For the Russian people, vodka was and remains the national alcoholic drink. But many of us still do not know who invented vodka, and who should be thanked for its appearance? The current material is devoted to the answers to these important questions. I will give you a short historical background.
Dmitry Mendeleev is not the creator of vodka; it existed even before the birth of the great chemist. Yes, he has a work “On the combination of alcohol with water”, but in it Mendeleev does not try to find out the optimal strength of vodka. The dissertation is devoted to completely different issues. Mendeleev did not drink vodka, believing that it was useful only for the state treasury, and he himself preferred dry wine.
The optimal strength of vodka was determined by the English scientist-chemist J. Gilpin. He believed that the ideal vodka should contain 38 degrees of alcohol. Mendeleev only cited a lesser-known English colleague in his dissertation. But in all Russian production standards, 40-degree vodka has been and continues to be used. The point is that this concentration simplifies the calculation of the alcohol tax.
Even before the scientific works of Gilpin, people drank vodka. It’s just that the alcohol content in it was not regulated at the state level. Only in 1894, the government of tsarist Russia patented vodka, which contained 40 parts by weight of ethyl alcohol, and a charcoal filter was used to remove fusel oils. It was produced under the brand name “Moscow special”.
For the first time, more or less pure alcohol by distillation was learned by Arab alchemists in the 7th-8th centuries. But for them, alcohol was just a medicine for rubbing, the Koran does not encourage the use of alcohol. From this we conclude that the Arabs did not invent vodka, since they do not drink alcohol at all.
In Europe, the Italian monk Valentus was the first to receive alcohol, but he did not try to mix it with water, so Valentus cannot be called the creator of vodka either.
To date, historians have not been able to find written evidence about the person who invented vodka. Most likely, it appeared in some small village, and over time the recipe spread throughout the country. The creator of the vodka was not a famous historical person, it is a folk alcoholic drink.
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