They Thought this was Medicine?! | How to Drink

a long while back i did an episode on bottled and canned old fashions and i included in that lineup a bottle of jacqueline's i did it again it's not joaquins it's jack wins jack wins interesting linguistics there i'd always been told it was sort of a kind of bottled old fashioned but that turned out to not really be the case and actually a lot of people in the comments had thoughts on rock and rye and wanted me to revisit the subject which caught me by surprise because i didn't know rock and roll was still relevant but sure let's do that today on hdd later in this episode i'm actually going to make my own batch of rock and rye and i've got a bunch of bottles of the stuff here that i'm going to sample and review as well but first i think we should figure out what exactly rock and rye is well i got to do a bit of reading on the subject and the first few articles i found basically say that rock and rye which is a combination of rock candy and rye whiskey rock candy by the way is just crystallized sugar syrup that's all it is it's sugar some form or another has been a folk remedy since at least the 1870s and i had assumed that was about as much detail as i'd be able to squeeze out of the murk of history on the origins of this stuff i assumed wrong as always leave it to david wonders to find the receipts in a 2019 article in the daily beast which will be linked in the pin count below he traces the origin of rock and rye at least the commercially available stuff to an article recounting a particular ex-judge's 1877 trolley ride with a reporter from the new york sun from the new york sun's printing of the judge's account of how five pounds rock candy dissolves into a gallon of rye whiskey it cured him of consumption wondritz finds the first ad for bottled rock and rye for sale in 1878 a little less than two months after that article had been printed as near as anyone can guess rock and rye and similar sugar whiskey concoctions had been popular as folk remedies before 1878 it's just really hard to find like records of that right and that makes sense i mean because i think pretty much all alcohol consumption has its roots in supposed medicine the julip and the cocktail both enjoyed curative claims of course there's the gin and tonic which actually was a medicine at the height of its popularity there were dubious bottlings of medicine show mystery cure-all tonics being sold under this name often containing no actual rye probably not rock candy and a lot of very dangerous chemicals that you don't want to drink but until recent years that star had faded with rock and rye kind of being relegated to the back of dusty old liquor cabinets and being prescribed for coughs and colds mainly by grandmas clinging to the traditions of their youth and more mainly by pennsylvania grandmas it seems where the stuff kind of retained a little bit more popularity than in other places now there is some new stuff on the market joining the stalwart jaclyns and i think based on your comments there might even be a mini rock and rye revival going on around here so uh let's taste some rock and rye right after this let's get into the rock and rye i didn't pick an order to do these in um let's revisit jacqueline's america's oldest cordial producer this one is bottled at 27 alcohol by volume has a lot of mold and stuff floating around in there it's probably not mold it's probably not i don't know it looks gross i mean it is truly gross looking [ __ ] it used to be a cherry and it's got no color left and there's like some orange wedges this is some special [ __ ] it doesn't have really any serving instructions i think we just put it over an ice cube and stir it up boom jaclyn's am i smelling orange i might be smelling the orange it's got some kind of a citrusy smell like on first glance that smell smells just sort of chemical but when you think about it's like no that's some kind of lemon or citrus oil that's so weird it does taste putrid like putridly sweet it tastes like the smell of walking into a florist which sounds nice but it's not like you go into a floor shop in my experience they don't smell like flowers they smell like fertilizer water being recirculated and kind of being stale funky i think i called it corpse juice recently like it does it has like a kind of the the sickeningly sweet taste of decay i don't know what that actually is but it's syrupy i mean and it would be right only 27 alcohol i don't like it though it also has a there's like a metallicness to it i think that's part of what i'm detecting as like sort of rotting dead flowers i don't love it up next i'm going to do larue rock and rye this is another one that's been around forever let me put it this way um the stolen the mr cats and the slow and low they all kind of represent this raw this rock and rye revival that's going on like the the upmarket rock and rye refined and improved jack wins in larue is like sort of the old school like this is cheap weird stuff grandma medicine cough syrup really much less of a red color with this one the jack ones has like a really reddish color uh and actually i don't hate the reddish color i kind of think that's a neat touch this actually says caramel color added uh larue is a royal family of international acclaim it says so right here okay here we go with larue oh man that's a really weird smell ah it's like rubbing alcohol and um faustine like rotting hay yeah that's gross whoa i hate that oh man that's a weird whoa whoa hot mama that's weird what the hell yeah that man wow carpet glue it tastes like it tastes toxic like this is freaking foul man oh my god meredith asked me on the scale of malort to cowling wine baijo where does this fall i would say it's comparable to the unpleasantness of malort in my opinion but a very different stripe of unpleasantness malur is intensely bitter this is very sweet it just tastes wrong the cowling wine baijo it's not even a taste so much as like your body rejects it it tastes unholy nothing you can consume should taste like that or do what it does to you i mean like you convulse it's it's bizarre this is uh let's get some more ice water on it's starting to melt a little harder here i can see it um this is gross oh my god wow i might prefer malord i'm not gonna lie it really truly tastes like a berber carpet that you've boiled like a acrylic melting glue that is wow man that is some gro that is gross let's try some mr katz's american rock and rye this actually has a label on it mr katz is on the old build railroad an american classic rock and rye can once be found on the back bar of most noteworthy establishments blended with rock candy sugar dried bing cherries orange peel and cinnamon bark it's bottled at 65 proof so there's a little bit more alcohol content than the other two it's up to 32 percent now it didn't say whether i should or shouldn't address the sediments on the bottom generally speaking when there's sediments you want to shake them in you know so that's my instinct shake it man don't let them sit on the bottom unless you're dealing with like you know aged port wines or something like that um it has a nice dark cola look to it let's put it on the rocks let's try it out it's from new york distilling company not very syrupy just on the poor you can tell that's a much lighter pour than the other two which were like this is more blip that's like a lighter pour it's not so syrupy also you can just see the viscosity and the way it kind of moves over the ice i wanted to do this episode dressed as like colonel sanders because there's the song st louis blues i love that man like a kentucky colonel likes his rock and rock anyway this is mr katz um mr katz's rock and roll here we go smells like whiskey that is light that is not oh wow okay wow cool that just tastes like a manhattan which makes sense you know you put cherries into manhattan it's like taking the cherries and making them a infusing them throughout the drink you do get some cherry notes that is so completely different character from the others that it's very not sweet at all i mean there's some stuff in there that kind of registers as being i wonder what brand of bitters that is but actually it's probably that those kind of herbal ingredients that go into a rock and rye are probably kind of overlapping with some of the flavor profiles of a bitters so it could be that i'm not gonna lie i think it's okay like as a product it's way less disgusting like it's i don't wanna say it's less disgusting that sounds like it's still disgusting as a product it's way more interesting than these like syrupy these these weirdos these two guys here you're calling it rock and rye i want to be something totally unique i think it could be fruitier i think it'd even be a little bit sweeter than this to be honest there's a big difference between the level of sugar here and the level of sugar here here uh you could you could you can come up a lot in sweetness on this sucker before you're at one of these crazy things but i would basically treat this like a bottled manhattan that's basically what it tastes like and if you put that in your head like oh this is my bottle of manhattan nice it's nice nice uh let's get to the next one let's do stolen now look at that the bottle is black but that is just light that looks like uh this looks like rye it doesn't look like anything else this is called stolen rock and rye made with aged american rye whiskey raw honey orange peel this is 80 proof this is a fool proof spirit now i have a funny feeling and this is going to taste basically like straight spirits that is an old-fashioned i mean that just tastes like an old-fashioned i like it too it's not a bad old fashion that's a that's about how i like my old-fashioned shoot and i like that a lot there's some apple notes in there that's interesting i'm not picking up on the honey says it was made with honey but i wonder if the rye plus honey somehow equals apple could be but i get apple i get like green apples rye little sweet nice nice i like this one over this one to be honest i like the stolen over the mr cats personally it's just a flavor profile i find that you know honestly i'm not a manhattan guy i don't really like manhattan's i like them a lot less after shooting the 42 manhattan matrix by the way i don't dislike them it's just not my go-to my go-to is an old-fashioned and in fact i think that this probably should have been one of the lineup in my bottle of old-fashioned episodes i would say that you can drink this as a bottled old fashioned and you'd be pretty happy about it uh let's get to slow and low i think this is probably the most celebrated of the rock and rye revival certainly is oh man i gotta say i this is sexy branding we got a special bottle with this twisty neck this logo of the bee on the on the orange that is just gorgeous i love that 42 alcohol so we're actually over 80 proof hush stadlers hutch stetter's hutch stutters hutch stutters you people with the names hot statters slow and low um it says established 1884 but i know it just kind of came to market so it's got to be a revival or something 84 proof straight rye whiskey rock candy raw honey aromatic bitters and navel oranges extra dry extra dry both sides pour over ice and serve oh man locally union made i love unions hell yeah man i didn't know they were union made and look at this they even have are those like usable stickers or something like if you look through the juice there's all kinds of cool little artwork going on inside there it's a neat bottle i like it some people are gonna say that's some hipster ass [ __ ] i just think it's nice i like it all right here we go big neck i mean you can't put a speed pour on that that's for sure let's do the hot stetler slow and low totally different nose um this smells like cola almost here we go hot stutters wow okay i get why this is the most celebrated one because this doesn't taste like an existing cocktail this doesn't taste like an old-fashioned or manhattan this tastes like its own thing you get immediately that whether or not you like that thing it's a subjective question this is objectively foul nobody likes this this is objectively freaking weird some people like this but the people who like this know that they're weird for liking it this stands on its own legs i haven't decided if i personally like it or not but it's like it is interesting let's go in again you get a lot of orange and i might be picking up on a hints of honey you know first blush i was gonna say it was a little malty but i think that's actually a honey note that is coming around at the end there it has a little evolution to it you know that's interesting i like it i would say that you're going to treat it a lot like an old-fashioned because it's really potent stuff and one or two of these and you're going to be out for the count i mean like proof-of-proof your stuff um it is interesting i suppose if i told you here's an old-fashioned and i just poured that you'd probably believe me but i also think that if you're being trying to be objective about it it doesn't really present as an old-fashioned it definitely doesn't present as something like in manhattan it's a lot closer to an old fashioned than a manhattan this really does taste like a bottle of manhattan there's no question and this one really tastes pretty strongly like an old fashioned that i would make this tastes like an old-fashioned that somebody i don't know might make it really does taste like its own thing what do i think about rock and rye having tasted all these in in general i don't know i don't know what is i there i hope there's a place for these things i'm not inclined to mix a new cocktail with these like they're already so blended so mixed so flavored so sweetened that like the idea of using rock and rye as an ingredient in something else seems weird to me so it's like it's meant to be drank on the rocks that's it do i seek like a ready to pour beverage that i can just throw on an ice cube and stir up not really it's not that hard for me to go one two stir peel you know make an old fashion like it takes a second so i'm probably personally gonna reach for the old fashioned but definitely some people want these the question i have then is what is the platonic ideal of a rock and rye what is the correct answer these are all representing a fundamentally different design philosophy from this stuff which is syrup i mean it's just like it's whiskey syrup in a weird way in a perverse way even though i don't like these if you're gonna make a rock and ride i want to be more divergent from the rye and to really really be its own thing and kind of unrecognizable as like oh this is a lot like a [ __ ] yeah this cocktail or something like that now that i've had my rock and rye i'm ready to take a swing at making my own so let's do that right after this so let's make some rock and rye here now today old judge schnabel in 1877 he calls for five pounds of rock candy to a gallon of rye a gallon of hundred proof whiskey should clock in at around 7.84 pounds water would be 8.34 pounds which makes our five pounds of rock candy version very sweet indeed that's one-third rock to two-thirds rye right david wundrich calls for a pound of rock candy to a 750 of whiskey which is actually just around the same ratio i didn't really work out the math but i looked at i was like oh yeah it's closer than you think so that's probably not a bad place to start i found a recipe in whiskey advocate that calls for using clay's whorehound drops hard candies infused with the medicinal herb that i also found most often in other rock and rye recipes and i liked that idea a lot so i bought a bunch of these but that recipe only called for like four to five of these drops per 750 of rye and a couple tablespoons of honey which seems very unsweet that to me is swinging way too far away from you know the old guard syrupy direction i don't even know if you'd be able to taste four or five of these in a 750 i think that's kind of crazy at any rate i think um armed with this knowledge of the standard recipe ratio the idea of using horror hound drops and ideas about what i liked from these uh and what would typically go into a rock and rye particularly like a home brew rock and rye which is an herbal medicine medicinal thing i want to come up with a recipe of my own i don't have anything written i'm just going to kind of wing it i want to make something that is a little bit weirder i want to make something here that's a little bit more true to the idea of rock and rye having supposed medicinal roots and being pretty sweet to be honest like a cough syrup right because that's sort of the idea i think so i haven't even sampled one of these clay's four hound drops these old time candies well let's try one where now and that's the idea by the way in that that recipe use this instead of unflavored rock candy and i may end up using some sugar rock candy is sugar that's all it is it is sugar it don't really taste like much i mean i taste like i've not turned this into a show where you wait for me to eat a hard candy the slowest thing known to man i'm not gonna lie i don't know what horror hound is and i don't want you to think i'm making it up [ __ ] hound i trust them that there's some horror hound in here but this just tastes like sugar to me i'm gonna chew it up now i release the [ __ ] that's a funny name no man that's just sugar i bought these jars a while back for the purposes of infusing things and i got my kitchen scale and uh we're gonna wing it you too can it can release the whorehound by clicking the link in the pin comment below and ordering uh some clay's candy horrorhound old-fashioned hard candy uh it's available from amazon using the affiliate link in the pin code below and also if you guys are want to use the bottles i use on the show swing by curiata they will certainly have some hotsteaders uh and we'll try to get some mr cats and stolen on there these guys are available at your local whatever shop they serve 30 states in america which represent 80 percent of the u.s population if you want to use the stuff i use on the show you can get it at curata drink.com use the link in the pinned comment below um i know i'm going to do a whole bottle of rye i happen to be using this written house rye i'm gonna use the whole thing i don't care so we're gonna pour this 750 into this bottle it's a one liter bottle so i should leave me with some room to work all right there you go 700 grams of rye so each of these weighs about four grams maybe we'll do 100 grams i'm now going to add some demerara sugar this is sugar in the raw how much am i going to add i don't know we're about 100 grams there we have 700 grams of rye and 300-ish grams of sugar total 100 of those grams are from the hard candies uh 200 grams of the demerara sugar i think that once this dissolves and it's going to take a long time to dissolve that will get us to what i want to hit which is sort of between the dry rock and rise and the super syrupy rock and rice that's a little bit better than two parts rye to one part um sugar i want to add one cinnamon stick three wedges of orange so 71 grams of orange let's take a lemon do the same thing two wedges there and then i have a bunch of like dried herbs that i use for fusing it doesn't come off that much on the show i'm gonna throw some hibiscus in there because i really like the color of the jack ones and i wanna try and get some of that uh i don't find the hibiscus taste like much but it will add a little bit of something kind of flowery and it's gonna add a lot of like reddish color okay so it's actually a little over a gram and then the other thing i wanted to add was a little bit of bitter orange it doesn't take much of this again if you make it to a gram that's quite a bit so there's one gram of bitter orange and now i'm going to seal this up and uh hopefully i don't spill any when i do okay we're sealed normally as i clean this up normally you're not gonna get sugar to dissolve into a pure spirit like this there is a little bit of water there though right like it's not pure spirit it's not a hundred percent alcohol it's only a hundred it's only 50 alcohol so there's room in this in that water for the sugar to dissolve into and we're just gonna have it's gonna take time that's all there is to it but that in a few days is gonna be some interesting stuff to try and for now we're gonna take a little break and when we come back we're gonna try that and finish up this episode all right so it's been about three days um i think three days exactly and actually as of this morning all of our sugar is dissolved it took all of three days but it's gone now the candies the sugars everything is dissolved although the skins of these lemons and oranges look pretty phased the fruit is really breaking down the pulp is is falling apart here and i can see that the hibiscus has really puffed up and loosened and the cinnamon has uh kind of bleached out a little bit and softened and the uh what do you call it the bitter orange peels have kind of gone soft and puffy too those are really dry um so i think we've done a lot of infusion here uh and i'm ready to stop it i'm good with this so i'm just gonna decant that into this little decanter i've got i'm always opposed to making an old fashion with the sugar cube because the amount of water that's in there you cannot get that sugar to dissolve into the whiskey but the truth is that you can get sugar to dissolve into a pretty much pure spirit it just takes a really long time so here we go doing a pour there we go nice pour going right through a little screen here really got every drop [Music] let's try one of these gross old irons yeah i don't want to do that they're not terrible but they're pretty boozy uh all right and there we have it this is our rock and rye i'm gonna try a little bit of it neat right now pretty syrupy based on what i saw coming out of there thick there we go a little taste ooh oh yeah i like that yes that is yes that is exactly what i wanted this tastes like heck yeah that is delicious that is delicious that came out so good it is it is sweet i don't think it's too sweet though because it's rock and rye like you know what it is matters it's a lot sweeter than an old-fashioned i still think it's less sweet than like jaclyn's or this for sure which are just straight up syrups this tastes like cinnamon actually the cinnamon is really big presence in there that one stick of cinnamon did a lot of infusion it has orange and lemon notes from the oils somewhat muted here but definitely present definitely present the hibiscus i don't know how much color it's provided yeah definitely some you know because like there's a little bit of the written house left you can see it's gotten a lot redder from where this guy started a lot of that is though also coming from the fact that i used a demerara sugar which the molasses in there carries a lot of color and i think that was a good move that brought in a lot of flavor the bitter oranges yes you're definitely getting a little snap a little bite of bitterness and not too much i think that somehow i think i just i do i think i lucked out trying to kind of find a place in between where this wouldn't be like a bottled old fashioned it's a product into it it's like it's a in a category into its own but also with an eye towards like not making straight up cough syrup so when i say that too like i could see this being an old time cough syrup like i i think that mary poppins would put that in the spoon and feed it to you right hers was um rum punch if i'm punch if i'm not mistaken i want to say too there are some you probably see it there you can definitely see it there little bits of pulp from the orange and lemons usually when you see that in something like that's not so good that means that's gonna that those pulpy bits could grow molds and go bad but with our sugar content here and our alcohol content i don't know i mean i i think that they're probably safe part of me thinks like oh strain them out with a cheesecloth or something another part he's like let it go let's see what happens because certainly in something like jaclyn's which um honestly i think it's probably lower proof it's not really an issue that stuff it's not causing like botulism outbreaks or anything like that i want to try this on ice because i have a funny feeling it'll be a little different on ice so i've got another bigger glass here you don't have to spin your ice when you drop it into a glass but i do you can see the sugar actually flowing around the ice cube there do you guys just want like um pouring and stirring hey asmr let me know in the comments below meredith seems to think that we should make like six hour long asmr reels of like close-up footage i could do a binaural like uh chit chat all right here we go this is um spun on ice and uh chilled and watered greg's rock and rye here we go that is good very orangey really cool how chilling and diluting that really brings the orange up so whereas like an old fashioned because of like that expression of oil has like a bright fresh orange vibe um this has a candied orange vibe like orange gummies or like a teres chocolate orange or something like that like it has that kind of orange confection thing happening you get a blast of cinnamon i don't know if i'm catching lemon specifically but i assume that whatever i'm tasting is actually really a combination of the lemon and the orange plus the sugar and there is a spiciness to this there's that cinnamon spice the rye spice i think a spicier rye actually might even be better rittenhouse is pretty uh run-of-the-mill um dead center one i mean you're talking expensive but like get yourself a barrel aged you know a cask strength like um alberta premium or something like that or high west you can go with some smoky like the high west campfire that might be really good and you know maple syrup will crystallize too so you don't necessarily need to use pure cane sugar you could use a maple i kind of was winging it i mean i was 100 winging it on my ratios but i feel like i nailed it and i couldn't be happier with how it came out it is exactly but also like you know also different different enough that it's not just an old fashioned in a bottle much thanks to david wonders for writing an excellent article in the daily beast which provided real research here i don't care if you like comment subscribe do whatever you want that's fine but what i do love is when you watch the show that's so nice of you to do and whether you're a new fan or an old boy i've been making the show for six years i bet there's something you haven't seen here are four options for you to check out right now why don't you go and check them out well thank you so much for watching and i'll see you soon with another episode of htd

Channel: How To Drink

Views: 297,387

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, Rock and Rye, Rock and Rye recipe for cough, diy, homemade, diy recipe, rock and rye whiskey, ready to pour, taste test, hard to find, weird, weird booze, gross drinks, cursed, canned cocktail, patent medicine, consumption, consumption cure, 1800s medicine, old time medicine, old time remedy

Id: XAVI6rtOe8s

Length: 26min 33sec (1593 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 08 2022