Posted on

Moonraker, Mountain Dew, Moonshine, or White Lightning?

This article first appeared in the Coloradoan newspaper.

Screen Shot 2016-08-11 at 2.53.59 PM

If it shed any light on the subject at all — and it doesn’t remotely — I might be tempted to elaborate on the actual term “moonshine,” and where it originated: i.e. rural England (circa 1780), when country smugglers hid illicit barrels of French brandy in shallow ponds, to avoid the taxman, but were discovered one fated summer night, when the moon shone down so brightly on the surface of the pond that it looked as if a wheel of cheese were floating there, and so these bootleggers told the taxmen that they were, in fact, raking the water not for contraband but for a creamy piece of that cheese. This, however, is all rumor and rodomontade, easily sliced with an investigative blade.

It is in any case almost universally agreed that the term “moonshine” comes from the term “moonraker,” which in turn comes from this legend.

It is also generally agreed that moonshine — or white-lightning, if you prefer, or white-whiskey, or mountain dew — entered America in the early 1800’s, when Scots-Irish immigrants, who back home often made their whiskey without aging it, began settling the Appalachian region of America.

Yet the question remains: if many vodkas are essentially white whiskies, and if many whiskies made of corn mash are not moonshine, what, in the final analysis, is the distinguishing characteristic of moonshine?

The answer, it turns out, is this: illegality.

Moonshine, notorious for its high proof — frequently hovering around 190 (yowza!) — is any distilled spirit concocted in an unlicensed still.

That includes so-called splo, or bathtub gin, or the harrowing hooch concocted by your next of kin.





Posted on

A Green Fairy Named Absinthe

This article first appeared in the Coloradoan newspaper, which took a tomahawk to it and ruined it.


Screen Shot 2016-07-22 at 2.03.18 PM

You won’t like absinthe if you don’t like black licorice.

Absinthe — mint-green star in a constellation of multicolored bottles, over-proofed, over-hyped, overrated, mythologized, mystified and then demystified — won’t, all reports to the contrary notwithstanding, make you hallucinate.

It’s the sweet fennel and green anise that give absinthe its unmistakable licorice flavor.

In answer to your next question, the ban was lifted nearly a decade ago.

Was absinthe invented by hipsters for hipsters?

No. But you’ll be excused for thinking so.

The word itself comes from one of the many botanicals of which it’s composed: Artemisia Absinthium, which means “grand wormwood” — an herbaceous perennial with slender, silvery-green leaves that’s been used medicinally since at least 1500 BC, beginning with the Ancient Egyptians.

The standard story of absinthe’s modern-day manifestation is that it was concocted (circa 1792) by Pierre Ordinaire, a French doctor who practiced in Switzerland, and who later passed his recipe along to certain sisters named Henriod.

In fact, though, some say that Madame Henriod is the actual originator of absinthe: a confection she made from plants gathered in the Swiss mountains around her home — this according to one Jessyka Birchard, brand director of Pernod Absinthe. This elixir, says Birchard, was later tinkered with by Dr. Pierre Ordinaire, who marketed it as medicinal.

An ambitious entrepreneur called Major Dubied came across the absinthe recipe and, after seeing the potential to brand it as a kind of nostrum with vast medicinal properties, partnered with his son-in-law, Henri-Louis Pernod, to set up the first absinthe distillery. This was in Switzerland, in 1797.

Thus was born absinthe as we know it today.

The mint-green gem of absinthe deep in the glass, where you guzzle perdition and feel the thunder of god’s judgement that roasts the naked soul.

Paul Verlaine described it as.





Posted on

Wodka!

This article first appeared, in slightly altered form, in the Coloradoan newspaper.

Screen Shot 2016-06-17 at 2.44.48 PM

The Polish call it wodka.

The Russians call it vodka.

The word itself comes from the slavic voda — meaning “little water” — and, like water, vodka is colorless, odorless, and often enjoyed ice-cold.

Distilled from fermented potatoes, or fermented grains (like rye or wheat), or sometimes even grapes, vodka is a deceptively simple spirit that consists primarily of ethanol and water.

Here’s a little known fact about vodka:

Grain vodka because it’s distilled from grain is actually whiskey.

It is, to be sure, underaged and heavily filtered whiskey, but it’s whiskey, nevertheless. One of the chief differences is that vodka is usually filtered through charcoal, whereas whiskey is usually filtered through wood.

Both the Polish and the Russians lay claim to the invention of vodka.

To the Polish people in particular, this subject is significant and contentious — a question of national pride — and on this subject, the historical record is unclear. Certain sources do say the first distillation of vodka took place in what is now a part of Russia, in the 9th century, but there are other historians, just as venerable, who date it in 8th century Poland.

Neither of these prototypical vodkas, however, were anything like the vodka we know and love today — nor, incidentally, were they particularly strong, weighing in at a preposterous 30 proof. Like gin, most of these early vodkas were medicinal rather than recreational. Today, we know better.

Prior to the 1940’s, vodka was virtually unknown in the United States.

The vodka martini — also known as the Kangaroo Cocktail or the Vodkatini — isn’t generally accepted by so-called purists (i.e. snobs and classicists with whom I stridently disagree) as a true martini, but in fact the vodka martini has a more legitimate claim to this title than most people realize. That, though, is another story for another time.

One thing is certain:

In Casino Royale, when James Bond ordered his now famous Vesper cocktail, he did much to popularize the vodka martini.

Here’s how the passage appears in Ian Fleming’s famous novel, published in 1953:

“A dry martini,” Bond said. “One. In a deep champagne goblet.”

“Oui, Monsieur.”

“Just a moment. Three measures of Gordon’s, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it’s ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon peel. Got it?”

Got it.





Posted on

Putting the Cock Back in Cocktail: Mojitos, Daiquiris, Rum Sours, and More!

This video was made for a recent article, which was rather deplorably edited, and which I therefore reprint below as it was originally written.



Getting Numb With Rum


Rum, like the hangovers it can create, is a side-effect, a by-product: a by-product of the juice that comes from sugarcane. And that, really, is one of the few definitive things you can say about the origins of rum.

For instance: rum may or may not have been invented in the early seventeenth century, on the pear-shaped island of Barbados, or Rum may or may not have been invented by Portuguese colonists operating along the coast of Brazil, when they created a harsh sugarcane concoction later called cachaça, or, after all, rum may or may not have been invented by the early Spanish colonists who populated the islands of Hispaniola and Cuba.

The word “rum,” likewise, may or may not come from the Latin saccharum, which is the Latin word for sugar, or, alternatively, the word “rum” may or may not have come from the British term for “the greatest” (“We had a rum of a time at Ace Gillett’s!”), or, finally, the word rum may or may not have come from the Gypsy word rum, which means “potent and strong.”

We do know that by 1654 both the name and the product were in common usage — the General Court of Connecticut having officially ordered “confiscations of whatsoever Barbados liquors, commonly called rum, kill devil and the like.”

It was in the early 1600’s that sugar-planters crushed up sugarcane and boiled the juice that was then cured in clay pots from which oozed a black and viscous liquid we now call molasses. This was in the 17th Century, mind you, and at that time molasses was actually regarded as what we now call “industrial waste.” But because the ingenuity of the human mind is limitless, an admixture was soon created whereby the liquid skimmed off the boiled cane juice was fermented and then added to this molasses by-product.

This process is the provenance of rum.

I’m not saying I’m going to, but I could persuasively argue that rum is the most quintessentially American spirit there is.

Look at America through the lens of rum and what do you see?

This:

A great gurgling vat of sugar-cane liquor — a melting pot, the only spirit you can get in white, brown, or black.

You see a four-century survivor, who rose up through the classes, who belongs to them all, who went from the streets to the state-room, from sweaty to sophisticated, from poverty and prison to preeminence and patrician, self-made, not rare but beautiful — street-handsome — swashbuckling, never (unlike bourbon) over-regulated, or snooty, like gin.

“Of all the spirits in your home,” wrote James Beard, in 1956, “rum is the most romantic.”

Posted on

Putting the Cock Back in Cocktail: Sazeracs & Manhattans

A reader writes:

In your last video (which I enjoyed somewhat) you said the Old-Fashioned isn’t the oldest cocktail on written record, and you are correct. The Sazerac is. When will you do a vid featuring that one, bud?

Here you go, bud — though, for the record, it’s not actually known if the Sazerac is the “oldest cocktail” on written record. Everyone says it is, but history is mute on the matter.





Thanks for watching.