This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Whisky, brandy, rum, vodka, gin, mezcal and sake-adjacent shochu look nothing alike on a shelf, and they taste even less alike, but every one of them is made by the same basic operation: take something already fermented, wine, beer, or a fermented mash of grain, fruit, sugarcane or agave, heat it, and capture the vapor that condenses back into a liquid far more concentrated in alcohol than fermentation alone could ever produce. That single shared mechanism is what the category distilled spirits actually names. It is not a flavor family or a region, the way this atlas's treatment of an individual spirit such as mezcal is; it is a manufacturing principle broad enough to hold together drinks with essentially nothing else in common, separated by continents, base ingredients and centuries of independent development. Mezcal belongs to the class because agave is fermented and then distilled. Whisky belongs because grain is. What differs between them, the raw material, the still design, the barrel or the absence of one, the length of aging, is everything that gives each spirit its identity, and none of it is what makes it, technically, a distilled spirit in the first place. Understanding the category this way is useful precisely because it resists the intuition that distilled spirits are a taste. They are a technique, one technique, wearing an enormous number of regional costumes.