#history-of-alcohol

IWD: In Praise of Maria the Jewess

Maria the Jewess and the invention of distillation Without the invention of the still, I wouldn’t have a job. The general historical consensus is that the first person known to have distilled alcohol was the great Arab alchemist Jābir Ibn Hayyan (c.AD 721-815). His part in the eventual invention of Gin is unsurprisingly the least of the accolades and perhaps on International Men’s Day, I’ll go into that further. Behind every great man is a great woman, but in the case of Jābir, there was a great woman about 700 years before him. Maria the Jewess. Maria lived in the Egyptian city of Alexandria and is considered one of the first people that wrote about alchemy.  What is alchemy? Alchemy isn’t the crackpot pursuit of turning lead into gold. Well, at least it’s not only that. Alchemy was a mixture of science, pseudo-science and philosophy and was the progenitor to chemistry and modern medicine. Western alchemy, the one we know the most about, was defined by its dogged pursuit of three