Thousands of years ago, the first humans accidentally created the first beer and wine.

This occurred naturally when yeast in the air converted sugars into alcohol.

However, it wasn't until thousands of years later that new techniques were developed to distill those beverages, but even then the products they created weren't designed for human consumption.

Eventually, these techniques were perfected to a point where they could be consumed, and they resulted in entirely new categories of

beverages. Learn more about spirits and liqueurs, what the differences and the various

types on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. We might as well start off the episode by defining some terms and I should note at the beginning that there doesn't seem to be universal

agreement on the exact meaning of some of these terms. I'm going to provide those that seem

to be the most commonly used and which also happen to be the ones that make the most sense.

If we were to categorize everything and create a tree diagram,

at the very top of what we're going to be talking about in this episode would be liquor.

Liquor covers both spirits and liqueurs. Despite similar

spellings and pronunciation liquor and liqueurs are different things and I will

get into the difference later in the episode.

The confusion in the definition comes from the fact that many people use the term liquor and spirits interchangeably.

They treat them like synonyms.

For the purpose of this episode episode I will use liquor as the overarching category

that covers all distilled beverages with high alcohol content, and by high I mean that above most wines and beers.

Colloquially, liquor would be synonymous with hooch or booze.

Under that category of liquor then, we first have spirits.

spirits start out as a fermented beverage where yeast turns sugars into alcohol, just like with

beer and wine.

However, what makes them a spirit is that a spirit undergoes distillation.

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