rotgut

I was sitting at my desk worrying my way through a glass of rotgut whiskey.

But I prefer to believe that arrack is simply the sound one makes when one chokes down a shot of harsh home-brewed rotgut, and therefore it applies to any ingredients equally well.

Seventeenth-century British soldiers, fighting in the Low Countries, showed a sweet tooth for the local rotgut, and the word “gin” derives from jenever, the Dutch for juniper.

Not the mummified ones you might find soaking in the bottoms of rotgut mezcal bottles — originally placed there as a marketing scheme to sell cheap liquor — but the ones you order on purpose, as dinner.

There will be rotgut whiskey and weary horses.