Well yes. That is where proof comes from.
But the concepts and history around strength and dilution predate wide availability of gun powder and and the gunpowder method. The earliest version of Proof as an English measure or process is 16th century, and used a simple burn test rather than the gunpowder test.
Think the gunpowder method was mostly used in the US and later.
Distilled liquor in Europe begins to show up in the 12-13th centuries.
Oh, yum! They look awesome.
Have tried and failed with these. Congrats!
Scotch eggs always look disgusting, but are most often delicious! Those look like winners to me.
Thereâs a street stall where I used to work (east london) that makes those beiju filled with veg and rice, etc⊠usually plenty of cheese too.
<pedant>
This depends on how you define âEurope.â The Muslim empire conquered much of southern Europe beginning in the 8th century, and Jabir Ibn Hayyan (Geber, in the west) invented the alembic still in the 9th century. When the Normans conquered Sicily in the 11th century, the Muslim Medical School at Syracuse already had a giant still in operation. So in that sense, distilling was happening in what is today Europe since at least that time. Other stills existed in the Muslim areas of the European continent, and they were distilling wine into brandy in various places before the 11th century.
The handbooks that Muslim scientists used, though, werenât translated into Latin until the 12th century. Even so, Europeans seem to have been freeze-distilling alcohol for some time before that. In Britannia, freeze-distilled cider was a thing the Romans noted.
</pedant>
Fun way to test moonshine: Pour a bit into your hands and rub your hands like youâre washing them. Not too hard, but enough to rub the booze into your hands. Then clap them together once or twice, hard. Your hands will smell like the yeast thatâs been used [this was a test to see that the right yeast was used in fermentation]. Clap hard again and you can smell the grain that was used [another testâit should smell like corn]. Clap hard one final time and you can smell the alcohol [a rough test that it fermented out]. [I think I recall that this is the order of smell. Itâs been a while since Iâve done it. But the hard claps work. Itâs kind of spooky]
Interesting that this is one of the two ancestors of the current strawberry.
I applaud for this post! 
I donât have any moonshine. Does that work with other spirits? I guess not once theyâre barrel aged?
It might work for a GNS like everclear. But not for anything thatâs aged, or has herbals (like gin).
ETA: just tried it with Everclear. It doesnât work. Too much alcohol in it.
Everclear, what % can you buy? I donât see it anymore around SF.
I used to buy it up in the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe.
BtW.
Working for a contractor down on the shell oil docks they used to bring in a small tanker that had 100% grain alcohol. They used for some sort of BTU test at Shell oil company Martinez. They would pour off a few dozen gallons to clear the hose from contamination so it would be pure. I took a gallon home.
I mixed it 1x4 with Hawaiian Punch for a high school dance.
WaitâŠwhat? 2 of my favorite things!
We can get Everclear 190 here. Thatâs not legal in Ca; only the 151.
Grain alcohol and rainwater, eh?
Stumpwater, if youâre a purist.
Thought so. 151
I can out pedant the pedant:
The sort of proviso with the early history of distillation is that those Arabic scientists werenât producing alcohol to consume. Even when distillation as a technology first landed in Western Europe it was not for the production of alcoholic beverages. In itâs earliest history it was little more than a science experiment, and early alembic stills werenât appropriate for volume production of palatable spirits or the sorts of concentrations we talk about today. Usage was in alchemical research and concentration of medical substances. Thereâs as much about mercury vapors in the early use of stills as there is about alcohol.
Lines up fairly well with a medical school at Syracuse. So while those Muslim scientists were certainly making spirits of wine, itâs debatable whether they were making anything we would consider to be brandy.
Distilled liquor as a drink. The earliest indications we have are 12th-13th century, and mostly in Western Europe. Though thereâs some stuff going down in Asia a bit earlier, the two are independent developments. Both regions picked up distillation from Arabic areas, but it made the jump to tasty drinks separately.
Similar with freeze distillation. The technology was known. But everything we have on beverages indicates the handful of freeze distilled drinks we know today are pretty recent. 18th and 19th century for the most part.
