Alcoholist Yet another cocktail blog.

TotC2009 notes: Cocktails Born from the Seven Seas

Cocktails Born from the Seven Sea was a Robert Hess history lesson on how the sealanes carried spirits and mixed drink recipes around the world.

• Originally the 7 seas were those just around southern Europe and Arabia; pre-Columbus (Adriatic, Mediterranean, Caspian, Black, Red, Aegean, and Persian — thanks Louisia W-S)
• 13th century world was just Europe, Arabia, and China; countries (cf, VOC in Low Country Libations)
• silk route both overland and water, but nobody traveled the whole route, just legs, but moved textiles, spices, and culture along the routes
• 1274 – Marco Polo was (one of the) first to travel the whole route
• 1295 – returned to Europe (but the Chinese were reluctant to see him go)
• 1312 – wrote the story of his travels down, and was initially disbelieved
• 1280-1370 – Mongolion Empire made the land silk route possible, the route broke apart when it collapsed
• 1488 – Portugal finally passed Cape Horn to replace the land route
• 1492 – Spain went westward
• 1494 – Treaty of Torbesillas split the world between Portugal, getting Brazil & east, Span got the North American coast and west
• British Empire was later to world travel, battling with France and Holland
• 1578 – Great Britain sent ships out [where?], but failed
• 1584 – GB found Roanoke (but we know how that ends)
• 1624 – GB in the Caribean
• ca 1815 – British Empire the largest out there
• Tasting: the Voyager
  • 2 oz Don Q gold rum (”top-selling rum in Puerto Rico”)
  • ½ oz Benedictine
  • ½ oz Falernum
  • ½ oz lime juice
  • 2 dashes Angostura
  • served on the rocks, with a lime wedge
• tiki drinks started in the Caribbean because fruits, etc were plentiful there, but are modified punches
• 15th century, first [modern] distillations
• Brandy, first in the 12th century, became popular in the 14th
• Romans made wine (and probably distillates as well; we rediscovered both later), but they added garlic, salt water, honey, and other things, which indicates it wasn’t necessarily great
• punch was also designed to cover less than ideal flavors
• cachaça b/n 1530 and 1550, “sugar wine”, doled out to slaves as incentive to work
  • appellation not so big a deal – just had fermented product, distilled it, it’s stronger
  • consumed at a rate of 2 gallons / person / year in Brazil
  • caipirinha is the diminuitive of caipira, which means “hill billy”
  • See also Jared Brown & Anistatia Miller’s Soul of Brasil for a history of cachaça
• pisco:
  • first wine grapes in Pisco, Peru in 1500
  • distillation technique from European brandy
  • early piscos were pomace wines
  • 1641 – Spain banned exports of pisco from the colonies because it was cutting into the native Spanish wine market
  • pisco is distilled at bottle strength (rather than diluted as most spirits), so it retains more flavor
  • aged in clay casks, rather than wooden barrells
  • originally pisco was the word for a bird, then for the people who lived in the area, then for the clay of the area, then for the spirit stored in that clay
  • Chilean pisco claims origination; they were distilling, but differently
  • originally the pisco in North America (especially San Francisco) came from Peru, but Chile took over the market; Peru’s just now getting back on its feet
  • 1928 – first printed reference [or recipe?] to a pisco sour, Victo Morris in Lima
  • Chileans leave the egg out of pisco sours
• Mescal:
  • 200 AD at least for palque, fermented sap of agave
  • distillation beagn mid 1500s (probably 1531)
  • some evidence that distillation was introduced by Filipinos in Colima & Jalisco (most say it was introduced by the Conquistadors)
    • the equipment more resembles Filipino’s than Spanish
    • the Spanish were conquerors, but the Filipinos were traders
• Some margarita origination stories I didn’t note down; “margarita” = “daisy” (and is similar, as is the Cosmo)
• Rum:
  • on ships to kill the contamination in the water
  • began with the import of molasses (and slave triangle)
  • gradually moved north from the islands
• the Mojito:
  • preceded by El Draque, 1586, named for Sir Francis Drake
  • Angel Martinez standardized the recipe in 1998
• gin:
  • based on jenever from the Netherlands in 1595 [but see also Low Country Libations]
  • British soldiers introduced to it in 1625
  • British gin still foundings:
    • 1793 Plymouth
    • 1796 Gordon’s
    • 1820 Beefeater
    • 1830 Tanqueray
  • 1751 – gin act limited and taxed production & sales
  • Pink Gin – most likely invented by the Royal Navy in order to take Angostura for seasickness
  • Gimlet, named for Thomas Gimlette; 1879 mandated consumation of limes and got it into the Merchant Shipping act (see also Lauchlin Rose production of preserved lime juice, in 1867)
• [From the QA, maybe?] There were some truly weird things during mid-millenium; yeast was unknown until Pasteur, so there was something called chicha – pineapple, apple, chewed to soften it, fermentation started with feces from guinea pigs, then add star anise to cover the odor