Rakı

Okay.

Another time he got similar kind of stuff along with a bottle of homemade Raki.

Oh my God.

That his uncle had made.

That gets a secondary ferment...

That gets a fermentation all its own, and then they distill that stuff into some, uh, Hellenic moonshine that often goes by the name Raki, R-A-K-I.

Or would that be rho alpha capta, uh, uh, kappa iota? Shit comes off the still at, like, 140 proof.

Y-you can, uh, y-you could, you can strip old furniture and, uh, get, get absolutely, uh, melt down old, uh, you know, layers of ancient varnish with it.

Yeah.

Raki, raki is Turkish.

Ouzo is Greek.

Um-

And what one can do with that brandy is take some Mediterranean spices like green anise, soak that to the brandy, redistill it.

And what comes out the other end is Arapa or Raki or Uzo.

So the process of distilling brandy that's been scented with Mediterranean botanicals like anise and fennel goes back a very long time.

It just so happens that in reading a copy of Nicholas Culpepper's The Complete Herbal from 1653, which was the first real herbal medicine book that was published in English so that commoners could understand it, which of course the medical community didn't like.

All right.

And we are live with our first ever GD Politics virtual happy hour, featuring special guests Mary Radcliffe and Nathaniel Rakich.

Hey, guys.

How's it going?