In the early twenties the liquor one bought from bootleggers for home use was unreliable, although there were many speakeasies where liquor was expensive but non-poisonous. It was not until about 1926 that the bootlegging industry became well enough organized for the quality of bottled goods or liquor over the bars to be depended upon. Many had been temporarily blinded by bad liquor in the early days of Prohibition. That was why so-called "bathtub" gin became so popular and why it is today identified with the twenties. The most reliable liquor was synthetic gin which one made oneself ...
Grain alcohol sold for from four to eight dollars a gallon and it made two gallons or more of synthetic gin. One mixed the grain alcohol with equal parts of distilled water, dropped in sixteen drops of oil of juniper, added a half ounce of glycerine to emulsify the solution, and shook the mixture well. Omitting the juniper oil, one could buy extracts which produced a synthetic liqueur, such as benedictine, anisette, chartreuse, and so on, but this was not very satisfactory either in taste or in aftereffects, because the extracts tended to produce headaches and to impair digestion. Nearly everybody who drank used synthetic gin for cocktails until bootlegging became a well-organized business, which had to maintain high standards of quality ...
From Burton Rascoe's We Were Interrupted, his sequel of sorts to Before I Forget that follows him through Chicago, New York, and Paris during the 1920s. From the flap: "This book is peopled with the great names of literature, art, business, and the theater—W. Somerset Maugham, Otto Kahn, Texas Guinan, T.S. Eliot, Earl Carroll, Ernest Hemingway, Charles M. Schwab, and many others."
Source:
- Rascoe, Burton. We Were Interrupted
. Garden City: Doubleday, 1947. 166-7.
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