Vodka, in the common imagination, is somehow squeezed from the otherwise mundane potato. The idea is a bit jolting– a crystal martini glass pinched between two manicured fingers full of nothing more than a lump of muddy tater. The reality is quite different. Distillers refine the flavorless, colorless spirit from a variety of materials including corn, grain, and beats. For the potato, though, vodka is its only real foray into the world of alcohol. So who put the unassuming tuber there in the first place? The Polish? The Russians? The Incas?
Vodka is a hotly contested commodity on the Continent. The Swedish say it is one thing, the Finnish another. The Polish claim to have invented it, so do the Russians. But the history of vodka is not the history of the potato. Long before the potato was distilled, medieval Europeans were making vodka from grain. It was not until the 1800s that some folks began to turn to the potato as a source of alcohol.
Scott Simpson argues that the first commercial potato vodka distillery was opened in 1760 by a David Mollinger in Monheim which is now in present day Germany. The trend caught on quite well in what would become Prussia. The Germanic peoples just never called their product vodka. Instead, they named the distilled potato mash schnapps, like every other spirit. By the middle of the 19th century, Germans were using far more potatoes in their distillation than they were grain. (Christian) The drink became so popular in rural hamlets, many considered the health and moral implications to be a plague.
Moving east, the Polish, drinkers of wódka, would follow shortly after the early example of David Mollinger. The 1809 Polish language treatise Gorzelnik i piwowar doskonaly (Perfect Distiller and Brewer) was already acknowledging potato vodka processing. From the 1860s onwards, potato vodka would become the most popular alcoholic drink in all of Poland, thanks largely to potato farms which doubled as distilleries in the offseason. The system made potatoes far cheaper than grain, pushing beer out of fashion and saving drinkers money if they opted for vodka. (Simpson). When the old land system turned to state management in the mid 1900s, the potato fell out of favor and potato vodkas have become increasingly less common. Even so, potato vodka has stuck in the identity of Poland and modern brands like Chopin or Luksusowa still rely on the potato.
Russia, the single largest product and consumer of vodka, also used potatoes, but a bit later than its western neighbors. In Russia, David Christian believes the earliest mention of potato distillation dates back to 1789 and was encouraged in the early 1800s. In 1843, the Russian government turned their policy to favor potato as a source of vodka. They moved towards permitting distilleries a higher ceiling on their yearly production cap if the distillers used potatoes. (Christian) The trend did not really catch on, although towards the end of the 1800s more Russian distillers relied on the root crops.
The countries may have been slow in their adoption of potatoes to produce spirits because potatoes are not the best product for fermentation. The brown tubers are 81-85% water and only 12-22% starch. This is far lower than other alternatives like sugar beets or malted grain. Moreover, the starch of potatoes requires more work to ferment. Rather than just adding yeast, like with sugar beat, or malting, like with grain, potatoes must have amylase enzymes added to the mash to make effective fermentation occur. Malted grains are often used for their enzymes in potato fermentations.
To make potato vodka, the process is fairly straightforward. Potatoes are cleaned and then steamed. They are then mashed and mixed with malt and left for an hour or so. The sugary potato soup then needs to cool down, at which point yeast is added for fermentation over several days. The fermented potato beer can then be drawn off into a still and turned into vodka over several distillations. Water is added to strong spirits to make a more palatable drink.
The Europeans mastered these techniques during the 19th century, but there is another possible region that played a far more foundational role in the birth of potato vodka. That is the first people to cultivate the potato and turn it into alcohol, indigenous South Americans.
The humble potato traces its origins to the heights of the Andes mountains and the coasts of Chile. Humans on the South American continent have been consuming the root for over 12,000 years. Chiloé Island off the coast of Chile, is the genetic source of most of the world’s potatoes. (Daughters) Without Andean agricultural pioneering, the potato would never have been a viable option for spirit making. But the South Americans may have went farther than just the farm.
Natives in South America like the Inca and the Huari have been consuming alcoholic beverages since ancient time. Most famously, they drank a beverage called chicha by the Spanish, but actually called azúa. It is most often made of corn, but there are a wide variety. The South American peoples fermented everything that they could. Indeed, one linguist defines the word chicha as “An alcoholic beverage that is prepared in many ways: from grape, from pineapple, from peanut, from molle pod, from corn, from apples, from manioc flour, or any other tuber or cereal.” (Rosario Asensio, translation is my own). Our focus, of course, is the “any other tuber” part.
Yes, South Americans had potato beer. They just grouped it into their larger category of beers known as chicha. Beer, yes, but did they have vodka? Indigenous peoples likely did not have distillation prior to Spanish contact. Nevertheless, with potato vodka distillation beginning in Europe only in the late 1700s, the indigenous Peruvians would have had plenty of time after Pizarro’s arrival in 1532 to apply the technology to their native beers, beating the Europeans to a rudimentary potato spirit.
As a matter of fact, the 1832 text A Philosophical and Statistical History of the Inventions and Customs of Ancient and Modern Nations in the Manufacture and Use of Inebriating Liquors by Samuel Morewood depicts a supposed Peruvian distillation apparatus and gives the name of a chicha distillate, puichiu. Whether this text is reliable or not is up for debate, but the author was a prolific surveyor of alcoholic beverages during his time. His works include descriptions on European, African, American, and Indian alcohols. He is somewhat corroborated by later texts which put forth the name chakta as a distillate of potato chicha. (Haverkort) Neither puichiu or chakta is mentioned in a considerable portion of the scholarship on chicha.
The indigenous people of South America were the first to grow the potato and then ferment it into alcohol. The question as to whether or not they distilled the potato first is up for debate. After Europeans arrived, the potato had to make its way over to the distillers of Europe, and the technology of distillation over to the Andes. With some obscure mentions of early distillation of chicha and potato chicha, it is more likely that distillation arrived in Cusco before the potato did in Krakow.
Christian, David. Living Water: Vodka and Russian Society On the Eve of Emancipation. Oxford: Clarendon, 1990.
Daughters, Anton. “Food and Culture in Chiloé: Potatoes, Curanto, and Chicha.” Chiloé. Springer, Cham, 2018. 53-65.
Fairley, Thomas. “The early history of distillation.” Journal of the Institute of Brewing 13.6 (1907): 559-582.
Haverkort, A. J., et al. “On Processing Potato: 1. Survey of the Ontology, History and Participating Actors.” Potato Research (2022): 1-38.
Rebaza-Cardenas, Teresa D., et al. ““Masato de Yuca” and “Chicha de Siete Semillas” Two Traditional Vegetable Fermented Beverages from Peru as Source for the Isolation of Potential Probiotic Bacteria.” Probiotics and Antimicrobial Proteins (2021): 1-12.
Rosario Asensio, Ruiz. Los americanismos léxicos en Lituma en los Andes de Mario Vargas Llosa. 2006. Universidad de Alicante, PhD. http://hdl.handle.net/10045/9241
Simpson, Scott. “History and Mythology of Polish Vodka: 1270-2007.” Food and History 8.1 (2010): 121-148.
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