Arak, the Anise Spirit That Turns to Cloud

A glass of arak, clear as well water. A splash of cold water goes in, and the glass turns white, slowly, from the bottom up. The smell of anise reaches you before the glass does.

Most drinks change their taste when you add water. Arak changes its weather.

A word that means sweat

The name comes from the Arabic for sweat. It describes the drops that bead on the inside of a still and run down into the cup. The still itself has an Arabic name too. Alembic comes from al-anbiq, the vessel the old distillers of the region used to coax a spirit out of a ferment.

That tells you the drink’s real age. You may read that the Pharaohs drank arak by the Nile. They did not. Arak is distilled, and the distilling of spirits in this part of the world belongs to the medieval centuries, not the ancient ones. The story is younger than the pyramids and older than most of the cities that now pour it.

Grapes first, then the seed

Levantine arak begins with grapes. The juice is fermented, distilled into a clear grape spirit, then distilled again with aniseed, often three times in all. Aniseed is a small grey seed with a long reach. It carries the licorice note you smell across the room.

In Lebanon, traditional arak rests in clay jars before it is bottled. Clay breathes a little. The spirit softens behind it.

Where the cloud comes from

The white has a plain cause. The flavor in anise comes from an oil called anethole. Anethole dissolves happily in alcohol and refuses water. When you pour water in, the oil falls out of the spirit as millions of tiny droplets, and those droplets scatter the light. The glass looks like milk. Chemists call it the louche, or the ouzo effect.

The order of the pour matters. In Lebanon the house rule is arak first, then water, often one part arak to two of water, and the ice last. Put the ice in first and the cold can pull the oil out too fast, leaving a thin skin of crystals on the surface. A good host does it in the right order without thinking, the way you hold a door.

A drink that waits for the food

Arak is not a nightcap. It belongs at the table, beside mezze: hummus, tabbouleh, olives, raw kibbeh, a plate of grilled meat that keeps arriving. The anise cuts the oil and the garlic. A glass lasts as long as the conversation, and the conversation lasts as long as the plates.

You will find it poured across the Levant:

• Lebanon: the best known arak, with its grape base and its clay jars.
• Syria: a long distilling tradition of its own, at family tables and village feasts.
• Jordan: poured with mezze, where hospitality is measured in how often the plates are refilled.
• Palestine: made by small producers, often family distilleries with their own grapes.
• Israel: made and poured widely, the same anise and grape at the base.

The cousins at other tables

Cross a border and the cloud keeps its shape under a new name. In Turkey it is rakı, nicknamed lion’s milk for its white. In Greece it is ouzo. In France it is pastis, drunk long over ice on summer afternoons in the south.

One name causes trouble. Arrack, spelled with two r’s and found in Sri Lanka and Indonesia, is a different spirit altogether, made from palm sap or rice. Same old word for sweat, different fields, different glass.

The glass at the end of the table

Pour the arak. Pour the water. Watch it cloud from the bottom up. Somewhere in that white are the drops that once ran down the inside of a still, the clay jar, the grape, the seed. The glass was clear a moment ago. It took a little water to show you what was in it all along.