Purl or wormwood ale is an English drink. It was originally made by infusing ale

Ale

Ale is a type of beer brewed from malted barley using a warm fermentation with a strain of brewers' yeast. The yeast will ferment the beer quickly, giving it a sweet, full bodied and fruity taste...

 with the tops of the wormwood plant, especially the variety which grows in coastal salt marsh

Salt marsh

A salt marsh is an environment in the upper coastal intertidal zone between land and salt water or brackish water, it is dominated by dense stands of halophytic plants such as herbs, grasses, or low shrubs. These plants are terrestrial in origin and are essential to the stability of the salt marsh...

, which is called old woman

Artemisia maritima

Artemisia maritima is a species of wormwood known as sea wormwood and old woman.In its many variations of form it has an extremely wide distribution in the northern hemisphere of the Old World, occurring mostly in saltish soils...

. Other purgative or bitter

Bitters

A bitters is an alcoholic beverage that is flavored with herbal essences and has a bitter or bittersweet flavor. There are numerous brands of bitters that were formerly marketed as patent medicines but are now considered to be digestifs, rather than medicines...

 herbs such as orange peel

Orange (fruit)

An orange—specifically, the sweet orange—is the citrus Citrus × sinensis and its fruit. It is the most commonly grown tree fruit in the world....

 or senna might also be used. The drink was commonly drunk in the early hours of the morning at which time it was popular with labourers.

By the middle of the 19th century, wormwood had been forgotten and the recipe was to mull ale with gin

Gin

Gin is a spirit which derives its predominant flavour from juniper berries . Although several different styles of gin have existed since its origins, it is broadly differentiated into two basic legal categories...

, sugar

Sugar

Sugar is a class of edible crystalline carbohydrates, mainly sucrose, lactose, and fructose, characterized by a sweet flavor.Sucrose in its refined form primarily comes from sugar cane and sugar beet...

 and spices such as ginger

Ginger

Ginger is the rhizome of the plant Zingiber officinale, consumed as a delicacy, medicine, or spice. It lends its name to its genus and family . Other notable members of this plant family are turmeric, cardamom, and galangal....

. It was sold by purl-men from purl-boats on the Thames who were licensed by the Watermen's Hall. The drink ceased to be popular by the end of the 19th century, being replaced by beer, especially the variety known to the English as bitter

Bitter (beer)

Bitter is an English term for pale ale. Bitters vary in colour from gold to dark amber and in strength from 3% to 7% alcohol by volume.-Brief history:...

.

Purl-royal was a similar concoction made using wine in place of ale or beer.

Shakespeare mentions purl in his play, The Merry Wives of Windsor

The Merry Wives of Windsor

The Merry Wives of Windsor is a comedy by William Shakespeare, first published in 1602, though believed to have been written prior to 1597. It features the fat knight Sir John Falstaff, and is Shakespeare's only play to deal exclusively with contemporary Elizabethan era English middle class life...

. Samuel Pepys

Samuel Pepys

Samuel Pepys FRS, MP, JP, was an English naval administrator and Member of Parliament who is now most famous for the diary he kept for a decade while still a relatively young man...

 recorded in his diary entry for February 19, 1660, "Thence forth to Mr Harper's to drink a draft of purle, whither by appointment Monsieur L'Impertinent..." On March 21, 1662, he writes, "Thence to Westminster Hall ... Here I met with Chetwind, Parry, and several others, and went to a little house behind the Lords' house to drink some wormwood ale, which doubtless was a bawdy house, the mistress of the house having the look and dress". Two centuries later, Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens

Charles John Huffam Dickens was an English novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian period. Dickens enjoyed a wider popularity and fame than had any previous author during his lifetime, and he remains popular, having been responsible for some of English literature's most iconic...

 described the final period of the drink in his last novel, Our Mutual Friend

Our Mutual Friend

Our Mutual Friend is the last novel completed by Charles Dickens and is one of his most sophisticated works, combining psychological insight with social analysis. It centres on, in the words of critic J. Hillis Miller, "money, money, money, and what money can make of life" but is also about human...

:

The English took the drink with them to North America and a purl house was opened in New York where rich punches

Punch (drink)

Punch is the term for a wide assortment of drinks, both non-alcoholic and alcoholic, generally containing fruit or fruit juice. The drink was introduced from India to England in the early seventeenth century; from there its use spread to other countries...

 and posset

Posset

A posset was a British hot drink of milk curdled with wine or ale, often spiced, which was popular from medieval times to the 19th century...

s were popular.

Purl is also represented now in modern form at award winning London Cocktail bar Purl London in Marylebone