I have some alcohol for you today. I had a tweet in from Ben Pope, who asked whether... He'd had a rumor that "gin" is actually an alteration of "gun", "gunpowder", because it's so strong. It'a complitely wrong, unfortunately, but a nice idea. But gin is made from juniper, and it goes bzck to "juniperus", which is the Latin for the juniper berries. Very strangely, somewhere along its way, it became to associated with the city of Geneva in Switherland - it has absolutelly no connection with that at all, but in English, it became "genever" and eventually, it got shortened and changed a little bit to "gin". So very, kind of, strange route that it took, but nothing to do with a gunpowder there. But, as strange, as the idea might be, there is connection between gunpowder and gin, because the measure of the alcohol content of distilled spirits is proof - we talk about something which is alcohol proof. And that proof - meaning to establish the validity of something - goes all the way back again to the Romans, "probare" maening "to test". So when we say the proof of pudding is in the eating, that's actually the testing of the pudding is in the eating. And morden distilleries today use very sophisticated machines to measure the ethanol, so the amount of alcohol, in a liquid. But before then, the distillers did use gunpowder to prove the alcohol content of their drinks. So equal anount of the brew that they were testing and gunpowder were combined. A flame was applied. If it didn/t burn, it was under proof, and contained too little alcohol, but if it was too bright, it was over proof - that meant it was too strong. Just right which is about 50% alcohol - I think it's 57, actually - the mixture burned with very steady blue flame, and that's when they knew that they had the proof right. Of course, in America, still, they talk about something being 100% proof of whatever for their alcohol. So there is a connection between gunpowder and gin, just not the one that Ben thought.
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