Lesson 1: Spirits
Introduction and Definitions
Welcome to Bartending 101! Kick back your feet and let’s dive in. With all courses, the first thing to do is to establish a common vocabulary for our subject matter. Roget’s Thesaurus has three pages of words regarding alcohol and intoxication. There is major confusion among such words as “alcohol”, “spirits”, “liquor”, “hard liquor” “booze”, “hooch”, “cocktails”. So to keep everybody on the same page, here are the words that we’ll use throughout this course.
"Alcohol” is a chemical compound produced when any plant food that contains sugar is fermented. Alcohol is the intoxicating element in any drink. Actually, there are many types of alcohol; the particular compound we’re discussing is ethyl alcohol – which is the only type of alcohol that can be safely consumed.
“Liquor” will be defined as any beverage containing alcohol. I appreciate that “liquor” to some doesn't include beer or wine. Europeans often make this difference as they regard beer and wine more as a food group. However, selling beer and wine does require a liquor license, and people who say they “don’t or can’t drink liquor” usually mean they don’t drink beer or wine as well as spirits. So we’ll consider liquor to be any intoxicating beverage.
We’ll divide liquor into two categories: 1) hard liquor or spirits and 2) beer and wine. The difference, as described below, is that spirits are distilled and beer and wine are not distilled. This lesson will discuss spirits - beer and wine will be discussed in the next lesson.
