for sure, but brandy has links to the French, which would not exactly help make it popular in England. Gin on the other hand is from our Protestant Germanic cousins, the Dutch.
English higher classes at various times liked to parrot the French. That’s how they started e.g. adding milk to tea, which was started by a French lady to fight off the bitter taste of low quality tea imported from China at the time. That was before the French moved to coffee due to English dominance in China which blocked them from getting tea at reasonable prices.
So I don’t think that brandy being linked to the French would be problematic, given long enough time scale.
I’ve read that gin was much more affordable.
Yes, that's true. Brandy had to be distilled from wine. And foreign brandy was subject to high import taxes. Thus it was only affordable to the upper classes. Gin can be distilled from much cheaper grain.
"Drunk for a penny, Dead drunk for twopence, Clean straw for nothing."
https://wtlh.wordpress.com/2016/11/30/drunk-for-a-pennydead-...
In fact the government was explicitly trying to encourage gin over brandy:
> Between 1689 and 1697, the Government passed a range of legislation aimed at restricting brandy imports and encouraging gin production. Most importantly, the monopoly of the London Guild of Distillers was broken in 1690, thereby opening up the market in gin distillation. The production and consumption of English gin, which was then popular amongst politicians and even Queen Anne, was encouraged by the government. This encouragement was shown in the reduced taxes on the distillation of spirits. Additionally, no licenses were needed to make spirits, so distillers of spirits could have smaller, simpler workshops than brewers, who were required to serve food and provide shelter for patrons.
And the British had been making Rum in the Caribbean since the 1600’s.