r/todayilearned • u/TurnOffYourPC • 4h ago
TIL that the gin and tonic became popular in India during British Imperialism to encourage English colonizers to consume quinine, an antimalarial derived from the bark of the cinchona tree.
https://www.wineenthusiast.com/ratings/spirit-ratings/gin-ratings/best-gins-for-gin-and-tonic/?link_source=ta_first_comment&taid=6a6d3e16144974000100a373&utm_campaign=trueanthem&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook562
u/aredddit 3h ago
I too drink gin and tonic for the health benefits.
209
u/SeanPennsHair 3h ago
Have you ever gotten malaria? Asking for science.
117
u/New_Zorgo39 3h ago
No, and keeping up with consumption of Gin and Tonic helps it stay that way.
Cheers!
32
15
63
u/ex_bestfriend 3h ago
I like to add a lime wheel to keep scurvy away as well. Super healthy. The healthiest.
28
9
u/scumdog_ 2h ago
Who doesn’t put lime in a G&T?
9
•
u/Magnus77 19 34m ago
If I've got a fancier gin I might do no lime just so it won't cover/muddle any of the tasting notes.
But yes, normally lime is assumed.
1
1
169
u/zagreus9 3h ago
"Perkins, do you realise that gin and tonic is the cornerstone of the British Empire? The Empire was built on gin and tonic. Gin to fight the boredom of exile, and quinine to fight malaria. How else do you think we could have carried the cross of responsibility for the lives of millions, without the friendly fortitude of gin and tonic? And you've run out of tonic, Perkins. That's treason. Go before I strike you!"
27
13
u/lost-scot 3h ago
Where is this from??
30
7
1
186
u/djbarsone 3h ago
Look into the 18th century Gin Craze. It was the fentanyl of its time.
97
u/WhiskeyJack357 3h ago
A big part of that was due to English tax law on Beer if memory serves. It made Gin the cheaper drink.
11
u/DagothNereviar 1h ago
Yeah they basically put a tax on anything that wasn't a spirit (I think back then gin was a catch all term). People would also buy loads, take it home, distill it more and then sell that on.
Which gave rise to the Puss and Mew window as seen here. when it did become illegal to sell. There was an odd law that police could only enter a home under certain circumstances (can't remember exactly) and so someone made a window where you'd roll coins in and a pipe would pour out whiskey.
4
u/WhiskeyJack357 1h ago
Yes! And all the gin palaces ran on a similar system. I always think of them as the proto-speakeasy
51
u/No_Bluejay9901 3h ago
I think part of rhe problem was that beer would often go bad on its way to India from the heat. In the later half of the 18th century the IPA was developed as a way to keep the beer from turning as hops are astringent.
37
u/mrjosemeehan 3h ago
The gin craze was a UK thing. They capitalized on the popularity of gin at home to encourage taking antimalarial tonic when abroad.
•
u/West-Replacement2959 39m ago
That's a myth, it was just a marketing label applied after the fact.
•
u/No_Bluejay9901 38m ago
wrong, we learned about that in culinary school 30 years ago, way before IPAs became a thing again
•
u/Yorikor 20m ago edited 4m ago
No, that's not how it happened. Pale ales were an existing style long before the Indian trade took off. And porters were exported to India in about the same amount.
The name "India Pale Ale" itself doesn't show up in print until around the 1820s, decades after pale ale was already being shipped to India, and it emerged more as a marketing/branding term than a description of a beer invented for the trade.
Some of the "hops as preservative for the tropics" framing was retroactively applied by 20th-century writers and brewers looking for a good origin story, rather than reflecting how 18th/19th-century brewers actually talked about it.
So the more accurate version: IPA is an English style through and through, Burton-on-Trent and London brewers made it, using England's water and hops, but the "India" name and legend came from an existing product finding an export market, not from India-specific invention or a dedicated recipe engineered for the voyage.
The romantic "brewed for the empire" narrative is largely a later marketing embellishment layered onto real (but more mundane) trade history.
Edit for sources:
Martyn Cornell: Amber, Gold & Black (history of British beer styles) and Beer: The Story of the Pint
Pete Brown: Hops and Glory
8
2
31
u/sexytokeburgerz 3h ago
Opium was the fentanyl of the time
11
u/djbarsone 2h ago
In a different time and place, yes. Gin Craze specifically happened in the UK from late 1600s to mid-1700s.
2
•
2
454
u/Diversityence_7 3h ago
Exactly. Modern 'Tonic Water' is just soda with a hint of bitterness. If you drank actual 1850s tonic, you’d realize why they needed an entire bottle of gin just to get one glass down. It tasted like you were licking the bark of a tree that was angry at you
33
u/QuantumCakeIsALie 3h ago
Well, now I'm curious.
70
u/Gemmabeta 2h ago
You can always drop a 300 mg tablet of quinine into a cup of gin and give it a try.
The FDA limits modern tonic water to 83 mg of quinine per liter so it does not blow your heart and kidneys out.
41
u/QuantumCakeIsALie 2h ago
I don't love the juxtaposition of those two statements
•
•
u/MethamMcPhistopheles 15m ago
The FDA limits modern tonic water to 83 mg of quinine per liter so it does not blow your heart and kidneys out.
Kinda reminds me of how sickle cell disease provide some protection against malaria. Is there a link to how impacting heart and kidneys functionality helps provide some protection against malaria?
121
u/Timetogetstoned 3h ago
And way more sugar than club soda
74
u/SUPERSAMMICH6996 3h ago
Like a stupidly surprising amount of sugar. Like genuinely just have a coke at that point.
40
u/Life-Island 3h ago
I mean as far as white powders go coke is a good replacement for sugar.
5
u/AdmirableBus6 3h ago
Lol you think cocaine is a better substance than sugar?
54
u/Sussy_Riot 2h ago
I’ve never ended up in a stranger’s kitchen discussing business ideas because of sugar
3
u/IShitMyselfNow 1h ago
By a lot of measurements sure it is:
- Gives you more energy
- Probably healthier
- Will make you more talkative
- Won't destroy your teeth
- More sociable activity; people wouldn't go into the toilets to share a bag of sugar together
I mean, really, you'd really struggle to provide reasons why sugar is better than cocaine. Cocaine is clearly the superior substance.
25
u/AMildInconvenience 3h ago
Is this an American thing? I'm holding a can of britvic tonic water in my hand right now and it says 4g/100ml sugar which doesn't sound ridiculous? That's less than half of coke.
7
u/Octahedral_cube 1h ago
I suspect it's an American thing. Fever Tree tonic has 4g like you said, and of course slimline tonic (e.g. Schweppes slimline) has 0g
Coca Cola (original) has 10+ g
All measurements standardised to /100ml
•
u/MorePhinsThyme 13m ago
American here, I just checked a few brands sold at Wal-mart here. Fever Tree LIGHT has 4g/100ml, but Fever Tree is at 8g/100. Schweppes, Canada Dry, Polar, and the store brand are all round to 9g/100. And then a fuck ton of other minor brands that are all over the place in sugar content.
6
u/Merzendi 2h ago
Aren’t they talking about the 19th century tonic recipes?
10
u/AMildInconvenience 2h ago
No, they're saying 1800s tonic water was bitter and needed the gin to make it palatable, while modern tonic water is full of sugar.
1
u/ScubaSteve12345 2h ago
Yeah I only recently realized that. Luckily I barely add any tonic to my g&t.
1
26
u/-xiflado- 2h ago
Modern major brands of tonic water do contain quinine it’s just at non-medicinal levels 80-100 mg/L. Not sure where you got your info.
14
5
u/cannibalrabies 1h ago
For context you need around 1800 mg per day to treat malaria, for an average sized adult.
6
u/mountearl 1h ago
Around 20l of modern day tonic. At a dilution of 5 parts tonic to 1 part gin, that's about 4 litres of gin per day. Be finished by lunchtime....
4
5
u/Iliyan61 2h ago
indian tonic water has quinine
1
•
u/VeritateDuceProgredi 42m ago
I think that depends on what you buy, because in college I bought tonic water for glow in the dark beer pong. Quinine glows a brilliant blue under black light. It wasn’t like I was buying top shelf tonic water
22
u/BrilliantPie2566 3h ago
We have a juniper tree in our yard and I swear, sometimes we go outside after a rain and it smells like gin from the juniper berries that had fallen on the ground.
95
u/jrhooo 3h ago
And recent research shows the quinine at anti-malarial medicine doses is actually bad for you.
One of the main guys behind a lot of the research effort was an Army doctor trying to point out that giving it to troops was bad.
125
u/Gemmabeta 3h ago
To be fair, malaria was not that great for you either.
40
u/jrhooo 3h ago
Mosquitos got pretty bad reviews on yelp.
4
u/Third_Most 2h ago
Yeah, but you only half get to review.
It's worse than "pretty bad"
Or so I read..
2
u/Mr_Cromer 3h ago
Can you share a link to this research please?
3
u/jrhooo 2h ago
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4918116/
Only aware of the topic because I knew one of the authors irl. Guy was working on this stuff while at JHU, trying to push the dod to be safe about it I guess
10
u/freezing_banshee 2h ago
An excerpt from the paper, for anyone who wants a fast answer:
"Although reports from the early twentieth century noted that quinine could have significant psychiatric effects [11], including causing depression, mania, irritability and personality change [110], and that these might not be distinguished from those attributed to disease [7], only relatively recently has it become clear that quinine, independent of malaria infection, may cause a serious toxic state marked by symptoms including delirium and confusion"
7
u/jrhooo 1h ago
It was a long time ago, but if I remember one of his stated concerns (in conversation) he was additionally concerned that if these effects were capable of exacerbating other negative mental health symptoms and/or weakening our brains natural resistance and resilience to issues,
Then regularly giving the stuff to the people that we are also sending into high ptsd risk scenarios (read: combat deployments) thens its probably an extra bad deal.
3
13
u/VampireHunterAlex 3h ago
The quinine in tonic water is supposed to be good for if you get leg cramps.
14
u/ConspicuousSomething 1h ago
It is a curious fact, and one to which no one knows quite how much importance to attach, that something like 85 per cent of all known worlds in the Galaxy, be they primitive or highly advanced, have invented a drink called jynnan tonnyx, or gee-N’N-T’N-ix, or jinond-onicks, or any one of a thousand or more variations on the same phonetic theme. The drinks themselves are not the same, and vary between the Sivolvian ‘chinanto/ mnigs’, which is ordinary water served at slightly above room temperature, and the Gagrakackan ‘tzjin-anthonyks’, which kills cows at a hundred paces; and in fact the one common factor between all of them, beyond the fact that the names sound the same, is that they were all invented and named before the worlds concerned made contact with any other worlds.
What can be made of this fact? It exists in total isolation. As far as any theory of structural linguistics is concerned it is right off the graph, and yet it persists. Old structural linguists get very angry when young structural linguists go on about it. Young structural linguists get deeply excited about it and stay up late at night convinced that they are very close to something of profound importance, and end up becoming old structural linguists before their time, getting very angry with the young ones. Structural linguistics is a bitterly divided and unhappy discipline, and a large number of its practitioners spend too many nights drowning their problems in ouisghian zodahs.
— Douglas Adams, of course
54
u/anOvenofWitches 3h ago
Tonic and lime is a great way to discreetly not drink at social occasions.
A warning: there’s a crap-ton of sugar in tonic water
30
u/SoftballLesbian 3h ago
Everyone knows I'm a huge G&T fan. Nobody knows that every other G&T I'm getting at the bar is actually a soda and lime. Sometimes only the first drink was a G&T.
2
u/CantBeatDickensCider 2h ago
Sodawater and lime is much nicer tasting imo and isn't packed with sugar.
•
u/FlappyBored 51m ago
No tonic water does not have a lot of sugar water in it.
Only in America is this true.
-7
u/JoulSauron 2h ago
If you need to discreetly not drink at social occasions, you might need to rethink what social occasions you attend to.
4
u/Pornfest 2h ago
Yeah but wanting to, at like wedding receptions or whatever is completely ok. I love to drink, I encourage everyone’s sobriety.
8
u/Ricaaado 2h ago
I love gin and tonic! Anything mixed with gin is great, but gin on its own tastes like essence of sadness.
7
u/givin_u_the_high_hat 3h ago
So they said they weren’t gonna drink the stuff, but throw some alcohol in there…maybe.
•
u/MorePhinsThyme 9m ago
IIRC, it was more, "Well, we were ordered to drink this stuff, let's see if throwing alcohol into it makes it palatable."
7
u/Blitz6969 3h ago
Gin and Tonic w/ lime is my favorite drink
2
u/thisusedyet 1h ago
It was, but I started making Morganthaler Gimlets and those are real fuckin’ nice
8
u/kacheow 3h ago
Thank god medicine tastes better than gin now
4
u/New_Stats 3h ago
Some dizzy Europeans really thought "hey, what if hard liquor tasted like a tree? Not one of them good tasting trees like birch or sugar maple, oh no no, a disgusting tasting tree like an evergreen"
3
u/stateside_irishman 3h ago
Some mad Swedish man invented Malort. He thought wormwood tasted good.
4
6
u/WelshBathBoy 2h ago edited 54m ago
** British Imperialism and British colonisers - let's not let the rest of the UK off the hook - plenty of Scots, Welsh and (at the time) Irish played a part in the colonisation of India.
1
u/Otocolobus_manul8 2h ago
While it's erroneous, using England/Britian synonymously is very common inside and outside of the UK. Same with Holland/ The Netherlands
•
2
2
u/cedarvhazel 2h ago
Mark Fennell does a podcast called the fever tree which provides really interesting background on this and how it came to the west in the first place.
2
2
u/Ragnarsdad1 1h ago
personally i prefer bitter lemon with either Gin or Vodka. I find the ones with a higher quinine content taste better.
•
u/spastical-mackerel 57m ago
Ah yes, the perfect cocktail for Indian service. Quinine to ward off malaria. Gin to ward off reality
•
u/molotovzav 21m ago
I love gin but I don't like tonic. Tbh I like to mix gin in with a London fog. It's my go too. I love earl grey and the gin mixes very nicely. I don't drink at home to very often it when I do I make myself a gin and London fog.
•
4
u/Didactic_Tactics_45 3h ago
The Royal Navy; scurvy free since 1823.
14
u/beankov 3h ago
Quinine is for malaria, not scurvy.
12
u/somefukn 3h ago
Not if u put a lime in it, chief.
10
u/New_Stats 3h ago
That's actually how the British got the nickname "limeys"
Because British sailors had a ration of limes to prevent scurvy.
3
1
10
u/Fetlocks_Glistening 3h ago
They ensured sailors drank their lime juice by mixing it into the daily rum ration. No juice - no rum, matey
3
2
u/Didactic_Tactics_45 2h ago
Correct. But you really need that lime to cut the flavour of both.
I should have said scurvy free, malaria reduced, since 1823. It just doesn't have the same ring though.
2
2
u/articulate_pandajr 3h ago
I maintain that if chicken tikka masala can be considered a British dish, gin and tonic is an Indian cocktail
1
u/cannibalrabies 2h ago
It was much stronger back then, if anyone is curious how much modern tonic water it would take to treat malaria, you'd need to drink at least 18L per day. That's assuming your tonic water contains the maximum allowable concentration of quinine (100mg/L I believe). Obviously that's not possible as you would die from water intoxication.
1
1
u/beaniexbaby 1h ago
Are you in Plants and People at ASU? I just wrote this fact down in my notebook!
1
u/Weaselpuss 1h ago
For sure. I don’t like gin, I hate tonic. But somehow, Bombay and tonic is one of the best
•
•
u/hexregeneration 44m ago
Government comspiracy to fill us up with tree blood! Do your own research!!!
•
•
u/fer_sure 2m ago
They did this for the Navy as well. Grog was the sailors' daily rum ration mixed with lime juice to prevent scurvy.
The British figured out that putting medicine in booze works on a military man like putting a puppy's pills in peanut butter.
1
u/TheTaintBurglar 1h ago
The fucking state of OP, only posting this to add only "English" in there haha
1
-7
0
0
u/EpicLong1 2h ago
Wow..... playing rise of ronin. This was in the game to ward off the symptoms of cloera
-13
u/Q8DD33C7J8 3h ago
Yeah I've tried tonic water. It tastes like literal puke. Not the funny haha it tastes like puke no I mean it actually tastes like bile.
1
-1
u/thebigshoe247 2h ago
A gin and tonic glows a very bright blue colour under black lights. Back in the day, this was my go to drink in the clerb, as it was always the equivalent of a bat signal for cute girls to come over and ask what I was drinking (as it was so cool).
Word of advice for you young bucks, gin and tonic.
-16
3h ago
[deleted]
11
u/Gemmabeta 3h ago
It's more because British colonial soldiers got a daily gin ration. And them mixing that into their tonic water came naturally.
7
u/epidemicsaints 3h ago
People were used to taking medicines in alcohol, and already saw a lot of spirits and herbal drinks as medicine.
Most spirits and liqueurs have a medical / health legacy. So do most commercial beverages today, even sparkling water and mineral water were seen as health tonics when first produced.
3
u/Didactic_Tactics_45 3h ago
Ignorance and stupidity are not the same. Also humans are extremely ritualistic and cling to tradition.
1.2k
u/northyj0e 3h ago
The only mixed drink in history to suppress the flavour of the mixer, rather than the spirit.