We ended our tale of whisky Thursday with the first taxes on the booze. Here’s more information on historic whisky than you’ll ever know or likely to know. Let’s continue:

In Scotland, meanwhile, as in England, the first taxes on distilling were introduced in the 17th century. Yes, legalized theft by any other name…

By1707, excise on spirits was well established, and continued throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. Naturally, there developed a thriving illicit industry, primarily in the Scottish Highlands regions, and the legendary tussles between the wily illicit distiller and the excise man have become an essential part of whisky folklore both in Europe and here in America.

Many accounts of crafty ruses, colorful characters and improbable escapes are recorded in Gavin Smith’s book The Secret Still. Highlights include ‘Sarah of the Bog’, a West Highland lady alleged to have masqueraded as a witch to keep nosy neighbors away from her still (before one day tragically staggering drunk into her own furnace); and Magnus Eunson, an infamous Orkney smuggler, known for his quick thinking and habit of hiding his contraband stash in pulpits and under coffins, among other places. Other accounts include barrels hidden beneath broody hens, barrels hidden in funeral corteges and barrels ‘nursed’ by breastfeeding mothers. Of course, for an illicit distilling enterprise to survive, the first requirement was a well-hidden still. While sometimes a remote sea cave or a treacherous bog, navigable only by locals, would do the job, on other occasions a more intricate arrangement was called for. One account in Smith’s book, dating from 1824, describes an ingenious set-up, with a still hidden in an underground cavern, beneath a trap door covered with earth, with water supplied by a subterranean stream, and its smoke diverted through the chimney of a cottage some distance away.

Naturally, there developed a thriving illicit industry, primarily in the Highlands regions, and the legendary tussles between the wily illicit distiller and the excise man have become an essential part of whisky folklore

It all sounds like good fun – Smith even suggests that Robert Louis Stevenson may have based some of his Treasure Island characters on the wily illicit distillers at work in Aberdeenshire in the 1880s. Yet while illicit distilling was a very real phenomenon and widespread across the Highlands, its causes and culprits weren’t always quite as have been depicted.

“[The illicit distilling boom] was partly to do with the fact that landowners in the north, who abetted and encouraged it, saw it as a form of increasing the profitability of their estates,” he says. In those areas where there was a tradition of distilling, rents were “jacked up”, Devine says, “and since the landed class in that period were demanding increased cash rental, people had to search for means of obtaining this.” There were legal possibilities, such as cattle droving, kelping and slate quarrying, but illegal distilling was an option that promised to bring in bountiful rents from tenants. “It flourished partly because the elites of the areas where there was specialist illicit distillation were root and branch behind it – even those who were part of the legal establishment.”

The other factor behind the boom, of course, was demand. And here comes another surprise. Devine says that while whisky certainly was distilled for domestic consumption in some peasant households, there was no real commercial market for it before the mid-18th century, with wine and beer being the most popular drinks in Scotland. Instead, the commercial demand for whisky and the beginning of the whisky industry, both legal and illicit, came, he says, not from the pleasant glens of the Highlands, but from somewhere quite different: the 19th-century ‘Gomorrah’ of Glasgow.

A swirling, swarming hive of industrial activity, economic growth and squalor, the city was growing faster than any other European city of its size – and it wasn’t alone. In 1700, only around 15% of Scots lived in a town with a population of more than 5,000. By the 1850s, that figure had risen to 60%. Wages were low, living conditions were poor and, in the days before football and cinema, there was little release from the misery of everyday life. This, Devine says, was whisky’s heyday, when it became established as a drink of the masses. “The big attraction of whisky was it gave the hit to a much greater extent than beer. Life was extremely challenging and rough in the first period of urbanization, until you’ve got things like sanitary and health controls developing; and so whisky was a kind of antidote to that hellish experience, because it gave more quickly the possibility of psychological escape through drunkenness.”

Against this backdrop a timely intervention by a former excise man, of all people, was to have a seismic impact on the history of whisky. Until the 1830s, whisky had been distilled only in pot stills. Iconic in shape, generally with broad kettle bases, elegant swan necks and crafted from copper, pot stills produce a spirit with a rich and complex taste. In the 1820s, however, the first designs for a new kind of still began to appear. Known as the ‘column’ or ‘continuous’ still, it produced a whisky that was higher in alcohol and less flavorsome than pot-distilled whisky – sometimes referred to as a ‘silent spirit’ – but in much greater quantities, more quickly and more cheaply. Aeneas Coffey, former Inspector General of Excise in Ireland, tweaked earlier designs and patented his version in 1830.

For Heidi Donelon, Coffey’s innovation was the beginning of a painful decline for Irish whisky. “The major Irish distilleries of the time rejected this new invention, which produced these lighter, less aromatic whiskeys, as they did not want to alter in any way their rich, fruity and smooth pot still whiskeys,” Donelon explains. So Coffey took his still to Scotland, where it was enthusiastically embraced. The lighter taste of Coffey-distilled grain whisky made it ideal for counterbalancing the heavier notes of idiosyncratic single malts. By judiciously blending the two, it was possible to create easier-going whiskies, which appealed to a broader spectrum of drinkers, and, most importantly, to do so more cheaply and more quickly. Coffey’s still helped to open up a whole new market for blended Scotch, enabling it to eclipse its Irish competitor.

A timely intervention by a former excise man, of all people, was to have a seismic impact on the history of whisky

And it also opened up a new can of worms. Whisky had traditionally been fairly easy to define, but now there were many more varieties to consider. Could it be column-distilled from grain, without the distinctive characteristics for which whisky had become famous, and still be whisky? Was a mix of the grain and malt still a pure whisky, or was it adulterated? Was Irish whisky a style, or a geographic denomination? And what was Scotch anyway?

In fact, exactly what was going into a dram had been a cause for concern during the 19th century, with many suspecting that what was being served up in the growing cities was anything but pure Highland dew. A relatively little-known scandal that tainted the whisky industry is explored by Edward Burns in his book Bad Whisky. In 1872, the editor of the North British Daily Mail took 30 samples of whisky from bars and pubs across Glasgow and had them analysed under lab conditions. To his horror, almost every sample was a very special ‘blend’ of whisky, water, and noxious additives. These included: turpentine; methylated spirits; ‘finish’ (a thin form of varnish); and highly corrosive sulphuric acid. One sample was found to contain as little as a couple of ounces of whisky to the gallon. Another, worryingly described in the lab notes as ‘pinkish green’ in appearance, was alleged to be nothing but ‘finish’ and water. These ‘drams’ were not only foul-tasting, they were often very poisonous.

Thirsty for a round? OR just scared now that you found out why its called varnish in some quarters?

More tomorrow…come and visit again!