Rakia - A Historic Account

I have found a good post that give a detailed account of the Rakia and its history. It brings up some new insight to the regions where the Rakia making process have been made, not only Bulgaria. Although this is a business website with products to sell, the writing is quite impressive and of great interest to anyone who want to know more about this spirit.

Thanks to posts like this Rakia is gaining an increasing worldwide following over the past few years.

Rakia is hard liquor similar to brandy and vodka, popular in the Balkans and among the South Slavic peoples. The tradition of making and drinking rakia as well as all other distilled beverages, is a lot poorer than a corresponding wine tradition. However, the two of them are certainly intertwined, since the process of distillation as we know it today was first used by South Italian monks approximately a thousand years ago. As the reader will know, it was the monks who dominated the production of wine for almost a whole millennium. Prior to Italian monks, distillation was used by alchemists in Alexandria, but their experiments did not contribute to producing alcoholic drinks, since they had a different purpose. clipped from www.klikic.hr