The Spirit of Medicine
Everyone wants to know how to flavor a spirit… but what most people don't realize is, the way we used to do it wasn't just about taste, it was about medicine.
I’ve never liked artificial flavoring. I can taste it immediately; it just isn’t real. So, when I set out to learn how to flavor spirits, I didn’t take the easy route. I went straight to the source. If I wanted cherry, I worked with cherries. If I wanted orange, I used orange. Chocolate, botanicals, fruits, spices, I wanted the real thing, no shortcuts.
That meant learning how to build flavor through fermentation, through distillation, and through natural post-distillation extraction. Tinctures, infusions, extracts. It became less about making something taste good and more about understanding how to pull something meaningful out of raw ingredients.
And somewhere along the way, I realized something that changed how I see this craft forever.
I wasn’t just learning how to flavor spirits.
I was retracing the foundation of medicine itself.
Long before modern pharmaceuticals, before laboratories and synthetic compounds, medicine was alcohol. And even before distillation, fermentation itself played a role in survival and health. In ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, beer wasn’t just something people drank for enjoyment. It was a source of nutrition. It was safer than water, rich in calories, and full of vitamins from grain and fermentation. It was often thick, almost like liquid bread, and it was consumed daily by workers, laborers, and entire communities. It wasn’t indulgence, it was sustenance.
As knowledge evolved, fermentation gave way to distillation, and with it came a more concentrated form of medicine. Distillation wasn’t originally about whiskey or vodka or anything we associate with drinking today. It was about healing. Aqua Vitae: The Water of Life. Alcohol became one of the first antiseptics, one of the first pain relievers, and one of the most effective ways to extract and deliver medicinal compounds from plants, roots, and botanicals.
When you make a tincture, when you steep raw ingredients in alcohol, you're not just pulling out flavor, you're also pulling out their essential compounds. Alcohol is incredibly efficient at this. It extracts oils, alkaloids, and beneficial elements, and when consumed, it carries them directly into the bloodstream. That’s not a modern innovation. That’s an ancient practice.
One of my favorite historical references is a book called The Distiller of London, Books are very special to me, and I will never forget the day I saw this book it was introduced to me by a dear friend Marc Meltonville a Distilling & Food Historian, he brought it in to the distillery, George Washinton’s Mount Vernon, where we were practicing early American Distillation (which I have to write about later). He knew that I would appreciate it, and my nerdiness went into Overdrive! That book specifically impacted my perception of early alcohol distillation and its practice. Published in 1678. It was written by a physician to the English court, and it wasn’t just a distilling manual. It was a medical guide. It was essentially a collection of knowledge meant for distillers, teaching them how to create tinctures and extracts that could be used to treat everything from digestive issues to anxiety, stress, and sleep disorders. These weren’t novelty drinks. They were remedies, early prescriptions, Alchemy!
Alcohol as medicine in a fermented form goes back to the ancient world; medicinal distilled spirits show up around the 8th century. If you look closely, you can still see that history today. Aperitifs, digestifs, bitters, herbal liqueurs, gins, even absinthe and anise spirits all come from that same foundation. They were never just about flavor. They were about function.
Somewhere between the 16th and 18th centuries, that began to change. As distillation became more widespread and spirits more accessible, alcohol slowly moved out of the apothecary and into the tavern. By the 1700s, especially during periods like the Gin Craze in England, alcohol had taken on a new role. It became recreational, social, and an escape. From that point on, alcohol carried two identities, one rooted in healing and one rooted in consumption.
But what’s fascinating is that even when society tried to eliminate alcohol altogether, it never fully escaped its role as medicine!
During Prohibition in the early 1900s, alcohol was illegal in the United States, but not entirely. If you wanted it legally, you could still obtain it… “as medicine”. You would go to a doctor, receive a “prescription” for whiskey, and take that prescription to a pharmacy to have it filled.
And the list of “medical reasons” was pretty comical by today’s standards.
Doctors prescribed whiskey for:
colds and coughs
influenza
pneumonia
digestive issues
anxiety and nervousness
insomnia
high blood pressure
general pain
In some cases, it was even prescribed simply for “general vitality.” Pharmacies stocked it. Doctors signed off on it. Patients lined up for it. Even at a time when alcohol was outlawed, it was still recognized, at least officially, as medicine.
At the same time, there was a very real and practical reason people continued to rely on it. Water wasn’t always safe to drink. Before modern sanitation and treatment, diseases like cholera spread through contaminated sources. People often drank low-proof beer or cider daily or added alcohol to water to help make it safer. In many cases, alcohol wasn’t just medicine or recreation. It was survival.
Of course, not all this history is clean. Alongside real remedies came exaggeration, and sometimes outright deception. The era of snake oil salesmen brought bottles filled with alcohol mixed with everything from opium to cocaine, turpentine to camphor, all marketed as miracle cures. They promised to regrow hair, cure disease, restore youth, and fix nearly anything that ailed you. Some had real herbal foundations. Many did not. But all of them relied on the same principle—alcohol as a carrier of medicine.
And then there’s Appalachia, where that tradition never really disappeared.
In the hills, long before pharmacies were within reach, people relied on what they could make. Moonshine wasn’t just something to drink. It was something you used. It was rubbed on sore muscles, used to clean wounds, mixed with honey, herbs, and roots to make cough syrups and tonics. It was a remedy passed down through families, built on knowledge that came from necessity. It wasn’t written in books. It was learned through experience, through survival, through generations of people figuring out what worked.
That kind of knowledge doesn’t come from convenience. It comes from doing things the hard way. And that’s really what this comes down to. Innovation out of necessity.
Today, we have a choice. We can take shortcuts. We can use artificial flavors, lab-created compounds, and engineered sweetness to create something that’s fast, consistent, and easy. Or we can do it the way it started. The harder way. The real way.
If you want cherry, you extract it from cherries. If you want orange, you use the zest, the oils, the fruit itself. You build flavor through fermentation, through distillation, or through true extraction. Because when you do that, you’re not just creating flavor. You’re preserving something deeper.
What fascinates me most is that these ingredients still carry their original purpose. Cherry, especially tart cherry, contains natural melatonin and has been used to support sleep and reduce inflammation. Orange, something so simple, can support digestion, stimulate appetite, and provide antioxidants and vitamin C. These are everyday ingredients, but when treated properly, they become something powerful.
Now we’re at a point where things are shifting again. People, especially the younger generations, seem to be drinking less. They’re becoming more aware, more selective, more intentional. At the same time, there’s a growing return to natural remedies, to herbal medicine, to understanding what we’re putting into our bodies.
It makes you wonder if we moved too far away from where this all began.
Modern medicine has done incredible things. There’s no denying that. But there’s also something to be said for reconnecting with the natural world, for understanding the origins of what we consume, and for respecting the process instead of replacing it. There will always be a place for herbalism, alchemy, and just understanding how to make your own medicine from raw ingredients. Especially when one wants to focus on self-reliance. My mind always ventures back to what happens if society collapses. Well, knowing distillation would be a key to survival, & so would understanding the practice of making natural medicine from your spirits.
Distillation was never just about making alcohol.
It was about extracting something meaningful and preserving it.
Flavor was never just flavor.
It was function.
It was purpose.
It was medicine.
And maybe, in some ways…
It still is.
The Spirit of Medicine
By: Amanda Bryant
