Grog, Shanties, and The Wellerman | How to Drink

there once was a ship that put the sea the name of the ship was the bully a tea the wind blew up a bow dipped down a blow my bully boys blew soon may the man come to bring her sugar and tea and rum one day when the tongan is done we'll take a leave and go are you sick of that one yet i hope not because today i'm gonna talk shanties make grog and also a cocktail that i put together in honor of that wellerman and her cargo of sugar tea and rum so hold fast me hearties hold fast and i'll see you around the horn i can't say hold fast and i'll see you around the horn without slipping into a pirate voice it's impossible it's a physical impossibility so apparently sea shanty's our thing right now on tick tock so much so that the new york times felt compelled to write an article about it and it's mainly down to this wellerman song nathan evans a tick tocker is that the proper nomenclature ticker docker ricky ticky tacky tower i'm gonna go with tucker nathan evans a talker from scotland uh just kind of broke through with his rendition of the wellerman this was a ship that put to see the name of the ship was a bully of tea and then talkers started layering their own harmonies and instruments onto it and it's really it's kind of amazing honestly by the way but should i be yeah probably not the thing about the swelling song is that it's got a chorus that well soon made the weather man come to bring us sugar and tea and ramen blah blah and now sugar tea and rum well i gotta tell you that is the foundation for a period appropriate rum punch actually but i've kind of done punches along those lines on here already when i talked about double indemnity for example and when i did miss patty's founder's day punch from gilmore's girls links below to both of those if you missed them so i played around with that recipe as a punch a bit uh but i wanted to take it a step further into like proper cocktail territory and i gotta say i am i'm very pleased with the results of those efforts uh but first i do think we should talk a little bit about shanties and grog right after this message from my sponsors hello friends it's wine time again you know the thing about wine is that there is an awful lot of it out there and the thing about me is that i am regularly paralyzed with decision fatigue do i want to open the bottle and drink the wine sure of course i do do i want to get out of my house and put on a mask and brave the store and agonize over which bottles are the ones to buy no i do not so instead i let bright sellers do it for me you know i propped over to their website and answered seven idiot questions about things i like and then bright sellers took my answers and fed it into their wine computer figured out the right wines for me the best part is they got it right i've been using bright cells for a while now and each time i taste the wine i give it a rating on my account and brightsellers has used that information to further tailor the bottles that have selected me but you know it's not like there've been any really wide misses either so subtle adjustments it's a subtle fine tuning i just got this box of wine and so let's uncork one and give it a try nihilist wine company that's the one right off the top you gotta take a little knife go around the top like a little smelly egg what kind of wine is this cabernet sauvignon cabernet sauvignon let's uh let's pour myself a glass and see how it is i really like to aerate it with my course you know just like bubble it up go crazy boom that's a good solid pour wine salute i like this a lot oh there's some nice tannins in there one of my favorite things about bryson is these little cars that they include it really appeals to my desire to know things uh so let's see what they can tell me about this bottle pairs well with gourmet aged cheeses decadent steak dinners and anniversary celebrations yeah that sounds about right i know you guys just put red with fish but i don't care i think this would go good with a nice salmon like a cedar plank salmon as well right now bright cellars is giving hvd fans an exclusive deal half off of your first six bottle box and a free bonus bottle on top of that and all you've got to do is click the link below and take the quiz to get started so do that all day back to you greg [Music] so let's talk a little bit about shanties and grog because for one people have been asking me to make grog for a really long time actually um and but for two and more importantly the welderman isn't a shanty i'll come to the shanties in a moment for i needs me grog before i go a call in the hall now i did an episode previously um about a 1960s tiki drink called navy grog and i thought i was quite clear in that episode that quote navy grog is a chain tiki bar recipe that has nothing to do with the grog that was served daily by the british navy to its sailors from 1740 until 1970 but apparently i wasn't that clear since i still get comments on that episode correcting me that my grog wasn't authentic i know it's not authentic grog so we're going to talk a little about the history of grog see because from basically as soon as folks started sailing long distances like a ways out over the horizon from one continent to another say from england to the americas ships had to carry casks of beer and wine because they had no ability to make salt water into fresh water while at sea and their casks of fresh water would quickly turn to algae blooms and they needed to drink something they could take that beer and wine and dilute it into their slimy algae water to make the slimy algae water kind of drinkable but the beer and wine also would only keep so long and also also took up quite a bit of the hold in its barrels you had to have a lot of beer and wine for your sailors the regulations of the british navy prior to the invention of grog require that the ship have a gallon of beer for every sailor aboard for every day that's a lot of that's a lot of gallons that you have to keep on board your ship and so they take up a lot of space they weigh a lot they slow the boat down um and and again they take up a lot of space it's a lot of beer but then in 1655 william penn father of the other william penn for whom pennsylvania is named conquered jamaica which had been a spanish colony since 1494 and as a result rum was introduced to england i know i find that a bit tough to swallow myself actually because i'm pretty sure that england had access to rum before all of this but this is the information i've got it's the best i've found so let's go with this tale even if it's a bit of a legend okay england now had a steady supply of rum and rum had a huge advantage over the beer and wine because its alcohol content is highly concentrated so you can carry the same water clarifying power in far fewer and smaller casks it's like switching from dawn to dawn ultra it took a bit though for rum to go from being a thing savvy captains and pursers would stock to being an actual regulation of the british navy that came in 1731 and that regulation stated that a ship could swap their beer for rum at a ratio of a gallon of beer to a half a pint of undiluted rum and that saves a ton of space and weight aboard the ship up until this time a sailor was entitled to a gallon of beer a day to mix with their water this was generally weak stuff by the way you know three maybe six percent beers so far as i've read suddenly the regulations said they could instead give the sailors a pint of straight rum every day oh boy think about no there's a problem here right and if that weren't enough some of the more stalwart sailors who could stand to stave off a little bit there some of those guys would uh save up several days of their ration to really blow it out and have a party of it it may surprise you to find that the result of this was really terrible for morale and decorum and safety and just like the general sobriety of the crew [Music] time to go enter admiral edward vernon known by the nickname old grog for the heavy grogram cloak that he was fond of wearing all that he is a sharp fellow and so he wrote into the regulations the following the daily allowance of a half a pint of man is to be mixed with a quart of water to be mixed in one scuttle butt kept for that purpose and be done upon deck and in the presence of lieutenant of the watch who is to see that the men are not defrauded of their rom allowance it is be served in two servings one in the morning and the other in the afternoon the men that have good husbandsmen made from the savings of their salt provisions and bread purchase sugar and limes to make the water more palatable to them from admiral vernon's official order of august 21 1740 while aboard her majesty ship burford in the port royal harbor i i can't believe that burford's not a typo and they named this watered rum for the beloved admiral who foisted it upon them grog in case you're wondering a scuttle butt is a barrel that's had one of its ends knocked open so you can use it like a big vat uh he was concerned that sailors would think that they were going to get ripped off on their rum this was a consideration in their compensation after all so he devised a system to ensure that they would not have to worry about it okay the sugar and limes those are just good scents i will take a daiquiri over rum and water any day there is this idea out there that grog was specifically devised to prevent scurvy that is not true because even though james lin figured out that vitamin c from citrus fruit would prevent scurvy as early as 1747 didn't catch on at first and even though sailors and ships surgeons were putting two and two together that citrus works classically trained doctors and the navy at large thought that was superstition because everyone knows that disease is caused by miasma and an imbalance of the humors in fact the british navy wasn't convinced that citrus cured scurvy at all until 1795 after a four-month voyage of the hms suffolk which was returning from sea which they crew that was miraculously free from scurvy since the captain commodore peter raniere had been a lemon man word traveled around the navy and by 1800 or thereabouts the british navy had a system in place to supply lemons and lemon juice to all of its sailors so at least officially those limes and lemons they had nothing to do with scurvy so back to the grog at hand a pint is two quarts and so then a half a pint of rum to a quart of water gives a ratio of one part rum to four parts water so let's grab something strong and pot stilled and mix it with room temperature water and make up a bit of proper grog and then since we are good husbandsmen we'll season it with a bit of lime and sugar to see how that improves okay i've got my grog mug right here i'm going to add one ounce of a pot still rum this jamaican appleton estate preserve you know i think in the interest of science we can go two ounces and we'll need eight ounces of water and there it is my daily rum ration spare it's up it's not bad it's not good um it just tastes um a bit like woodsy water because you've really thinned out the flavor at this point you know and that's good rum too it just tastes a bit like sugar that's been aged on oak honestly easy easy to drink i'm out of smith and cross i think smith and cross would have been the better example here higher proof um and also funky stuff right that's a shame i have just enough though should we do it should we use the last my smith and cross to make some more possibly authentic grog it seems like a worthy cause all right that means i won't have any for the close-up we'll fake it with this we'll backfill give me a second i'll go get some smithing cross all right um away with this why is the rum always gone a bit too refined for the metaphor the mast um let's go with this phenomenal smith and cross as you can see that's what's left of it smells like butter oh i love it smells like buttered popcorn okay let's see what's left here and one ounce three quarters so we require seven ounces of water for the ratio and away we go [Music] and there's our rum made with smith and cross which i think is going to be more sufficiently in a period appropriately piratey if i may spirits up oh it's got a lot more body that's way better too i like that a lot more so the smith cross stands up to all that water it's really thinned out super drinkable it definitely still has some like um some fennels going on and fennel you know fennel fennel flavors it's got some of those flavors got some chemical flavors i think for a real effect we should have like some real slimy algae encrusted water but i don't want to do that it is basically just the flavor of smith and cross with the volume turned all the way down it's got just this very very mild funkiness to it that kind of lingers with a little bit of slightly accurate oaky woodsy flavor maybe that's what it is like tannins i think a lot of times like a funkier rum has a late arriving banana rot note that comes up after the other parts of the flavor profile but watered down like this you kind of lose that let's try it with some sugar and lime how much i don't know a knife [Music] a little squeeze a half one lime half in there right what do you think they just put the whole thing in they might and then we'll throw in some sugar how much sugar do you think he would have i don't know maybe two spoonfuls give that a good stir spirits up now we got something that's actually downright nice it's it's a little bit the sweetness is not it's not sweet yet i mean probably because most of the sugars aren't even dissolved so you're not even drinking it but that little lime and that little bit of sweetness on there just kind of the whole thing kind of uh kind of almost comes together like a lemonade or something i mean it's in that vein like oh yeah i like that on a hot day and it would be you know room temperature like this uh so you don't have ice really until you get to later on and then of course they did but dang that i kind of like that the tank bad at home so that's the grog um let's talk about those shanties now shanties chinese are work songs from the age of sales some were the purpose of coordinating the work of a team of sailors to a specific task aboard ship if you've ever worn a uniform and marched to run the cadence you have sung a shanty it's the same idea we don't find the word shanty in print before 1869 so it was impossible to say when it fell into use before then but a sailor's cant is slang and it stands to reason the term was in use for at least decades before it made it to the lubbock's papers there is some disagreement though as the etymology because to derive from the french shanta or the english chant there's some big questions there that nobody cares about now like cadences which generally break down to marching and running cadences shanties have categories too very broadly there are pulling and capstan shanties with pulling shanties having specific syllables that a crew of sailors working together would um working a line together would all pull on and capstone shanties intended to get everyone's feet in step together as they march around the capstone to turn it capstan is that big winch that's on deck for hauling up the anchor or possibly you could attach your halyards to it and stuff like that pulling shanties further breakdown to both long-haul and short-haul shanties a long haul involves hauling once per line generally on the final syllable short haul having two halls per line heavy slow work long haul easier quick work short haul the capstone shanty is broken down into stamp and go shanties and the pump shanty as well as the capstone shanty general a pump shanty was for working specifically bilge pumps and then the stamp and go is this really specific thing that happens on huge boats with massive crews where a crew would line up in a big circle or loop on deck and march and a section at a section of that circle there would be a line or capstan to join in and haul or push and then you'd move down the line and go around the loop on the rest right sort of an expanded open-ended capstan type job and then there's foxhole songs the foxel f-o apostrophe c apostrophe sle or forecastle in lubberspeak is the raised tower aboard the bow of an old galley in caravel a four castle is armed with archers in ye old days of yore it was also where your sailors lived it was where their crew quarters were they slept the sailors not the officers there was a difference between like you know able-bodied seamen and officers kind of enlisted an officer the name stuck even though the structure was removed from the deck and the foxhole would be referring to the sailors as a group or where they slept or just like the men of the ship right they were sung when not at work when at rest the foxholes where they slept these songs were just for fun they had no work syllables on them so what kind of a shanty is the wellerman you ask well according to shanti expert jerry smythe of liverpool john moore's university it isn't it is a song intended to be sung by a single singer and has no intended call and response god have mercy upon the shanty men who's asked for ashanti and offers the willamen perhaps it was a foxhole song though um one other thing about shanties they were mostly intended to be humorous and they were filthy now victorian and edwardian interest in folk music led to these songs being published in bulgarized form highly cleaned up for public consumption basically if you are now imagining a shanty that you know and you think you'd be comfortable singing in the presence of children or really just decent upstanding folk very likely the lyrics you're thinking of are the boulderized version or possibly you're not familiar with the meanings behind some of the colorful phrases for an example of some properly filthy shanty work look for the adult versions of barnacle bill the sailor also known as bollocky bill the sailor a foxel song by the way in case you were wondering that is barnacle bill was not for work now here's an example of a long-haul or long drag shanty called blow the man down uh he starts talking about a girl and then he replaces the girl with a boat but they're still talking about the girl and she's ready to go that's what the song's about okay as i was walking down paradise street way hay and blow the man down a pretty young damsel i chanced for to meet way and blew the man down she was rounding the counter and bluffing the bow way and blew the man down so i took in i'll sail and cried wave enough now way hay and blow the man down i hailed her in english she answered me clear way hey and blow the man down i'm from the black arrow bound to shakespeare way hay and blow the man down so i tell they're my flipper and took her and toe way hay and blow the man down and yard them to yard and mo where did we go we hang and blow the man down okay long haul shanty one line one pull perverse let's move on from sea shantytown all right i mentioned at the top here that i had a cocktail in mind for that wellerman song and i do and it's about damn time i make the thing i mentioned that sugar tea and rum were actually the makings um of a quality and period-appropriate rum punch so i started from there working from the barbadian formula of one of sour two of sweet three of strong four of weak i quickly had a couple of glasses of decent rum punches of various types in front of me using room temperature tea for the week actually which would have been a common way to go a demerara rum for the strong and a simple syrup for the sweet and lemon juice for the sour my simple is two to one and frankly that rhyme probably refers to either cane juice or granulated sugar so you gotta kind of the sweet you gotta figure out on your own you can't really go to scope by two of sweet i worked up a version of this with both oversteeped black tea which was quite good and a version with green tea which lost the flavor pretty much completely of the tea and why green tea actually never occurred to me but i was reading some articles and research for this and i saw that david wundrich in punch was saying that green tea makes an excellent punch and is appropriate and that he has some uh had a rough night drinking uh gunpowder green tea punch i like that green tea idea uh though and apparently it is period appropriate certainly green tea existed before black tea so it might even be more period appropriate so as i was digging through my cabinet looking through the tees that collect there i stumbled upon some matcha and i had an idea by switching to matcha i could ditch the four ounces of tea that were severely uh diluting this cocktail and swap it for ice and now we're basically looking at a cocktail i shook that up i tasted it it was quite pleasing but i knew it could be better so i threw it back in the shaker and added an egg white and then i shook it again and then we had it i know that song does not mention egg white but possits flip lager heads etc all manner of drinks had eggs in them at that time and were very popular in taverns and amongst sailors particularly flip i am going to go with it i think that it's yeah slight anachronism but not that it was impossible as a matter of fact it could have been done this is a cocktail i call the wellerman i shall need my sheikh to that we're going to add one ounce of lemon juice and an ounce of simple syrup you know that's how i made it last night when i was working this recipe out but i gotta say it was a touch sweet so i'm gonna go with a half an ounce today and we will add more if it turns out that it's not sweet enough i think that a half an ounce will be enough but maybe not we'll find out it's this is actually not a crazy idea so we'll just do a half half an ounce of simple syrup but we can always add another half an ounce to the glass if that is under sweetened i think a half an hour will be fine i haven't tried it yet two ounces of rum and choice of rum is important here demerara yes pot still yes um i think the el dorado 8 is it was fantastic in this i mean i would just go with the el dorado eight if you can get it um it has a lot of character and just brings a heck of a lot of um toasty sugar demerara oak flavors to this that are quite lovely i need a goodly spoonful of matcha powder i eyeballed it the other day a heaping half a teaspoon kind of thing i have really no more idea how much that was that's about that's probably overkill but it certainly did the trick yeah kind of like a a full load of matcha for like a you know a glass of tea if you were making a matcha tea and now an egg white uh so we got our egg white our rum our simple our lemon and our matcha in there let's dry shake that be careful that because dry shaking is when your cocktail shaker really wants to pull apart on you i'm gonna add some ice to this one big ice cube the other one we will crack [Music] strain that into a coop or sour glass that's appropriate i don't think it needs a garnish at all to be honest the green body and frothy head that's going to develop and it'll separate and really develop like a thick head on it in just a second here really cool looking it's something that you're not going to see a ton of in cocktails you could get fancy with a lime wheel but i think i'd prefer dusting of just the matcha on top but you're already so green i don't know maybe there's another way to do there's plenty of matcha in there already you know what i might do is i'll treat it like a whiskey sour and i'll do some bitters dots and see what i can do for a design on the top here uh angus store by the way is both period and culturally appropriate for this drink let me see can i do i don't know if i could do a skull and crossbones thing maybe a lot of work i'll try it it definitely worked i can do that we can make a skull and crossbones that's my first go at it it's not bad i actually definitely think that looks like i got to take a picture of it i think it looks like a skully crossbow and there it is who comes with sugar tea and rum spirits up uh just so you know that that was the uh that was the call the top supposedly that when they were serving the daily rum ration the call that went around the ship was spirits up and uh and the tot that was your daily allowance the black tot in 1970 was the very final rum ration july 31. oh i like that drink the sour and the matcha really the lemon and the matcha work really well together it's a bit dry i think that actually maybe not a full ounce but let's add another quarter of the simple um bring it back up to like halfway between where this is and where i had it the other day split the difference for an industry if you've ever worked in media again yeah it just rounds it out more now the matcha comes through as a flavor a little less bitter it takes a little bit of the bitterness off puts it more into a sour place because it could the botch on its own can be a little too dry a little too bitter a little too earthy but when you sweeten it up a little bit like this instead of tasting the earth like dirt it starts to have like this woodsy grassy sweetness it's really nice and that honestly the whole thing works so well together i love this drink the the lemon the sour the sweet and the matcha all work really well together and then underneath it all as like a base note because all those things the sour the sweet the lemon they're all kind of up here i think for me just the way i experience flavor and then the demerara rum the el dorado 8 is like wow like it's almost low frequency oscillator this is like running through the bottom of the flavor profile and it brings like this toasty demerara a little bit of funk there's a little bit of a kind of a chemical accurateness from you know a little bit of that funky rum stuff but this isn't that style of rum so it's very muted um brings a little bit of um caramel toasty some of the tannins from the ochre in there for sure it's got like a toasted kind of demerara sweetness thing going on without being very sweet because it's it's not you know sweetened right but uh but now of course this is sweetened we've kind of reawakened all those flavors that rely on sugar by adding simple syrup to the string simple can be like a salt you know you need you need certain things to taste other things certain foods if you make them are very bland and then you add some salt you ha you don't make the food salty you taste all the stuff that you put into it sugar can kind of do the same thing you can put a bunch of things together and be like ah that's that's something and yet a little bit of sugar not enough to make it sweet which we haven't really quite done here right on the edge um and it doesn't turn into candy it just lets you find those flavors that are hidden in there it turns them on i don't know how to explain it yeah it gets better and better it has such a wonderful mouth feel is this very creamy texture married with a kind of drying earthy dry bitterness it's not overpowering it is unique very enjoyable experience like as an experience the cocktail is really fun the whole flavor combo of the rum lemon matcha and sweetness kind of hit together on your first sip like a loud orchestra just like boom like an orchestra hit all at once and then all the little pieces kind of filter out and do their their rides from there it's quite beautiful honestly this is i'm very proud of this drink it's one of my favorite drinks i've ever made for the show honestly i'm extremely pleased with the way this one turned up um very proud of it i hope that you will enjoy a wellerman in the future and it's sugar tea and rum i gotta say this episode came from a suggestion i got on twitter from an account at uh krozick10 k-r-o-z-k-e-z-e-k-10 oh but i'm not putting on blast kyle rosick doesn't happen that often that i take a suggestion just straight off the bat but he was a great idea and i hadn't considered it and i thought about it for a split second i was like well that's a good idea for cocktail actually let's do it and if you want to shout cocktail suggestions at me that i will 99 of time ignore don't don't get me wrong i'm at how to drink on twitter i'm also at how to drink on instagram if you like the show enough that you want to see some more of it you want to see the parts this episode that i couldn't use and there's quite a few of them um well then you might want to check out my patreon at patreon.com how to drink it's behind the scenes there's extended stuff there's a discord for patrons that we're all hanging out in all time it's a lot of fun i'm in there quite a bit if you want to interact with me live on camera check out my twitch i'm on there all the time i'm on twitch constantly anymore it's kind of an addiction of mine i'm at twitch.tv greg from htd i'm doing stuff from the bar i'm playing video games i'm hosting and running tabletop role-playing games on tuesday nights at 9 pm for example thank you for watching htd i'm your host greg you know what else you could do check out these other four episodes that are appearing around me as if my magic check them out oh that's a favorite of mine that's a good one have you seen this this is a classic all kinds of had a drink for you there once was a ship that put to see the name of the ship was a bully a tea the wind blew up the bow dipped down blow my billy boy's blow

Channel: How To Drink

Views: 790,417

Keywords: htd, how to drink, mixology, tape brothers territory, alcohol, liquor, bartending, mixed drinks, how to, how to make, spirits, bitters, drink, cocktails, cocktail, classic, recipes

Id: gLlIMN1RTJE

Length: 30min 30sec (1830 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 28 2021