renders the flavour agreeable to their palates. If you determine to colour with burnt sugar, for the purpose of having a variety of flavours and colours to please your customers, a very small quantity of colouring matter will be sufficient. This colouring recommends itself to nicer palates, which do not like a luscious spirit, but expect the nutty bitterness of flavour which belongs to genuine brandy, as it imparts to the spirit an agreeable bitterness. In all cases of colouring, you should always add the colouring matter gradually, stirring it in the liquor, and trying the colour in a glass, in order that you may ascertain when it is deep enough.

The flavour belonging to genuine French brandy, and which is produced by a small portion of a peculiar essential oil contained in it, and generally known by the name of the oil of wine, is imitated by distilling British molasses spirit over wine lees; but the spirit, previously to its being distilled over the lees, is deprived, in part, of its peculiar disagreeable flavour, by rectification over fresh-burnt charcoal.

and quick-lime. Of course the English malt spirits are not fit for the purpose; but either cider, raisin, or crab spirits may be made use of. Some brandydealers employ a spirit obtained from raisin wine, which is suffered to pass into an incipient acescency. This spirit partakes strongly of the flavour which is characteristic of French brandy.

But the readiest method of flavouring brandy, and the best adapted for the publican and innkeeper, is as follows: To ten gallons of brandy, add ten pounds of bruised prunes, an ounce of pounded terra Japonica, three ounces of spirits of sweet nitre, an ounce of saffron, and half an ounce of mace; but the two last-mentioned ingredients should, previous to the mixing, be steeped in a pint of brandy for about the space of a week or ten days, and shook up once or twice a day, and the liquor should be previously strained before it is added to the other ingredients. Or you may much improve the flavour of your brandy, by the mere addition of some bitter almonds, sugar candy, and

prunes, all being well pounded previous to their being added to the spirit.

To give new brandy or rum a ripe taste, or the quality of age, and make it resemble brandy or rum which has been long kept in oaken casks, oak saw-dust and a spirituous tincture of raisin-stones are used; and in order to make these liquors assume an oily consistence, and the bead, or heading, when agitated in the proof-phial, or drawn in a glass, adopt the means prescribed for producing "the beads." The mixture of thirty drops of liquid ammonia with a gallon of new brandy, will also give it the apparent qualities of age; but remember to well agitate the acid with the liquor.

But in all your attempts to flavour brandy, or any other spirit, you should recollect, not to perform the operation on a large quantity of goods at once; as they do not long preserve the artificial flavour or quality. It is advisable only to prepare what is necessary for present use, or at least what you expect will be. soon consumed.

British Brandy.

British brandy is generally compounded of rectified spirits, vinegar, orris root, raisins, vitriol, colouring, &c. To these ingredients, nitrum dulce, tincture of raisin-stones, tinctura Japonica, cherrylaurel water, bitter-almond meal, cassiabuds, prunes, sugar candy, and extract of capsicums, or of grains of Paradise, are added by some distillers. Others entirely omit the vitriol, the cherry-laurel water, and the extracts. The materials are proportioned according to the taste or inclination of the compounder. As many of the materials above stated, are highly deleterious, it seems necessary to caution publicans and spirit-dealers, that a good British brandy may be composed out of the innoxious part of the above-mentioned ingredients; and by adding to them a portion of good French brandy, an imitation brandy may be made, nearly equal, to foreign.

15. Management, &c. of Rum.

Rum, of which there are various sorts and qualities, according to the place of its produce, and the particular mode of its manufacture, is a spirit distilled from molasses, and other coarse saccharine matter, procured during the manufacture of raw sugars by the planter in the East and West Indies; but it differs from what is denominated sugar spirit, as it contains more of the natural flavour, or essential oil, of the sugar-cane;-a great deal of raw juice, and even parts of the cane itself, being often fermented in the liquor or solution of which the rum is prepared.

Rums are imported into this country from the West India sugar-islands,-Jamaica, Barbadoes, Antigua, and other islands; but the Jamaica produce is the first in point of quality; the Leewardislands rums being inferior to it in flavour, strength, and value. The Bengal rum is not, when it has attained a proper age, in any respect inferior to that of Jamaica; yet but little of that variety ever reaches