A little bit of background knowledge can help you understand how spirits came about and appreciate them even more.

A distilled beverage, also called spirits or liquor, is a preparation for consumption containing ethyl alcohol purified by distillation from a fermented substance such as wine, malt, or grain. The term is usually restricted to alcoholic beverages.

Alcohol levels higher than 15% have historically been obtained in a number of ways.The most common method being distillation . In a basic form the technique of distillation goes back to Babylonia in the fourth millennium BC when specially shaped clay plots, it is thought, were used to extract some small amounts of distilled alcohol through natural cooling, for the manufacture of perfumes. Alcohol appears first in Europe in the mid 12th century among alchemists, who were more interested in medical "elixirs" than making gold from lead. It first appears under the name aqua ardens (burning water) in the Compendium Salerni from the medical school at Salerno.

Claims on the origins of alcoholic beverages are controversial, often invoking national pride, but they are plausible after the 12th century when Irish whiskey, German Hausbrand and German Brandy can all be safely said to have arrived. These beverages would have had much lower alcohol content, around 40 percent, and had "universal" medicinal elixir application. After the mid 14th century, when distilled liquors were commonly applied as remedies for the Black Death, consumption of liquor rose dramatically in Europe. Around 1400 it was discovered how to distill spirits from beer and grain spirits (corn, barley, rye) and even sawdust was used to make alcohol, a much cheaper option than grapes. Thus began the "national" drinks of Europe: jenever (Belgium and the Netherlands), gin (England), schnapps (Germany), aquavit (Scandinavia), vodka (Russia), rakia (Balkans). The actual names only emerged in the 16th century but the drinks were well known.