With the world obsessed, if only for a day, with the world of pirates, we thought we’d turn our attention to one of the few aspects of pirate life still socially acceptable – the drinking.
Writer Wayne Curtis, as part of his broader examination of rum’s links to American history in And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails, has traced and documented some of the now legendary tipples brewed by the grizzly sea-farers of the past.
And some of them are quite extraordinary indeed. Like flip, as recently described to NPR thusly:
… you’d make flip with a large pewter tankard, fill it up with some dark beer and then you’d add a sweetener to it. Then you’d put a few ounces of rum into it. And then the ritual part was to stick something into a fireplace called a loggerhead, which was a long piece of steel with a bulb on the end of it - a bulb of metal that would get heated up red hot. This would then be thrust into the tankard and it would all just bubble and boil and foam up.
How quickly would the smug look on every pirate-talking undergraduate disappear if you showed up at their parties tonight with a tankard of flip and a red-hot loggerhead?
To think that yesterday we thought we were hardcore mixing vodka and espresso…
And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails [Amazon]
Lacoste has the crocodile. Penguin has the, well, penguin. And Billionaire Boys Club has camp astronauts.
