The question most frequently requiring consideration with regard to the selection of alcoholic beverages, is their tendency to encourage acidity and to promote gout or rheumatism. For practical purposes, these three questions may be merged in the second, viz., their gouty or non-gouty tendency.

From long and careful consideration, both theoretically and practically, of the production and composition of fermented liquors, and their effects upon digestion and disease, I have come to the conclusion that alcoholic drinks favour the tendency to gout, or actually produce it, in proportion to the quantity they contain of saccharine and albuminoid ingredients in which the processes of fermentation and decomposition have commenced but have remained uncompleted. This head will especially include those full-bodied "fruity" wines, in which the course of fermentation has been stopped by added spirit, or in which it is incomplete from want of age and malt liquors and cider, in which the process of fermentation is never thoroughly completed by the time they are considered in good condition for drinking.

The least gouty alcoholic drinks are those spirits in which no unfermented compounds are present, and those wines in which vinous fermentation has become complete. But unfortunately these wines cannot be borne by acid stomachs, because complete fermentation of wines involves the production of much acid. If they are taken, therefore, they must be mixed with enough alkaline mineral water to neutralise their excess of acid.

It is important to remember that although a fluid may contain much acid, and therefore be unfit for some stomachs, it will not generate acid if it is free from saccharine matter; whereas a fluid containing saccharine matter will generate acid although it may not contain any.