Originally posted 24 April 2012

In the book I mention a bit about rum in the British and American navies. Though the elaborate ceremonies aboard British ships inspired the most famous images of grog consumption, rum rations were common in other navies as well. This picture from the 1890’s shows Czarist Russian sailors gathered around the rum pot. If anyone who views this image can read Russian and can make out the Cyrillic characters on the sailors’ hats, I’d be interested to now what ship this is.

Rum was also dispensed in the German navy as late as the Second World War. In his book “Without Hindsight,” German naval ensign Gerhard Both recorded a 1944 incident in which a sailor nicknamed Pongo earned the disapproval of his crewmates.

“The standard drink for any festivities on board for the rank and file was tea with rum, which was collected from the galley by means of very large teapots. On one such occasion, at an advanced stage of the party, it was Pongo’s turn to collect another pot full of tea with rum. Even today I can still visualize his return with a well-filled pot, but instead of setting it quietly on the table he started dancing around with it in the middle of the deck in crazy circles, and the tea/rum poured out of the spout and all over the deck. It took four or five men to stop this crazy carousel.”

The picture of the Russian sailors is courtesy of ThePiratesLair.com, which has an extraordinary collection of naval rum memorabilia. Among the pages here is a very well photographed article on naval rum cups, including information on how to detect counterfeits. If you never knew these existed, much less that people are counterfeiting them, there is much to see there.

Originally posted 23 April 2012

One thing that can confuse a rum scholar is the variety of names for the exact same thing. For example, here are three labels from 1945 that Ypioca of Brazil provided a bit too late to get in the book.

As you can see, two are labeled Aguardiente, the third “Delicious National Whiskey.” Both were produced in the same facility using the same ingredients, cane juice and water, and both would now be sold as cachaca. The differences in the names were 100% marketing, and depended on where in South America these bottles were to be shipped. (These are from the 1940’s, well before there was any attempt to market cachaca outside Brazil.) This problem is not limited to South American brands – as noted in a May 2006 article in a trade magazine called Drinks Buyer Magazine Asia, “In the Philippines, gin is made from molasses. In fact, India and the Philippines could be classed as major rum-drinking nations if some of the “gin” and “whiskey” there was properly classified.” Though international truth-in-labeling laws have extinguished most of the outright counterfeit products, there are still plenty of bottles that are labeled in ways that make it hard for an unwary patron of poorly lit bar to know what they are imbibing.

Originally posted 22 April 2012

Rum was often used as a basis for medicinal tonics, and a pair of pharmacists in Kingston, Jamaica had a particularly tasty recipe that they brewed up using local Long Pond rum.  The popular drink caught the eye of a major liquor company in 1944, but since Levy Brothers Pharmacy Spiced Rum wasn’t catchy enough, they named it after a Caribbean celebrity: Captain Morgan. Henry Morgan was a colorful character, a pirate and privateer who was briefly the Governor of Jamaica. He was notable for ingenious military strategies, personal courage, heavy imbibing, flagrant disregard of orders from London, and an incident in which his crew was so drunk on rum that they set his flagship on fire. Though the beverage named after Morgan wasn’t the first spiced rum ever made, it was the first to be mass marketed, and the image of the gaudily dressed Welsh privateer was a potent marketing tool.  His portrayal has changed over the years – this ad is from 1950.

I like this depiction of the Captain better than the modern version – he looks less like a cartoon character and more like someone I’d actually hoist a glass with. (Images courtesy of Diageo).

Originally posted 21 April 2012

What better way could there be for the family to spend an evening than pretend to be pirates? The British board game Buccaneer premiered in the 1930s, and allowed players to compete for diamonds, rubies, gold, pearls, and barrels of rum.

One wonders whether a game that encourages children to fight over barrels of alcohol would be accepted in current society. The game was sold until the 1980’s in Britain but never caught on elsewhere, and early sets in good condition fetch a substantial amount among collectors.

Originally posted 20 April 2012

One of the challenges in writing this book was a problem faced by culinary historians and historical recreationists everywhere – when you see a common measurement, is it really what you think it is? For instance, when you see the word “Gallon” in an old British or Colonial American manuscript, it might be one of three different measures. There was a dry gallon, used for wheat and other grains, and two wet gallons, the wine gallon (3.75 liters) and the ale gallon (4.62 liters). There were also standardized measures for larger containers – the wine barrel contained 31.5 gallons, the beer barrel 36 gallons. When the question arose of which gallon was used for rum, I contacted historian Steve Bashore, who is restoring George Washington’s distillery at Mount Vernon. Steve contacted the cooper at Colonial Williamsburg, who confirmed that since spirits were usually aged in old wine barrels, when a gallon of rum is mentioned in a recipe, it is probably a wine gallon.

Handily for Americans who are recreating old rum recipes, the modern American gallon is based on the wine gallon, while the British Imperial Gallon is based on the old beer gallon. (In case you are interested, the two countries standardized their respective gallons in 1824.) Americans and others who use US measurements, your standard measuring cups and jugs may be your guide. For the rest of you, there are conversion tables aplenty on the web…

Originally posted April 19, 2012

Many articles about the alcohol trade with Native Americans use the same image, of a sharply dressed Yankee brandishing a bottle of liquor to a tribal chief.

Oddly, none of the individuals or institutions I contacted could give a date or origin for this image, which appears to be an engraving of the type used in books and newspapers in the early 1800’s. The Yankee is often identified as a fur trader, but the reason for that is unclear – perhaps those are furs on the wagon in the background, but I have not found a version in high enough resolution to make it out. Does anybody out there have any idea where and when this might have first appeared?