Chapter 4
Strong waters
Drink is a preparation, though it is rarely called one. It is fermenting, and then sometimes distilling, and the difference between a farmhouse and a still-house is a matter of equipment rather than craft.
It is cataloged here for two reasons. It is the base of every tincture in the sixth chapter, so a practitioner needs to know what is in the bottle before working with it. And it is the substance her trade saw most of.
What a measure is
Every drink below carries a Strength, which is how many measures one ordinary serving counts as. A serving is a serving as the house pours it: a tankard of small beer and a thimble of brandy are each one serving, and they are not each one measure.
A creature’s capacity is 2 + its Constitution modifier, to a minimum of 1. Up to its capacity in measures, a creature drinks without consequence.
Past that, every further measure calls a DC 10 Constitution saving throw. The Difficulty Class rises by 2 for each saving throw the creature has already made since it began drinking. On a failed save, the creature gains 1 level of Intoxication.
The four levels
Intoxication has four levels, and the effects of a level include those below it:
- Level 1, merry. The creature has Advantage on saving throws against being Frightened, and Disadvantage on ability checks based on Wisdom.
- Level 2, loose. The creature has Disadvantage on ability checks based on Dexterity, Dexterity saving throws, and Wisdom saving throws.
- Level 3, blind. The creature has the Poisoned condition, and its Speed is reduced by 10 feet.
- Level 4, insensible. The creature has the Unconscious condition for 1d4 hours. Damage does not end it. A creature that succeeds on a DC 15 Wisdom (Medicine) check rouses it for 1 minute, after which it drops again.
A creature has one level of Intoxication at a time, never several: a new failed save moves it up the list rather than adding a second copy of where it already is.
Intoxication falls by one level for each hour a creature spends without drinking. Food and water halve that hour. A creature that reached level 4 gains 1 Exhaustion level when its Intoxication ends, and no amount of water prevents it.
What drink asks for afterward
Drink carries a Craving, counted as the first chapter sets it out. What adds to it is being drunk: a day on which a creature reached the third or fourth level of Intoxication adds 1. A cup with a meal adds nothing, however many days in a row it is taken.
A day counts as gone without only if the creature had no drink at all. One cup with supper adds nothing to the count and takes nothing off it, so a creature that has one every evening holds wherever it already stood for as long as it goes on doing it.
Everything in the tables below shares that one count, because they are all the same substance. A body does not want ale and wine separately, and the Strength column decides only how fast an evening arrives at the third level.
At 6 the count converts to an addiction, and it deepens by a degree at 12 and again at 18. Drink is the only thing in this book whose three degrees are written out separately, because it is the one a practitioner meets at every depth. A creature at the first degree is not a smaller version of a creature at the third.
The first degree
The creature wants one every day, and usually at the same hours: with the meal, after the meal, before bed. It is not drunk, it does not get drunk, and nobody who lives with it would call it anything but a drinker.
A day without is the first degree — Disadvantage on Wisdom and Charisma checks — which in drink shows as a short temper, a slowness to settle, and poor company. The creature will also go out of its way to get one: a walk it did not need to take, a visit it did not want to make, an errand invented at the hour the inn is open.
Denied altogether, it sleeps badly. A creature at the first degree that goes to bed without a drink still finishes a Long Rest and still regains its Hit Points, but removes no Exhaustion level from that rest. Creatures at this degree commonly believe the drink is what lets them sleep.
A creature can hold this degree for the whole of a life. The saving throws that end an addiction are made only at the end of a day gone entirely without, and a creature that takes one with supper every evening never has such a day. It never makes one, never gets drunk enough to deepen, and stays where it is until something changes. It is the commonest case in the book.
The second degree
The creature drinks before the day begins, or before the thing in the day it is dreading, and it drinks alone at least sometimes. It conceals how much, and is offended at being asked.
A day without carries the first degree’s temper and the second degree’s Exhaustion level, which in drink is the shake: hands that will not be still until the first one is down. Money meant for other things goes on it.
The third degree
The creature no longer drinks in order to be drunk. It drinks because it has begun, and that is drink’s excess: when it drinks at all, it drinks to the fourth level. It does not intend to, it does not enjoy the last of it, and it cannot take one cup and stop.
What it does in the hours between the third level and the fourth is not the same in every creature. Some become loud and vulgar, some become violent, most become tedious, and the creature is not choosing which. A creature that reached the fourth level remembers nothing of the hours after it reached the third, and learns what it did from whoever was there.
A creature that has been at this degree and has stopped is not afterward a creature that can take one cup. The rule on that is general to this book and drink is its plainest case: one glass, at a wedding, twenty years later, and the creature is at the third degree again the same night, without passing through any count.
That is all this book counts about habitual drinking. What thirty years of it does to a liver, a hand, a trade and a household is not a rule here. It happens too slowly to count in days, and reliably enough that counting it would add nothing.
I am asked where drinking ends and drunkenness begins, and I will not say, because the count does not care and neither do I. A man who takes one glass after every meal of his life and cannot take none is further along than a boy who was insensible at a wedding and has not touched it since. The question was never how much. It is whether one can leave it.
Beer and ale
Malted grain, water, yeast, and — since the hop arrived — hops. The cheapest drink there is, the safest thing to give a child, and the reason most towns have clean-ish water at all.
| Drink | Strength | Serving | What it is | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Small beer | ½ | Tankard | Weak wort, drunk young and cloudy | 1 cp |
| Kvass | ½ | Tankard | Stale rye bread fermented two days | 1 cp |
| Mild | 1 | Tankard | Young ale, sold within the week | 3 cp |
| Table ale | 1 | Tankard | Malt and hops, brewed for the evening | 4 cp |
| Gruit ale | 1 | Tankard | Malt bittered with herbs instead of hops | 5 cp |
| Porter | 2 | Tankard | Browned malt, aged in vats | 6 cp |
| Stout | 2 | Tankard | Roasted malt, black under a standing head | 6 cp |
| Sour ale | 2 | Tankard | Ale left open to the air, then aged a year | 8 cp |
| Braggot | 2 | Tankard | Ale and honey fermented together | 1 sp |
| Barley wine | 4 | Cup | Ale brewed to its limit and kept for years | 2 sp |
Two of them are worth more than a line.
Small beer
What everyone drinks, including children and the sick, because the water is worse. Pale, cloudy, and thin, with almost no head. It smells of wet bread. It tastes of wet bread, and faintly sour at the end, and a person can drink it all day and work afterward.
One will not distil small beer, nor tincture in it, nor keep it above four days. It is food, and one does not tincture in soup.
Gruit ale
Ale bittered with herbs instead of hops — bog myrtle, yarrow, marsh rosemary — which is how it was done before the hop and how it is still done where the hop will not grow. Every gruit is its brewer’s own receipt, and that is the reason it is written out here.
A gruit is a metheglin’s cousin and it deserves the same attention. Some of what goes in a gruit is in my sixth chapter, and a brewer who is generous with the myrtle has made something stronger than ale without meaning to.
Cider, perry and mead
Fruit and honey, fermented — the drink of orchards and of people who keep bees, and the oldest of anything in this chapter.
| Drink | Strength | Serving | What it is | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cider | 1 | Tankard | Pressed apple, fermented | 3 cp |
| Hydromel | 1 | Cup | Mead made thin, drunk young | 4 cp |
| Perry | 1 | Tankard | Pressed pear, and softer than cider | 4 cp |
| Mead | 2 | Cup | Honey and water | 8 cp |
| Cyser | 2 | Cup | Apples and honey together | 1 sp |
| Melomel | 2 | Cup | Mead with hedge fruit at the fermenting | 1 sp |
| Pyment | 2 | Cup | Honey and grapes together | 1 sp |
| Metheglin | 2 | Cup | Mead with the maker’s own herbs | 2 sp |
| Sack mead | 3 | Cup | So much honey the yeast gives up before it is done | 3 sp |
Mead
Honey and water, fermented, which is the oldest of them and the one every people claims to have invented. It tastes sweet and then hot, and the heat arrives later than a drinker expects.
One will keep mead a year before drinking it and five before judging it. What is drunk at a month is not bad mead; it is not yet mead.
Metheglin
Mead with herbs put in at the fermenting, to the maker’s own receipt. It is where this chapter and the fifth one touch. Some of what goes in is a kitchen herb. Some of it is not, and an entry in the sixth chapter that says taken in drink is often taken exactly this way — in which case the entry’s own measure and Craving apply on top of the mead’s Strength.
Wine
Grapes, fermented, and everything a cellar does to them afterward. The range in this section is the widest in the book: the same fruit makes both the thinnest drink in the chapter and the most expensive.
| Drink | Strength | Serving | What it is | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Country wine | 1 | Cup | Anything but grapes — elderflower, sap, nettle | 3 cp |
| Table wine | 2 | Cup | Grape, thin and sour, usually cut with water | 5 cp |
| Resined wine | 2 | Cup | Wine sealed with pine resin, which gets into it | 6 cp |
| Claret | 2 | Cup | Light red, drunk young, shipped in quantity | 8 cp |
| Sack | 3 | Cup | Wine with spirit added, so that it travels | 1 sp |
| Canary | 3 | Cup | Sack’s sweeter cousin, from warmer islands | 2 sp |
| Malmsey | 3 | Cup | The heaviest of the fortified, dark as treacle | 3 sp |
| Straw wine | 3 | Cup | Grapes dried to half raisins, then pressed | 5 sp |
| Fine wine | 2 | Cup | A named vineyard, a good year, a cold cellar | 2 gp |
The fortified wines are the ones a table gets wrong. Sack, canary and malmsey are wine by name and carry half again what a claret carries, and they are poured into the same cup.
Fine wine
The same fruit as the table wine and nothing else the same: a named vineyard, a good year, and ten or fifteen years in a cellar that somebody paid to keep cool. Deep and clear, and it throws a sediment that a careful house decants off. It smells of the fruit it was and then of a dozen things that were never in it. It tastes long — the flavor arrives, changes twice, and is still there a minute after the mouthful is gone.
One will not tincture in fine wine, nor cook with it, nor give it to a patient. It is ten gold the bottle and it does nothing that two silver of common will not do as well, and I have said so to the faces of men who did not care for hearing it.
Spirits
Everything above, put through a still. A spirit is not a different drink so much as the same drink with the water taken out, and everything in this section is dangerous in a way nothing in the previous three is: a thimble looks like nothing and is four measures.
| Drink | Strength | Serving | What it is | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aqua vitae | 4 | Thimble | Wine, distilled plain | 2 sp |
| Marc | 4 | Thimble | What the wine press left — skins, stems, pips | 2 sp |
| Rum | 4 | Thimble | Cane sugar or its molasses, arrived by ship | 2 sp |
| Bread spirit | 4 | Thimble | Rye or wheat mash, charcoal-filtered, cold | 2 sp |
| Arrack | 4 | Thimble | Palm sap or rice, from a long way east | 3 sp |
| Brandy | 4 | Thimble | Aqua vitae kept in wood for years | 3 sp |
| Geneva | 4 | Thimble | Grain spirit flavored with juniper | 3 sp |
| Fruit spirit | 4 | Thimble | Cherries, plums or pears fermented whole | 4 sp |
| Usquebaugh | 4 | Thimble | Malted grain, years in wood | 4 sp |
| Wormwood water | 4 | Thimble | Spirit redistilled over wormwood and anise | 5 sp |
Three of them matter beyond the table: the one every tincture is built on, the one most often badly made, and the one that is half a simple already.
Aqua vitae
The first of the distilled and the plainest, and the base of near every tincture in the sixth chapter. What is wanted at a bench is a clean aqua vitae rather than a good one.
Aqua vitae is the base of near every tincture in the next chapter, and one will want it clean rather than good. What is pleasant to drink carries too much of its own flavor into a preparation, and a tincture is not improved by tasting of grapes.
Geneva
Distilled grain flavored with juniper, made everywhere and made badly nearly everywhere. A bad one tastes of turpentine, and there is a great deal of bad one.
Juniper is in it because juniper covers what the still did not take out. One will remember this when buying cheap geneva, and one will remember what it is covering.
Wormwood water
Spirit redistilled over wormwood, anise and fennel, sold green and drunk cut with water, which turns it cloudy. It tastes of anise first and wormwood a long time afterward.
Wormwood is in my sixth chapter as well, and one will read that entry before drinking much of this. A little wormwood settles a stomach. A great deal of wormwood is not drink at all, and the people who sell this by the bottle would rather one did not ask how much is in it.
Liquors
A liquor is a spirit that has been made to taste of something else and then sweetened: a herb, a nut, a peel, a stone, a bean, steeped in aqua vitae until the spirit has taken what it holds, then let down with sugar syrup. It is the sixth chapter’s tincture made for pleasure rather than for dose, and by the same method.
The sugar and the water bring the Strength down, so a liquor is weaker than the spirit it was built on and stronger than a wine. It is served in a small glass and drunk slowly, and the sweetness hides the spirit as reliably as it does in a mixture.
| Liquor | Strength | Serving | What it is | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aniseed water | 2 | Glass | Anise and fennel seed | 6 cp |
| Black bitters | 3 | Glass | Gentian, rind and a dozen herbs | 8 cp |
| Honey cordial | 2 | Glass | Honey and usquebaugh | 8 cp |
| Cherry cordial | 2 | Glass | Sour cherries, stones and all | 1 sp |
| Orange cordial | 2 | Glass | Dried bitter peel | 1 sp |
| Stonefruit milk | 2 | Glass | Apricot kernels, sugar, cream | 1 sp |
| Coffee cordial | 2 | Glass | Roasted bean, sugar, bread spirit | 2 sp |
| Cloister green | 3 | Glass | A closed order’s own herb list | 3 sp |
Three of the eight need saying out loud. Stonefruit milk will not keep above a week, being cut with cream, and is the only one on the list a house cannot lay down.
Aniseed water
Anise and fennel steeped in a clean spirit and sweetened, drunk either neat or let down with water, which turns it milky.
A glass taken after a heavy meal settles a stomach, in the same small way ginger tea does.
Coffee cordial
Roasted bean steeped in bread spirit and sweetened hard, drunk cold.
It carries no waking at all. Whatever the roasting put into the coffee does not survive the steeping, so a creature that drinks it for the purpose is drinking sugar and spirit.
Cloister green
A closed order’s own list of herbs, distilled and steeped and sweetened over a year, sold in a sealed flask with the order’s mark on it and imitated everywhere. No two makers’ agree, and the imitations are not the same drink.
I have taken a green liquor apart twice and got twenty-nine herbs out of it the first time and thirty-one the second, and I could not swear the flask was the same recipe. What one is buying is a year of somebody’s patience, and I say that as a compliment, which is not how it is usually taken.
Mixtures
Everything above is one thing fermented, and sometimes distilled. Everything below is two or more of them put together with heat, spice, eggs, cream, fruit or sugar — which is a preparation as much as anything in the sixth chapter is, and is made in the same kitchen by the same person on a colder evening. Several are built on a sparkle, and those are in the third chapter.
A mixture’s Strength is what went into it, not what it tastes of, and that is the whole danger of the section. Sugar, cream and spice hide spirit completely; a punch made of arrack tastes of lemon and drinks like four measures, because it is four measures. Where a mixture is cut with water, milk or cream it carries less than its parts, and the entry says so; where it is heated with a spirit it carries all of them.
Of ice, and of short measure
One will ask for a mixture without ice, and one will watch the face of whoever is asked.
A house that ices a punch is not cooling it for one’s comfort. Ice takes up the room the spirit was meant to occupy and then becomes water in the cup, so that one pays for four measures, receives two, and drinks the difference back as it melts. The bowl looks full throughout, which is the entire trick.
Taken without ice a mixture is warmer and honest, and one may count what one has had. And a cup that has been ice is water, and water alone rusts the bones, which I have written elsewhere and will write again.
A mixture is written out below where it was made for something other than pleasure, or where its Strength is not what a drinker would guess. The rest were made to be enjoyed, and there is nothing to add to them beyond the table.
| Mixture | Strength | Serving | What it is | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sparkle punch | — | Cup | Sparkles, fruit, sugar | 6 cp |
| Shandy | ½ | Tankard | Ale, ginger sparkle | 3 cp |
| Caudle | 1 | Cup | Ale, egg, oatmeal, spice | 4 cp |
| Posset | 1 | Cup | Milk, ale, spice | 6 cp |
| Purl | 1 | Tankard | Ale, wormwood, ginger | 5 cp |
| Spritz | 1 | Cup | Wine, sparkle, peel | 5 cp |
| Negus | 2 | Cup | Sack, hot water, lemon, nutmeg | 8 cp |
| Hippocras | 2 | Cup | Wine, honey, spice | 3 sp |
| Sack posset | 2 | Cup | Milk, sack, spice | 1 sp |
| Syllabub | 2 | Cup | Cream, wine or cider, sugar | 1 sp |
| Cordial long | 2 | Cup | Liquor, sparkle | 1 sp |
| Shrub | 3 | Cup | Fruit, vinegar, sugar, spirit | 1 sp |
| Punch | 4 | Cup | Spirit, citrus, sugar, water | 4 sp |
| Aqua mirabilis | 4 | Thimble | Spirit redistilled with herbs | 1 gp |
| Long spirit | 4 | Tankard | Spirit, sparkle, citrus | 4 sp |
| Flip | 5 | Tankard | Ale, spirit, egg, sugar | 1 sp |
Caudle
Ale thickened with egg and oatmeal, spiced, and drunk hot — invalid food more than drink, given to the sick, the newly delivered, and anybody who has been out in weather. Pale brown, thick enough to coat a spoon. It smells of oats and nutmeg. It tastes bland and comforting, and it is the only thing in this chapter a physician will hand you without comment.
A creature that drinks a cup of caudle and then rests has that rest count as though it were taken warm and fed.
Purl
Ale warmed with wormwood and ginger, bitter as a rebuke, drunk in the morning by people who were drinking something else the night before. Brown and cloudy. It smells of bitter herbs over malt. It tastes appalling and works.
A creature that drinks a tankard of purl reduces its Intoxication by 1 level, and can benefit from purl only once between Long Rests.
Purl is the only receipt in this book people thank me for and then go on doing the thing that made them want it. I have stopped saying anything and I have raised the price.
Flip
Ale, spirit, egg and sugar, mixed and then heated by plunging a red-hot iron into the tankard, which makes it froth and gives it a scorched note nothing else has. Deep brown under a tall head. It smells burnt and sweet. It tastes of caramel and singed cream, and the iron is not optional — a flip mixed cold is merely a bad drink.
The spirit in a flip is poured by the gill and not by the thimble, which is why it is the strongest thing in this chapter and why nobody believes that until afterward.
Hippocras
Nothing in it carries drink but the wine, so it is a wine’s Strength however hot and sweet it tastes — which she notes is the opposite of the trap the rest of this section sets.
Wine steeped with honey, cinnamon, ginger and grains of paradise, then strained through a long conical bag of felt that the trade calls a sleeve. Deep red-brown, and perfectly clear if the sleeve was doing its work. It smells of the spice before the wine. It tastes sweet and hot and long.
Of the straining
One will hang the sleeve and let it drip, and one will not squeeze it, however late the hour and however many are waiting. A squeezed hippocras is cloudy and bitter both, and the man who squeezed it always says the sleeve was at fault.
Punch
Spirit, citrus, sugar, water and spice — five things, which is what the name means, and the reason every house makes it differently is that only the proportions are secret. Color according to the spirit and the fruit, from pale gold to deep red. It smells of lemon and whatever it was built on. It tastes cold, sweet and sharp, and it hides its spirit more completely than anything else in this chapter.
Punch is made in a bowl and drunk in cups, and nobody counts cups. I have been called to more houses for punch than for every simple in the sixth chapter together, and the people who sent for me were always surprised.
Aqua mirabilis
The apothecary’s own drink: a clean spirit redistilled over herbs — sage, marjoram, mace, cloves, lemon peel — until it comes off sweet and green-smelling. Faintly gold, oily. It smells of a garden in the sun. It tastes hot, herbal and very slightly sweet, and it costs what it costs because a still is expensive and it is charged twice.
It is a spirit charged twice and cut with nothing, so a thimble carries as much as a thimble of anything in the spirits table. A creature that drinks one has Advantage on the next saving throw it makes against cold weather or exposure within the hour.
It is sold as a cure for everything from palsy to grief, and I have made my share of that money. What it is, is a warm drink for a cold road, and I will say so to anybody who asks me plainly.
The sparkle mixtures
Four of the mixtures are built on a sparkle, and the sparkle is water: it adds no drink and takes none away. A shandy therefore carries half what its ale carried, a spritz one measure where the cup of wine carried two, a cordial long exactly what the liquor carried, and a sparkle punch nothing at all.
Long spirit
A thimble of spirit in a tankard of sparkle, with citrus if the house has any, served cold enough that the spirit is hard to find in it. It tastes of almost nothing.
A long spirit is four measures. It carries exactly what the thimble carried, in a tankard that drinks like a sparkle. It is the plainest case of what this section warns about, and it is ordered by people who would not order four thimbles.
Where it is found
A house stocks what its custom can pay for, and the table is what a house of each sort pours. It is a band and not a floor. A house pours its own line and the one poorer than it, and nothing further down than that: a comfortable inn has claret and it has table ale, but it keeps no kvass, and there is no barrel of mild in an aristocratic cellar.
| House | What it pours |
|---|---|
| Wretched | Small beer and kvass, badly kept, and nothing else whatever |
| Squalid | Mild, and one unnamed spirit poured from an unmarked jar |
| Poor | Table ale, cider, country wine, purl, caudle, marc, bread spirit |
| Modest | Porter, stout, table wine, mead, hydromel, geneva, rum, aniseed water, shandy, negus, posset |
| Comfortable | Gruit, sour ale, braggot, perry, claret, resined wine, brandy, usquebaugh, most liquors, hippocras, spritz, shrub |
| Wealthy | Barley wine, sack, canary, cyser, melomel, metheglin, arrack, fruit spirit, aqua mirabilis, punch, long spirit |
| Aristocratic | Fine wine, malmsey, straw wine, sack mead, pyment, cloister green, and a cellar rather than a shelf |
Three things do not follow the table.
Small beer is at every level, because it is the water that is safe to drink. A house too grand to sell it still keeps it, for the kitchen and the servants rather than for the table.
Wormwood water is sold where it is not forbidden and nowhere it is, so it appears at both ends of the table and seldom in the middle.
And a house of any level keeps one bottle far above its station, held back for a particular customer or a particular occasion.