March 21, 2026 • 49 mins
If there's one thing we've learned about Chuck over the years it's that he loves his gin. And he loves it even more now that understands it. Pour yourself a martini and cozy up to the classic gin-cast.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey guys, it's me Josh, and for this week's select,
I've chosen our December twenty nineteen episode on Gin. I
don't take much of a tipple anymore, but I still
find that I appreciate Gin, and this episode does justice
to it in my opinion. It has history, distillation, laws, junipers,
everything you can imagine to make a well rounded, floral
(00:23):
forward Stuff you Should Know episode. I hope you enjoy
it very much.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and
there's Charles w Chuck Brian, there's Jerry over there, and
we are wasted waste it on excitement about talking about Gin.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
Waste it on excitement?
Speaker 1 (00:57):
Uh huh.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
I like that.
Speaker 3 (00:58):
That's a great motto. Yeah, and not a not the
worst band name, but not the best.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
It's not the best at all.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
Like an album title, more like, oh yeah, it's.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
A good album title. Maybe it's Jungle x Ray's second
album wasted on excitement?
Speaker 2 (01:13):
Yeah, or Bathtub Gin wasted on excitement.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
Bathtub Jin's of fish song.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
Oh it is it's funny.
Speaker 3 (01:22):
I was I was walking in the neighborhood yesterday and
I saw a car that was clearly like the child
home for Thanksgiving. It was like this kind of beat
up jeep from Florida, and it had a fish sticker
and a grateful dead sticker and like one other thing college.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
And this really nice thing.
Speaker 3 (01:40):
And I was like, oh, man, I bet I wonder
how much weed is hidden in that thing.
Speaker 1 (01:47):
That's funny.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
Welcome home, son. What's that smell?
Speaker 1 (01:53):
Right?
Speaker 2 (01:54):
Oh? Were you being the sun where we play acting?
Speaker 1 (01:56):
No, it just it was that that sip of coffee.
It's took one down the wrong pipe.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
The wrong pipe, man, What is up with those faulty flaps?
Speaker 1 (02:05):
I don't know, man, Probably too much gin.
Speaker 3 (02:08):
I love Gin, and I love reading about it and
researching it, and I might have a martini tonight as
a result.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
I don't think there's any way you could not have
a martini after reading about Gin for hours and hours
and hours.
Speaker 3 (02:23):
Yeah, because Gin and Tonic season is over for me, sadly.
Oh yeah, and I'm into wine season. But wine season
and martini season there's some comorbidity there.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
Martini seasons year round.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Not for me.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
I mean, I don't drink that many martinis. It's a
mood thing or if I'm with Hodgmen, we pound them.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
Sure you can't not drink martinis when Hodgman's around.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
Yeah, of course, yeah, no comment, okay, but correct.
Speaker 1 (02:49):
So we're talking Gin because Gin is great. We love Gin,
and it turns out Jin's got a pretty pretty interesting
history to it.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
I think so too.
Speaker 1 (02:59):
And we did an episode not too long ago on
a short stuff actually on the difference between bourbon and whiskey.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
Right, has that been out yet, even with the way
our schedule works.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
Oh wait, it's coming out tomorrow. Nok about it?
Speaker 3 (03:12):
Yeah, yeah, tomorrow is in today, or tomorrow is in
after this is released.
Speaker 1 (03:16):
Tomorrow is in the people who are listening to this
the day it comes out tomorrow, to them, that very
select group of humans as far as the dimension of
time goes.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
So tomorrow, everybody, you'll hear short stuff about the difference
between whiskey and bourbon. And one of the things that
really stands out is there are a lot of laws
surrounding whiskey, especially in the United States. What makes whiskey whiskey,
what you can call a specific kind of whiskey, what
you can put on the label of some kinds of whiskey,
(03:47):
lots and lots of laws exists.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
A lot of the country. Don't forget that one.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
The spirit of America, the native spirit of America. That's
what it was, Okay, Gin, It's quite the opposite. Basically,
as long as you have a neutral, grained spirit that
is distilled a I think eighty proof or higher, you
can add whatever flavor you want to it, and that
(04:15):
you can call it gin, okay, which is not whatever
you're if you buy that thing that I just described,
Although it's technically legally gin, it's not really gin. A
lot of people call it flavored vodkas. But for gin,
there are specific steps you want to follow. There's specific
(04:35):
things you want to do, and more than anything, there's
probably going to be a taste of juniper to it.
Speaker 3 (04:41):
Yeah, that used to be very much the case now,
and we've talked a little bit about this on other episodes.
Just tangentially, I think is that there are many artists
and gin makers now that are doing all kinds of
crazy gins, and some many issueing the juniper altogether, that
(05:01):
beautiful little evergreen shrub and those little cones that have
that piny, citrusy peppery taste that we love so much. Yeah,
by the way, I should say our buddy Ben Harrison
of the Greatest Generation and Friendly Fire, he I've seen
this online elsewhere, but as far as he knows, he
(05:22):
invented it. A smoked gin and tonic where he gets
a little like a chef's torch and smokes juniper berries
and then throws the glass on top of it upside
down and let's it just smoke up, and then turns
it over and adds the ice and the and the
(05:42):
rest of the mixings there.
Speaker 1 (05:44):
I would like to try that. I've had like smoked
Manhattans and smoked whiskey drinks, oh yeah, wood smoked kine.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
And did they do the same thing.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
Yeah, same process. But I've never ever heard of a
smoked gin and tonic. So hats off to Ben if
he did invent that.
Speaker 2 (05:59):
Yeah, it was good.
Speaker 3 (06:00):
And I also want to know shouted it out before.
But I get this local tonic, now, that's delicious. That
is the real deal, you know, the chinchona bark. And
it's very different than if you're used to traditional like schweps.
Speaker 2 (06:16):
Tonic. Doesn't taste anything like that.
Speaker 3 (06:18):
No, it's you cut it with soda water and it's
a very very lovely taste.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
Oh yeah, like good tonic water is just amazingly good.
Speaker 3 (06:29):
Yeah, and that's you know, if you're talking about like
fever tree will buzz market. Sure that is still a
little more of a traditional tonic. This stuff is brown,
right and syrupy, and then you mix it with the
soda and it becomes sort of a real version of
that stuff.
Speaker 1 (06:45):
So it's probably very similar to stuff they're drinking in
India in the nineteenth century, I think. So, so we'll
get all we'll get to all that.
Speaker 3 (06:53):
Let's go back to gin, all right, So you start
off if you want to make gin, and I have
a gin making kit from last Christmas I still haven't used.
And this has inspired me to go home today and
actually make my own gin.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
And then pound it.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
I'll bring some in. We can all take a.
Speaker 3 (07:09):
Sip, all right, just a sip. But you start with
that base spirit ethyl alcohol that's ninety six percent.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
ABV that you can power a car on.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
Yeah, and then you read distill gin, and that is
one of the keys here, a real real gin. You
redistill that spirit with whatever botanicals you end up choosing.
Speaker 1 (07:32):
Right, But typically, the main botanical that's used in the
main flavor profile of gin, aside from alcohol that you
can power your car on is that juniper berry. That's
that tradition juniper and a piny evergreeny. Some people call
it like drinking a Christmas tree. What makes gin gin?
(07:53):
Once you've had a sip of gin, you will never
mistake it for anything else for the rest of your life.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
That's right. And that base spirit it can.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
Be also, and you should also wait until you're twenty
one to have that sure.
Speaker 3 (08:04):
So of course that base spirit can be wheat, it
can be a rye, can be corn, it can be barley,
but it can be really anything. You can make potato
gin or apple gin. I saw this company in Ireland.
There was an article on Vice by Elizabeth Rousche. Ireland's
best gin is made out of milk.
Speaker 1 (08:25):
Yeah, I saw that too, Bertha's Gin.
Speaker 3 (08:28):
They make it and this is produced fully in Ireland,
which is a great thing because it's a byproduct of
cheese making that way sweet way they use that to
make gin. It's crazy.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
Yeah, They ferment the way and then use that they
distill that fermented beer basically, and then you distill that
further in the process of the presence of botanicals, and
then you have gin. It's just this multi step process.
But because you're starting out with such adiculously high proof
alcohol like neutral alcohol, you can use basically an old
(09:07):
shoe to make that neutral grain spirit and it's going
to taste virtually the same as neutral grain spirit made
from her neutral spirit made from barley, or from whay,
or from potatoes or grapes. It just is the the
alcoholic essence of those things.
Speaker 3 (09:24):
Yeah, and apparently that fermented way is what makes Bailey's
as well, which I didn't.
Speaker 1 (09:30):
Know Bailey's Irish whiskey.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
Yeah, fermented way cool.
Speaker 1 (09:34):
I did not know that either.
Speaker 3 (09:35):
In this I gotta try this stuff though. It's called
Bertha's Revenge.
Speaker 1 (09:38):
For Bailey's Irish Cream.
Speaker 2 (09:39):
I'm sorry, Yeah, what'd you say Irish whiskey?
Speaker 3 (09:42):
Yeah, no, no, it's the it's the coffee additive.
Speaker 1 (09:44):
That's that Connor McGregor stuff for grandma birth is revenge.
Speaker 3 (09:48):
I looks delicious and it is fully made in Ireland.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
And Bertha apparently is a cow they heard after.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
Yeah, she died at like age forty nine after giving
birth to thirty something calves over her life. Yeah, Yeah,
she was a very prolific milk.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
Cow in many ways.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
Yeah, but they they're not the only game in talent
making way based gin. There are others as well, but
supposedly again it's they say that there's something in the
way that even once it's distilled into its spirit, some
there's some mouthfield to it or some flavor profile. A
lot of people argue that that's just not the case,
(10:29):
that no matter what you make it from, you're going
to arrive at basically the same base neutral spirit. Okay, okay,
we'll find out. I'll just let me have some. I'll
try it.
Speaker 3 (10:40):
Bombay sapphire, which we'll learn later on perhaps kickstarted the
resurgence of gin.
Speaker 1 (10:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
Did you know that in the United States?
Speaker 3 (10:48):
No, But it makes it a little bit of sense
now that I see the dates in the timelines of
when it came over. But they very proudly display their
ten different botanicals on the bottle licorice of course, kubeb berries, angelica,
root almonds, coriander, cassia, bark iris, root lemon, peel, and
(11:09):
grains of paradise. Very nice, And I like a bombasedapphire martini.
That's a good fallback for me, although I'm a plymouth
man through and through when it comes to martini's, and
I like generally I like the Hendrix and I like Tankerrey,
good old fashioned Tankerrey for the Tonics.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
I'll get a Hendrix martini when I'm out and about,
but if I'm like making it myself, I used to
like the more boring, straightforward London dried gins, right, the
traditional ones for the martini. And then I realized, like, no, man,
you want to go the exact opposite of that. You
want like the most botanical gin you can find for
a gin martini, because I mean it's basically gin with
(11:50):
a little bit of vermouth, right, so you want to
taste your gin. So I've kind of gravitated toward stuff
like the Botanist or Saint George's Batanavar. Those are two
really really like I guess botanicals. The best way to
put it. Gin's that are out there that are really
really tasty.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
Is that the Saint George that tastes like feet.
Speaker 1 (12:13):
Yeah, so no, that is their aged like Raye Posato gin.
Speaker 2 (12:18):
Yeah that I didn't love that where.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
They made it like it was like kind of a
mescal or age tequila style gin where it was gin,
but it had like some quality of like really like
long aged tequila. I think you weren't prepared for it.
I wonder if you'd like it now, knowing like what
it was going into it.
Speaker 2 (12:39):
Maybe.
Speaker 3 (12:40):
I mean, I'm always hip to try something, but I'd
love a good, high quality London dry gin.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
That's my jam.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
Sure, I mean, I'm with you. I just like the
more botanical ones these days than I used to, the Britannical,
the puritanical ones, the ones that don't have any alcohol
at all.
Speaker 3 (12:56):
So I think we should quickly talk about before we
take our first break, about just how you distill it,
because there's a couple of ways, and then we'll take
our break. But the first way is steeping, and that is,
you know, you steep tea, and it's the same thing. Basically,
you have your base spirit heating up and its simmers,
and then you have those botanicals right in there and
(13:18):
the oils are releasing and it's just infusing through the
whole thing exactly the other way. And you know, Emily
has a still now, I'd love to maybe get in
there and try some of this for real.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
I did not know that. Does she like carry a
Tommy gun around and wear it flooraling for coat?
Speaker 2 (13:33):
No, she's got a copper still.
Speaker 3 (13:34):
She goes to Athens, Georgia once a week to harvest
herbs and then distills herbs.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
For Oh, that's right, I did know that.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
Yeah, it's very cool.
Speaker 1 (13:43):
That is super cool.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
It's a lot of fun to see her out there
doing that stuff.
Speaker 1 (13:46):
Yeah, that's neat.
Speaker 3 (13:48):
And then the other way is vapor infusion, and that
is what Bombay sapphire does, and that is when you
have the botanicals in a basket hanging above the boiling
spirit and that vapor rises and it does it more
through like that steam, I guess right.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
So, or you can combine the two, which is what
another kind of saint, George jin Terroar does where they
use the steeping method for most of the botanicals and
then they use the vapor method for I think like
Douglas fir and bay Laurel leaves. So it's it's got
like kind of the tea of botanicals brewing and then
(14:25):
it's just vaporizing through those other those last two so cool,
it is pretty cool.
Speaker 3 (14:30):
Actually, all right, now we'll take a break, and we'll
come back and talk a little bit about the types
of gin, which also entails some history right after this.
Speaker 1 (15:03):
Okay, we've taken our break, we had our little half sandwiches,
were ready to talk about you.
Speaker 2 (15:08):
So I can't believe you still cut the crust off.
That's very interesting for a garner.
Speaker 1 (15:11):
Well, I just think it's a little I always has
like a crusty taste to it. Then I'm not fond.
Speaker 3 (15:16):
I've always maintained if they didn't call it crust, kids
might eat it, do you think. Yeah, I think if
you said, you know, the do you want the magic
ring left on your bread? The kids would probably have
a whole different view. But if you say do you
want the crust?
Speaker 1 (15:32):
I disagree. I think that magic ring would be a
gross term. Now you look at that magic ringy, old guy,
he keeps staring at us.
Speaker 3 (15:42):
We'll just insert Josh Clark's magic word of choice, magic ringy. Yeah,
I mean it doesn't even have to use the word magic.
But what would you call crust? That sounds better to
a kid.
Speaker 1 (15:53):
I'm saying, no matter what you called it, I think
it would become synonymous with something gross.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
I know, but I'm asking you to yes, and let's see.
Speaker 1 (16:02):
Yes and is not my strong suit. I failed out
of improv.
Speaker 2 (16:05):
Yours is more. No butt?
Speaker 1 (16:07):
Right, No, there's no butt. It's no The rainbow ring. Okay, great,
the rainbow circle.
Speaker 2 (16:17):
I love it.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
I don't like it. I'll go back and edit this party.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
All right. So let's talk about gin.
Speaker 3 (16:24):
We already talked about the fact that it has to
be if you asked me, really distilled with these botanicals
to be real gin. Otherwise flavored vodka that name is
can come up and that's a dirty word, yes, But distilled.
Speaker 2 (16:39):
London dry gin.
Speaker 3 (16:41):
Some of the big big cats Beefeeder and Gordon's and
Tanker Ray are some of those those big daddy London dryes.
Like I said, I'm a plymouth guy. I like yeah,
but these are not sweet. That's why they're called dry gins, right.
Speaker 1 (16:57):
Sweet gins are have a long history and they actually
pre date gin for by many, many years. But the
London dry gin is what most people think of when
they think of gin, and a London dry gin is
actually a subcategory of a larger category, which is distilled gin.
You got gin, which is basically flavor vodkas, which you
(17:20):
could literally put any flavor into this neutral spirit and
call it gin distill Gin means it went through that
process like we described before the break and London dry
is one of those.
Speaker 2 (17:31):
That's right, right, Huh?
Speaker 1 (17:33):
Is that basically what you just said? Yeah, I mean
I was listening and following it, but it just seemed off.
Speaker 2 (17:38):
Oh interesting, Well, I'm glad you cleared that up.
Speaker 1 (17:40):
I'm sorry.
Speaker 2 (17:41):
That's all right.
Speaker 3 (17:42):
Then we get to Old Tom gin and this has
an interesting history of etymology. And I got this from
Mark Vierthaler at talesothococktail dot com. Apparently the name Old
Tom comes from these plaques that hung outside of pubs
that looked like there was like the shape of an
(18:04):
old tomcat's head.
Speaker 2 (18:06):
And get this, and this is amazing.
Speaker 3 (18:09):
Apparently in London, if you had this sign hanging up
in the window, underneath the cat's paw was a slot
and a lead pipe and attached to a funnel, and
you could go down the street in England and drop
a coin in the slot and get a shot of
gin in your mouth.
Speaker 1 (18:26):
Yeah, from under the cat's paw.
Speaker 2 (18:28):
Amazing.
Speaker 1 (18:28):
I saw that too. I saw that it originated Chuck
with this guy named Captain Dudley Bradstreet. And the whole
reason he started doing this was because there was a
law that said that the informant had to know the
name of the person who was selling the illegal gin
for the cops to have probable cause to raid a place.
Oh interesting, So he holed himself up in this house
(18:51):
on this one alley, Blue Anchor Alley, and started selling
gin that way anonymously, and because no one knew who
was selling it, the cops could never raid the place.
Speaker 2 (19:01):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
But yeah, it was under the paw of an old
like like a statue or sign or something of an
old paw or an old Tom Kat.
Speaker 2 (19:10):
I love it too, Old Tom went away. It was
very much sweeter.
Speaker 3 (19:14):
That was when they were using sugar and a lot
of botanicals because the base spirit wasn't that great taste wise,
so they loaded it up with sugar and this other stuff,
and prohibition basically killed Old Tom gin for a long time.
By the time people started, you know, prohibition was over.
They didn't really have a taste for it anymore. And
(19:35):
it has made a comeback in recent years, though a
bit of a comeback.
Speaker 1 (19:38):
You if you are interested in trying you should start
with ransoms old Tom gin. Yeah, it's just beautiful. Is
it good?
Speaker 2 (19:47):
What about Navy strength gin?
Speaker 1 (19:49):
I love that stuff. Have you ever had that?
Speaker 2 (19:51):
Nah? I don't know if I have or not.
Speaker 1 (19:53):
Actually, it will make you blind. Really, your hangover is
noticeably worse the next day for the same amount of booze.
It's just what's a brand and stronger stuff? I think Anchor.
I believe Anchor makes a Navy strength gin.
Speaker 2 (20:09):
That would make sense.
Speaker 1 (20:11):
I'm almost positive that's who's I've had. But it's it's
just like this higher proof. I think, like gin can
be as low as like thirty seven and a half percent,
and Navy's strength is at least fifty percent, okay, And
there's just a noticeable difference in it. And the taste
is it's you know, it's not terribly much different. It's
(20:32):
just the potency of it.
Speaker 2 (20:33):
But it's gotcha.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
It got its name from a pretty great little legend
from what I understand.
Speaker 3 (20:38):
Yeah, that's in the Navy. They loved them some gin
in the Navy, and they actually got gin rations, and
so sailors would test it out to see if it was,
you know, up to snuff or if it was watered
down and they would drizzle it over a little pinch
of gunpowder and then light it and if it lit,
then it was navy strength.
Speaker 1 (20:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:57):
I love it.
Speaker 1 (20:58):
And it's not like a Lee classification or anything, is it.
It's just kind of like a.
Speaker 3 (21:03):
Well it says it says navy strength gen is at
least fifty seven point one percent. So at least I
don't know if there's a law in the EU or
if that's just a sort of a standard.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
But that's that's where the name came from at least.
Speaker 2 (21:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:17):
Yeah, and it's potent stuff.
Speaker 2 (21:19):
What about Geneva, So that is.
Speaker 1 (21:23):
Basically like the predecessor of gin, right, I mean this
Dutch drink that was first drunk for people to get
drunk off of.
Speaker 3 (21:30):
Yeah, that's made more out of a malt wine. I
think fifteen to fifty percent malt wine, and so it
you know, it can kind of it's sort of like
the maltiness of a whiskey, but the botanicals of a gin.
Speaker 1 (21:42):
I think I've always heard that Old Tom and Geneva
are a lot alike. Oh really, yeah, they bear a resemblance. Interesting,
but so Geneva is like a pretty good place to
start as far as this history of gin goes, because
it was, like I was saying, like a proto gin,
like one of the first I guess, the direct predecessor
(22:03):
of gin as we understand it today. But even further
back than that, that essential component of gin, the juniper berry,
has been used at least since the seventies and now
the nineteen seventies, I mean just the straight up seventies.
There's a recipe from Pliny the Elder from seventy six
or seventy seven CE that used juniper berries and you
(22:28):
just were supposed to boil some white wine with juniper
berries and then drink it, and it was a curative
and probably got you pretty drunk. And then I thought
about this. This was like two years before he died,
the eruption of Vesuvius. Oh, interesting, that weird kind of chilling. Well,
at least he had a nice couple of years there
at the end. He definitely did.
Speaker 3 (22:48):
The word Genever, g e n e v e r
is actually Dutch for juniper, and it is it does
come hail from Holland, and apparently in the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries these and this was when people were using
herbs as medicine. They you know, obviously still do that today,
that's what Emily's doing. But apothecaries there were experimenting with
(23:10):
all kinds of curative herbs and medical tonics and stuff
like that, and juniper was definitely in that category. But
where Geneva took a right turn was they said, wow,
let's just get drunk and like, it's not so much
a cure all but I mean maybe maybe it cures
some things. But it was a drink that you drank
(23:32):
to get drunk.
Speaker 1 (23:33):
It was like, yeah, the first spirit out of I believe,
out of Europe for that people drank. I mean they
had beer and wine and everything before, but Geneva was
like this, like the first hard blicker. I think that
people really drank. And like you said, it was a
malted wine, right, yeah, that's the base, which sounds like
something you buy in a convenience store, drink out a
paper bag, like malted wine, but they would add like
(23:57):
sugar to it, and it had juniper, which is why
a lot of people say this is the direct predecessor
of Gin, and it was how the UK was introduced
to Gin was Geneva. Because I think in the fifteenth
century maybe something like that. Sixteenth the sixteenth century, Queen
Elizabeth the First sent some of her royal soldiers to
(24:20):
the Netherlands to fight alongside the Dutch when they were
fighting for independence, and the Dutch said, hey, man, take
a couple of shots of this Geneva and you'll fight anybody.
You won't be scared at all. And the English like
that a lot, and so they brought Geneva back with them,
or it tastes for it at least, and Geneva eventually
got shortened to Gin. That's where we got the word
(24:42):
gin from.
Speaker 3 (24:43):
That's right, And about close to one hundred years later,
the end of the Anglo Dutch War meant you could
actually import it legally by the barrel, and they were
called strong water shops was what the early liquor stores
in London were called.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
I love that. I'm sure there are places in America
where they have ganged that title.
Speaker 1 (25:02):
Oh yeah, and they also wear arm guards probably, so
I'm so glad you taught me that word because I've
always just called it, you know, those like our old
timey arm bands, and it never had quite the punch.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
Yeah, arm guards.
Speaker 3 (25:15):
The first Gin distillery in Britain in Plymouth.
Speaker 1 (25:23):
Right, Okay, I had a lot of trouble figuring this
one out. I saw that in eighteen forty Booths was
the first really gin distiller Okay, but and that the
Plymouth one was Oh wait, maybe that was like the
seventeen hundreds. I'm not sure there was a big rush
(25:43):
to establishing gin distilleries in this period that we're talking about.
Speaker 2 (25:48):
All right, well, I don't have a date for the
Plymouth one.
Speaker 1 (25:50):
Actually, let me look it up while you're talking.
Speaker 3 (25:52):
All right, well, let's flash forward then to the gen craze,
because gin, depending on who you're asking, was the the
crack of the sixteen hundreds in England. William of Orange,
Protestant King of the Netherlands, went to assume the throne
of Great Britain during the Glorious Revolution, and they were
(26:14):
drinking that Geneva and they loved it as the royalty.
But the working class could not afford this stuff, so
they started making their own rot gut like bathtub gin.
And apparently bathtub gin is it is not brewed or
not brewed. It's not distilled in a bathtub. It can
be mixed with botanicals in a bathtub. But from what
(26:36):
I saw. The main reason it's called bathtub gin is
because to water it down and top it off with water,
you couldn't fit it in these bottles in a sink,
so you had to do that in a bathtub.
Speaker 1 (26:45):
Oh okay, but I.
Speaker 3 (26:46):
Think they were mixing up botanicals and stuff too. But
at any rate, this rot gut gin in the early
seventeen hundreds, and by the mid seventeen hundreds that was
a full on gin in the UK.
Speaker 1 (27:01):
Yeah, it was called the Gin craze, and like especially
if you read like kind of the tracks railing against
it at the time, and newspaper editorials and stories about
just the depravity that was going on because of gin,
Like the whole country was just totally off its rocker
on gin, and not even like good gin or even Geneva.
(27:24):
This bathtub rockcut stuff that you were talking about, where
they would add things like turpentine to give it a
piny flavor because they didn't have juniper berries. They would
add sulfuric acid to give it a hot aftertaste, like
it was supposed to have, just really really bad stuff
and it was making people crazy, and there were stories
(27:45):
about mothers who there's a woman named Judith Defour who
killed her own daughter so that she could sell her
clothes to buy more gin, or parents like selling their
kids into slavery to buy more gin. You know, people
turning in to sex workers just to get gin money.
And just supposedly it was, like you said, it was
(28:05):
just like the crack epidemic and the same kind of
response to it as well here in the United States.
But this is gin back in the early eighteenth century.
Speaker 2 (28:14):
Yeah, and for sure there was a gin problem.
Speaker 3 (28:18):
Now historians look back a little bit and they're like,
you know what, these articles were written, and these op
eds were written by the upper class in Britain, and
they had basically an obsession with the English character being
degraded and dragged through the mud by these Gin drunks.
So take it with a grain of salt. There for
(28:39):
sure was a gin problem. But they're basically like, is
a chicken or an egg thing going on? Because they're like,
urbanization is going rampant in London at the time, and
was the gin craze a product of this poverty or
the cause of it? And by all accounts these days,
it looks like it was sort of a product of it.
Speaker 1 (28:58):
I saw that there were at least two who documented
cases of spontaneous human combustion really from drinking this gin. Wow,
isn't that crazy?
Speaker 3 (29:07):
Yeah, it's some hardcore chin geez. There were eight different
gen Acts from Parliament over about a twenty two year period. Basically,
I mean they said different things, but one of the
big ones was, hey, you can't put these you can't
put sulfuric acid in this stuff and sell it anymore.
Speaker 1 (29:28):
Right, And little by little, these incremental laws over these
eight acts, like made it really expensive to have a
license to sell gin, really expensive to import neutral spirits,
and just basically made it so that unless you owned
a large distillery and an established like tavern, you could
not legally engage in selling or producing gin.
Speaker 2 (29:52):
And generally, yeah, I think that's what it said in
the act.
Speaker 3 (29:57):
Genery, yes, that'll shout not pat engenery of any kind.
Speaker 1 (30:01):
Right, okay, So especially if your name is my cocaine.
Speaker 2 (30:06):
Oh you finally did it?
Speaker 1 (30:09):
Did I do it? If I did it was accidental,
no you didn't, okay. So but over the course of
these acts that left just like these handful of huge
distilleries like Booths Plymouth, Plymouth, by the way, was the first.
It was in the late eighteenth century, oh nice, and
a couple others. I think boodles might have been around
by then, but all the small distilleries went away just
(30:32):
by law. And so when this artisanal revolution that we're
currently going in that's going on now swept over to England,
this company called Sipsmiths when to go start their own
and they found out that they couldn't buy law that
was two hundred years old, so they had to lobby
and they were the first company in two hundred years
(30:52):
to get a license to bruce or distill small batch
gin in England. Amazing because of those gin. That's pretty great,
I think so too.
Speaker 3 (31:03):
All Right, well let's take another little break here and
we'll talk more about jin right after this.
Speaker 2 (31:33):
All right, So.
Speaker 3 (31:36):
Jin is going strong in the seventeen hundreds, some might
say it's a problem. Flash forward to the eighteen hundreds, okay,
eighteen thirty, and the invention of the continuous still came about.
Speaker 1 (31:48):
That's pretty big.
Speaker 2 (31:49):
If you come over to my house, you see Emily
down there. She doesn't have it.
Speaker 3 (31:52):
She has a traditional copper pot still, which means that
you can do one thing at a time. Basically, you
boil your mash and the alcohol boil that off. You
collect that distilled spirit in the end, but then you
got to start all over again. The continuous still was
a very and the other bad part about that is
(32:13):
is your ABV is going to be pretty low if
you're doing the single pot.
Speaker 1 (32:17):
That's your alcohol by volume. That's right, because the longer
it was, say distilled, the pure and more alcoholic, the
ultimate spirit you captured would be right, that's right.
Speaker 3 (32:28):
Okay, So if you have a continuous still, which was
what was invented in eighteen thirty, that means you can
just keep going, man, You just keep throwing that mash
in there, and you keep that process going, and you
get more and more pure as you go, and you're
going to get that beautiful clear grain alcohol around ninety
six percent in the end. And that really really changed
the game.
Speaker 1 (32:49):
Yeah, because so like these continuous stills are coffee stills
after the man who invented them. It's like the spirit
rises through increasingly high up stages and it's reheated and
heated and heated, and so it becomes pure and pure
the higher up it goes, and then eventually it gets
tapped off and then you have that high test alcohol.
(33:11):
And because you could get pure alcohol to use as
the base spirit for gin, you had less of a funky, foul,
nasty taste that you needed to cover up with stuff
like botanicals or sugar or turpentine, which meant that you
could produce gin with a much pure gin that eventually
(33:34):
evolved into London dry gin.
Speaker 3 (33:36):
Yeah, and London dry gen again with the dry that
means it's not a sugary. Apparently Victorians in the upper
class at one point decided to basically lower their sugar intake.
I don't know if that was just a major health
kick going on.
Speaker 1 (33:52):
It sounds like John Harvey Kellogg's work here.
Speaker 2 (33:55):
Oh maybe so.
Speaker 3 (33:56):
But that's when they started getting rid of the sugar
and that's why you get this dryer version which became
the London dry gin, and.
Speaker 2 (34:04):
The rest is history.
Speaker 3 (34:07):
They started producing some really high quality gens in England
at the time.
Speaker 1 (34:12):
Yeah, they did. I think that's when the Booths and
Boodles and all those guys started beef feeder and that
was great. That was fine for a while. Like you said,
the Navy was getting their rations and then going out
to see with their gin and testing it on gunpowder
and all that. But one of the things that you'll
look at, especially with the London dried gin, is while
(34:34):
there's no sugar, there's like a really interesting combination of
those botanicals and a botanical. We didn't really say, but
I think it's kind of self evident. It's any kind
of like root, plant, seed, leaf, stem, bark, whatever that's
used to add a particular flavor profile to gin. Typically
(34:55):
juniper is like the chief botanical in a gin. But
if you look at like these lists of botanicals that
are frequently used in London dry gin, they come from
all over the world. And it's no coincidence that England
was at the height of its imperial colonial power at
a time when London dried gin developed, because it was
in a position to bring all these ingredients from all
(35:18):
over the world to the distilleries that had set up
shop in London.
Speaker 2 (35:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (35:22):
I mean, I think even the Bombay Sapphire has each
country listed behind the botanical and it's you know, they're
all from ten different places or eleven different places.
Speaker 1 (35:31):
Yeah, pretty cool, It is pretty cool.
Speaker 3 (35:33):
So the seafaring of the Brits, British sea power have
you ever heard of that band?
Speaker 1 (35:39):
Yeah, we're good.
Speaker 2 (35:39):
I used to love those guys.
Speaker 1 (35:41):
They were like early two thousands.
Speaker 2 (35:43):
Right, yeah, that was a big La band for me.
Speaker 1 (35:46):
Oh okay, I didn't know where they were from.
Speaker 2 (35:48):
No, no, no, when I lived in La.
Speaker 1 (35:50):
Oh.
Speaker 2 (35:50):
I see they're British.
Speaker 1 (35:51):
I always think so. They were from like the era
of like of Montreal and Someone Still Loves You, Boris
Yeltsin and all those kind of indie bands at the
same time.
Speaker 2 (36:00):
Right, yeah, yeah, I think so love those guys.
Speaker 3 (36:03):
British Power, But that had a lot to do with
Gin because the Brits in their navy were very strong
and they sailed a lot and traveled all over the
world obviously because they had certain interests like conquering your
country and making it their own.
Speaker 1 (36:17):
And getting their hands on your botanicals.
Speaker 3 (36:19):
That's right, and also getting there until like let's say
the tropics and saying like, wow, I've never been here before.
What are these things that we can eat and drink?
And what is this disease? Malaria? I don't want to
get that. And so they looked at the you know,
the people from there obviously to get their clue on like.
Speaker 2 (36:40):
They're fine, how can we be like them?
Speaker 3 (36:42):
And the natives of South America chewed on that chinchona
tree and that bark to combat malaria, and chinchona is
pretty wondrous. That bark has a natural chemical and that
is the quinine that you hear. You know, if you
look at a tonic bottle, it contains quinine and it
calms your you know, it.
Speaker 2 (37:02):
Makes you feel better if you have malaria.
Speaker 3 (37:04):
But it also disrupts the metabolism of the parasite and
kills it. So it's a medicament as well as a
help you feel better type thing.
Speaker 1 (37:13):
Oh allah, what medicament? I'm in a predicament because my
heart's all the flooded. Uh, something just happened to me.
Speaker 3 (37:24):
But these doctors were like, hey, yeah, you British soldier,
you should. They started prescribing this stuff, this tinchona bark
and colonists in India and South America, and they were
eating a ton of it, seven hundred tons actually in
the eighteen forties, seven hundred tons of chinchona bark a
year were being eaten by British soldiers and settlers yep.
Speaker 1 (37:47):
And so they figured out how to I guess distill quinine,
probably using a coffee still and started putting it into
tonic like making this tonic water. But basically, I'm sure
what you're buying is just distilled quinine from the chincono bark.
It's gotta be right, I mean, that's the.
Speaker 3 (38:06):
Kind of look at the other stuff in there, and
maybe I'll follow up with some ingredients.
Speaker 1 (38:10):
Okay, do and bring me something to please.
Speaker 2 (38:12):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (38:13):
But so with quinine like you were, you were basically
taking a dose of quinine in a shot of tonic water.
And so, because everybody was sailing around the world on
British ships with gin in one hand and tonic water
in the other hand, they eventually put the two together
and came up with the gin and tonic. Throw a
lemon or a lime slice in there to combat scurvy,
(38:36):
and you have a complete drink.
Speaker 2 (38:37):
That's amazing.
Speaker 1 (38:39):
It is.
Speaker 3 (38:39):
And apparently a lot of these gin cocktails were born
out of the nasty taste of the original alcohol.
Speaker 2 (38:48):
So they you know, we were talking about that rotgut gin.
What do you do.
Speaker 3 (38:51):
You're gonna mix it with a lot of stuff to
try and make it more drinkable. That is not the martini, however,
this is a pretty neat story. And the eighteen seventies
and eighties is when Martini's were born. And this is
from a gentleman named Richard Barnett. And this makes so
much sense. It's very cool, he said. The Martini is
an embodiment of American history at its most diverse. Dutch
(39:14):
in English gin mixed with French vermouth, served with Mediterranean olives,
German Jewish pickled onions or Caribbean lemons.
Speaker 1 (39:22):
Yep.
Speaker 3 (39:23):
And that glass, which, by the way, one of my
more annoyances in life. The biggest annoyances is when you
get a Martini these days it's a weird glass. Yeah,
just get a Martini glass.
Speaker 1 (39:36):
But do you like the big honkin nineties Karen from
Will and Grace style Martini glasses? Like the classic sixties
you know, Madman Martini glass? Well, okay, more compact version.
Speaker 2 (39:48):
I like them both.
Speaker 3 (39:49):
I'll take a I'll take either one, but just give
me that conical glass. Don't give me like a tulip glass.
Speaker 1 (39:57):
I've not seen a Martini in a tulip class.
Speaker 2 (40:00):
I have.
Speaker 3 (40:00):
There are places around town that serve them in these
little tulo classes.
Speaker 1 (40:03):
And just do it right, Yeah, do it right. I
mean it's literally called a martini glass. It's the glass
meant for it.
Speaker 3 (40:11):
Yeah, it's just like serving a margarita in a well,
you can serve a margarita and a lot of different things.
Speaker 2 (40:16):
I guess.
Speaker 1 (40:17):
Sure. You can just cut your hands and drink margarita
out of there, and people have, including me.
Speaker 2 (40:22):
That's true.
Speaker 1 (40:24):
You can. You can get the margarita ingredients poured down
your throat. You don't even need to use your hands,
that's true. It's Senor Frogs.
Speaker 3 (40:32):
The nineteen twenties is when the gin craze kind of
was rekickstarted again because of prohibition, and they even went
back to putting like disgusting ingredients in there.
Speaker 1 (40:44):
Yeah, you mean, like not the gin craze, Like, oh,
everybody likes chin, like the gin craze, Like everybody's going
bonkers because of the terrible gin they're drinking.
Speaker 3 (40:52):
Right, well, and everyone's drinking gin because it was it
wasn't just straight up ethyl alcohol from ain or like, hey,
at least let's throw some quote unquote ingredients in here.
Speaker 1 (41:05):
Oh yeah, turpentine again. Yeah, they use the same stuff
that they used in the original gin craze, sulfuric acid
in turpentine. I know, gross, it's a classic recipe. Yeah, gross, dude.
Speaker 3 (41:18):
What else was made? The Manhattan the gin Fizz, the gimlet. Yep,
these are all born out of that sort of nineteen
thirties post prohibition cocktail movement.
Speaker 1 (41:29):
Yeah. We talked a lot about the origin of some
of those drinks in that How Bars Work Live episode
of Farm. Yeah, correctly, those are good for shows. But
it's funny to think, like some of our favorite cocktails
were built to combat the tastes of nasty gin. Yeah,
which is why people are like, oh, yeah, don't don't
use the good stuff to mix, Like the whole reason
(41:49):
for mixing is to cover up the nasty stuff. Yeah,
just drink the good stuff straight, although I cannot imagine
just drinking like like a neat room temperature. That does
not sound good to me.
Speaker 3 (42:02):
Well, let me tell you the story of my first
gin experience in Athens and College. And Dave Bruce put
this article together for us, and he very astutely points
out that if you're a child of the seventies and eighties,
he probably didn't drink like a gin and tonic early on,
Like this is something you may have picked up on
later and that was the case for me. It was
(42:22):
late college and there was a fellow waiter at Mexicali
Grill that was there for just a brief period named Don.
Can't remember the guy's last name, and Don and I
ended up out on the river late night at Oconey
Springs Park with a half gallon of Seagram's Gin.
Speaker 1 (42:41):
Oh my god, just took it too.
Speaker 3 (42:43):
Far and we're drinking it right out of the bottle
and wading out into the river and not being very safe.
Quite frankly, it doesn't tell, but I'll always remember Don
for that. He introduced me to gin, and he introduced
me unsuccessfully to the Dave Matthews band.
Speaker 1 (42:59):
It didn't stick.
Speaker 2 (43:00):
I don't know why those always stick out to me.
Speaker 3 (43:01):
But Don was the first guy who's like, man, this
band was playing across the street and like it's crazy
as kind of jazzy, and they're multiracial, and it's like
you never heard anything like it.
Speaker 2 (43:11):
And that was Dave Matthew's band.
Speaker 1 (43:12):
Yeah, he was right about that.
Speaker 2 (43:14):
He was actually correct about two things. It's jazzy and multiracial.
Speaker 1 (43:20):
Man Seagrum's right out of the handle.
Speaker 3 (43:22):
Oh boy, it was bad, but I remember very distinctly
like tasting that piny gin and thinking like, ooh, this
isn't a good thing to drink like this.
Speaker 1 (43:31):
No, it took me many years to finally come around
to gin and be like, Okay, I liked vodka Martini's
for that was one of my first drinks ever, was
vode Camartini's.
Speaker 2 (43:41):
When you were thirteen.
Speaker 1 (43:43):
Yeah, pretty much in my treehouse was smoking cigarettes and
drenching vlog of Martinis the summer before ninth grade. But
like so, I would drink vod Mamartinez. It wasn't like
I just couldn't take the taste of like straight up alcohol.
But for some reason I did not like gin. And
then I finally gave it a chance. I was like, actually,
this is way better than vodka. I never been a
(44:05):
vodka guy, unless you're talking about that delightful birthday cake
flavored vodka.
Speaker 2 (44:10):
Oh is that a thing?
Speaker 1 (44:12):
Yeah? Yeah, hey, we don't judge, man, if that's what
you know.
Speaker 3 (44:15):
Oh, sure, of course Jen is making a big comeback now, though,
like we said, it may have started in the late
nineties when Bombay Sapphire first came to the US. Apparently
it was a pretty big hit. Then Hendrix came along
in the US in two thousand and three.
Speaker 2 (44:31):
Yeah, I love that. Hendrix were saying as many brands
as possible, so.
Speaker 1 (44:35):
In the hopes that they'll send us pretty stuff.
Speaker 2 (44:38):
We get a lot of whiskey. We never get gin.
Speaker 1 (44:40):
Yeah. No, no, every once in a while we've gotten gin,
but not ever. No, not really.
Speaker 2 (44:46):
But the genisance is on.
Speaker 1 (44:47):
Still nice. Did you just coin that I did? That
was really good? Thanks Genissance and medicant medicament. Oh, even better.
Speaker 2 (44:57):
That's a real word though. I didn't make that up,
I know.
Speaker 1 (45:00):
But you just pull it out of the ether.
Speaker 2 (45:04):
It's great, fantastic.
Speaker 1 (45:09):
No, I thought you were still going and I'd interrupted you,
and you're gonna pick up again. You'd think after like
twelve years of doing this, we would have had that
figured out by now.
Speaker 2 (45:17):
Oh, I got nothing else.
Speaker 1 (45:19):
I don't have anything else either except the gin is great.
It is great if.
Speaker 3 (45:24):
You're of legal age, ye, drink responsibly, yep. Don't drive certainly, Nope.
Make it really easy on you to not drive these days, yeah, man,
advantage of.
Speaker 1 (45:34):
It, ride hailing apps, you have zero excuse these things. Well,
if you want to know more about Gin, well again,
I guess if you're twenty one, give it a try,
see what happens. But like Chuck said, drink responsibly. If
you're not twenty one, you're gonna have to wait. Sorry.
And since I said you're gonna have to wait, sorry,
it's time for listener mail, all.
Speaker 3 (45:56):
Right, So listener mail. This one is let me see here.
Oh this is a hand type letter. Look at this thing. Nice,
not an email. It's a printed email.
Speaker 1 (46:07):
It's also not written in the cutout magazine letters either,
so no thanks written.
Speaker 3 (46:12):
So this is from Westwood Sutherland and he's the guy
who sent us that beef turkey.
Speaker 1 (46:19):
Oh yeah, thanks west Hey.
Speaker 3 (46:20):
Guys, my name is Westwood Sutherland, currently a college sophomore
and environmental engineering at University of Colorado, Boulder.
Speaker 2 (46:28):
Sco buffs, He says, sure.
Speaker 3 (46:31):
I'd like to say I'm your biggest fan, but I
can't compete with my dad, who introduced me to your podcast.
He's been listening for years and even acts on some
of your information. After hearing your podcast about bees, the
first one, not the beekeeping, he became a beekeeper.
Speaker 2 (46:48):
Has reaped the rewards for years.
Speaker 3 (46:50):
Now in increased production from our fruit trees as well
as getting some honey. That's awesome, though he has to
deal with the bear. He'd sent in that picture of
the bear.
Speaker 1 (47:00):
That's the local cop that hassles them all the time.
Speaker 2 (47:02):
No, it's a bear go after his honey. And he
named the bear Jerry. How great is that?
Speaker 1 (47:07):
That's great? Give me so.
Speaker 3 (47:09):
He also invested money into a stock I'm sorry, into
any stock that.
Speaker 2 (47:13):
Worked with Crisper.
Speaker 1 (47:15):
Oh, smart guy.
Speaker 3 (47:17):
And after hearing your gene editing podcast, and he is
very happy with the results.
Speaker 2 (47:21):
Wank, pink cool.
Speaker 1 (47:22):
That's nice.
Speaker 2 (47:23):
I didn't I should have.
Speaker 1 (47:24):
Yeah, we didn't even take our own advice.
Speaker 2 (47:26):
What's my problem? Anyway?
Speaker 3 (47:28):
The reason I got into your podcast I started a
beef jerkey company when I was fourteen.
Speaker 2 (47:31):
I love that stuff, and.
Speaker 3 (47:33):
I was selling enough that I spent lots of hours cutting, marinating,
laying meat, and bagging jerky.
Speaker 2 (47:38):
During those long hours, my dad.
Speaker 3 (47:39):
Would help let me listen to stuff you should know,
one after the other and made time go by very quickly.
I just wanted to say thank you for your wisdom, comedy, insight,
and making my days of jerky production a bit easier.
I've included some samples of my jerky as a thank
you that is so cool, and that is Westwood Sutherland
and you can find his beef jerky at westside dot com.
Speaker 1 (48:02):
I believe Westwood comes from a pretty amazing family.
Speaker 3 (48:05):
And you know what, let me correct that too. He
does come from an amazing family. It is West's side
as in Westwood so w E s T s sid
e Jerky dot com.
Speaker 1 (48:18):
The extra S stands for.
Speaker 3 (48:19):
Super small batch flank steak, beef jerkey, gluten free and
one hundred percent not vegan. That's all right, that's what
he says on his card.
Speaker 1 (48:29):
Thanks Westwood, that was pretty cool, and hats off to
your dad too for being so cool as well.
Speaker 2 (48:33):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (48:34):
We need to do administrative details soon because I came
across the list. We've got stuff that was given to
us a year ago at like shows in October. Oh wow, yeah,
so we need to do it soon. Okay, totally, Okay. Well,
if you want to get in touch with us, like
Westwood did, you can go onto our social links start
at stuffishould know dot com and you can also send
(48:54):
us an email where you can send us a typewritten letter,
but try an email too. You can send it off
to stuff Podcasts said iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (49:04):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey guys, it's me Josh, and for this week's select,
I've chosen our December twenty nineteen episode on Gin. I
don't take much of a tipple anymore, but I still
find that I appreciate Gin, and this episode does justice
to it in my opinion. It has history, distillation, laws, junipers,
everything you can imagine to make a well rounded, floral
(00:23):
forward Stuff you Should Know episode. I hope you enjoy
it very much.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and
there's Charles w Chuck Brian, there's Jerry over there, and
we are wasted waste it on excitement about talking about Gin.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
Waste it on excitement?
Speaker 1 (00:57):
Uh huh.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
I like that.
Speaker 3 (00:58):
That's a great motto. Yeah, and not a not the
worst band name, but not the best.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
It's not the best at all.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
Like an album title, more like, oh yeah, it's.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
A good album title. Maybe it's Jungle x Ray's second
album wasted on excitement?
Speaker 2 (01:13):
Yeah, or Bathtub Gin wasted on excitement.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
Bathtub Jin's of fish song.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
Oh it is it's funny.
Speaker 3 (01:22):
I was I was walking in the neighborhood yesterday and
I saw a car that was clearly like the child
home for Thanksgiving. It was like this kind of beat
up jeep from Florida, and it had a fish sticker
and a grateful dead sticker and like one other thing college.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
And this really nice thing.
Speaker 3 (01:40):
And I was like, oh, man, I bet I wonder
how much weed is hidden in that thing.
Speaker 1 (01:47):
That's funny.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
Welcome home, son. What's that smell?
Speaker 1 (01:53):
Right?
Speaker 2 (01:54):
Oh? Were you being the sun where we play acting?
Speaker 1 (01:56):
No, it just it was that that sip of coffee.
It's took one down the wrong pipe.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
The wrong pipe, man, What is up with those faulty flaps?
Speaker 1 (02:05):
I don't know, man, Probably too much gin.
Speaker 3 (02:08):
I love Gin, and I love reading about it and
researching it, and I might have a martini tonight as
a result.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
I don't think there's any way you could not have
a martini after reading about Gin for hours and hours
and hours.
Speaker 3 (02:23):
Yeah, because Gin and Tonic season is over for me, sadly.
Oh yeah, and I'm into wine season. But wine season
and martini season there's some comorbidity there.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
Martini seasons year round.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Not for me.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
I mean, I don't drink that many martinis. It's a
mood thing or if I'm with Hodgmen, we pound them.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
Sure you can't not drink martinis when Hodgman's around.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
Yeah, of course, yeah, no comment, okay, but correct.
Speaker 1 (02:49):
So we're talking Gin because Gin is great. We love Gin,
and it turns out Jin's got a pretty pretty interesting
history to it.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
I think so too.
Speaker 1 (02:59):
And we did an episode not too long ago on
a short stuff actually on the difference between bourbon and whiskey.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
Right, has that been out yet, even with the way
our schedule works.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
Oh wait, it's coming out tomorrow. Nok about it?
Speaker 3 (03:12):
Yeah, yeah, tomorrow is in today, or tomorrow is in
after this is released.
Speaker 1 (03:16):
Tomorrow is in the people who are listening to this
the day it comes out tomorrow, to them, that very
select group of humans as far as the dimension of
time goes.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
So tomorrow, everybody, you'll hear short stuff about the difference
between whiskey and bourbon. And one of the things that
really stands out is there are a lot of laws
surrounding whiskey, especially in the United States. What makes whiskey whiskey,
what you can call a specific kind of whiskey, what
you can put on the label of some kinds of whiskey,
(03:47):
lots and lots of laws exists.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
A lot of the country. Don't forget that one.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
The spirit of America, the native spirit of America. That's
what it was, Okay, Gin, It's quite the opposite. Basically,
as long as you have a neutral, grained spirit that
is distilled a I think eighty proof or higher, you
can add whatever flavor you want to it, and that
(04:15):
you can call it gin, okay, which is not whatever
you're if you buy that thing that I just described,
Although it's technically legally gin, it's not really gin. A
lot of people call it flavored vodkas. But for gin,
there are specific steps you want to follow. There's specific
(04:35):
things you want to do, and more than anything, there's
probably going to be a taste of juniper to it.
Speaker 3 (04:41):
Yeah, that used to be very much the case now,
and we've talked a little bit about this on other episodes.
Just tangentially, I think is that there are many artists
and gin makers now that are doing all kinds of
crazy gins, and some many issueing the juniper altogether, that
(05:01):
beautiful little evergreen shrub and those little cones that have
that piny, citrusy peppery taste that we love so much. Yeah,
by the way, I should say our buddy Ben Harrison
of the Greatest Generation and Friendly Fire, he I've seen
this online elsewhere, but as far as he knows, he
(05:22):
invented it. A smoked gin and tonic where he gets
a little like a chef's torch and smokes juniper berries
and then throws the glass on top of it upside
down and let's it just smoke up, and then turns
it over and adds the ice and the and the
(05:42):
rest of the mixings there.
Speaker 1 (05:44):
I would like to try that. I've had like smoked
Manhattans and smoked whiskey drinks, oh yeah, wood smoked kine.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
And did they do the same thing.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
Yeah, same process. But I've never ever heard of a
smoked gin and tonic. So hats off to Ben if
he did invent that.
Speaker 2 (05:59):
Yeah, it was good.
Speaker 3 (06:00):
And I also want to know shouted it out before.
But I get this local tonic, now, that's delicious. That
is the real deal, you know, the chinchona bark. And
it's very different than if you're used to traditional like schweps.
Speaker 2 (06:16):
Tonic. Doesn't taste anything like that.
Speaker 3 (06:18):
No, it's you cut it with soda water and it's
a very very lovely taste.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
Oh yeah, like good tonic water is just amazingly good.
Speaker 3 (06:29):
Yeah, and that's you know, if you're talking about like
fever tree will buzz market. Sure that is still a
little more of a traditional tonic. This stuff is brown,
right and syrupy, and then you mix it with the
soda and it becomes sort of a real version of
that stuff.
Speaker 1 (06:45):
So it's probably very similar to stuff they're drinking in
India in the nineteenth century, I think. So, so we'll
get all we'll get to all that.
Speaker 3 (06:53):
Let's go back to gin, all right, So you start
off if you want to make gin, and I have
a gin making kit from last Christmas I still haven't used.
And this has inspired me to go home today and
actually make my own gin.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
And then pound it.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
I'll bring some in. We can all take a.
Speaker 3 (07:09):
Sip, all right, just a sip. But you start with
that base spirit ethyl alcohol that's ninety six percent.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
ABV that you can power a car on.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
Yeah, and then you read distill gin, and that is
one of the keys here, a real real gin. You
redistill that spirit with whatever botanicals you end up choosing.
Speaker 1 (07:32):
Right, But typically, the main botanical that's used in the
main flavor profile of gin, aside from alcohol that you
can power your car on is that juniper berry. That's
that tradition juniper and a piny evergreeny. Some people call
it like drinking a Christmas tree. What makes gin gin?
(07:53):
Once you've had a sip of gin, you will never
mistake it for anything else for the rest of your life.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
That's right. And that base spirit it can.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
Be also, and you should also wait until you're twenty
one to have that sure.
Speaker 3 (08:04):
So of course that base spirit can be wheat, it
can be a rye, can be corn, it can be barley,
but it can be really anything. You can make potato
gin or apple gin. I saw this company in Ireland.
There was an article on Vice by Elizabeth Rousche. Ireland's
best gin is made out of milk.
Speaker 1 (08:25):
Yeah, I saw that too, Bertha's Gin.
Speaker 3 (08:28):
They make it and this is produced fully in Ireland,
which is a great thing because it's a byproduct of
cheese making that way sweet way they use that to
make gin. It's crazy.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
Yeah, They ferment the way and then use that they
distill that fermented beer basically, and then you distill that
further in the process of the presence of botanicals, and
then you have gin. It's just this multi step process.
But because you're starting out with such adiculously high proof
alcohol like neutral alcohol, you can use basically an old
(09:07):
shoe to make that neutral grain spirit and it's going
to taste virtually the same as neutral grain spirit made
from her neutral spirit made from barley, or from whay,
or from potatoes or grapes. It just is the the
alcoholic essence of those things.
Speaker 3 (09:24):
Yeah, and apparently that fermented way is what makes Bailey's
as well, which I didn't.
Speaker 1 (09:30):
Know Bailey's Irish whiskey.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
Yeah, fermented way cool.
Speaker 1 (09:34):
I did not know that either.
Speaker 3 (09:35):
In this I gotta try this stuff though. It's called
Bertha's Revenge.
Speaker 1 (09:38):
For Bailey's Irish Cream.
Speaker 2 (09:39):
I'm sorry, Yeah, what'd you say Irish whiskey?
Speaker 3 (09:42):
Yeah, no, no, it's the it's the coffee additive.
Speaker 1 (09:44):
That's that Connor McGregor stuff for grandma birth is revenge.
Speaker 3 (09:48):
I looks delicious and it is fully made in Ireland.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
And Bertha apparently is a cow they heard after.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
Yeah, she died at like age forty nine after giving
birth to thirty something calves over her life. Yeah, Yeah,
she was a very prolific milk.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
Cow in many ways.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
Yeah, but they they're not the only game in talent
making way based gin. There are others as well, but
supposedly again it's they say that there's something in the
way that even once it's distilled into its spirit, some
there's some mouthfield to it or some flavor profile. A
lot of people argue that that's just not the case,
(10:29):
that no matter what you make it from, you're going
to arrive at basically the same base neutral spirit. Okay, okay,
we'll find out. I'll just let me have some. I'll
try it.
Speaker 3 (10:40):
Bombay sapphire, which we'll learn later on perhaps kickstarted the
resurgence of gin.
Speaker 1 (10:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
Did you know that in the United States?
Speaker 3 (10:48):
No, But it makes it a little bit of sense
now that I see the dates in the timelines of
when it came over. But they very proudly display their
ten different botanicals on the bottle licorice of course, kubeb berries, angelica,
root almonds, coriander, cassia, bark iris, root lemon, peel, and
(11:09):
grains of paradise. Very nice, And I like a bombasedapphire martini.
That's a good fallback for me, although I'm a plymouth
man through and through when it comes to martini's, and
I like generally I like the Hendrix and I like Tankerrey,
good old fashioned Tankerrey for the Tonics.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
I'll get a Hendrix martini when I'm out and about,
but if I'm like making it myself, I used to
like the more boring, straightforward London dried gins, right, the
traditional ones for the martini. And then I realized, like, no, man,
you want to go the exact opposite of that. You
want like the most botanical gin you can find for
a gin martini, because I mean it's basically gin with
(11:50):
a little bit of vermouth, right, so you want to
taste your gin. So I've kind of gravitated toward stuff
like the Botanist or Saint George's Batanavar. Those are two
really really like I guess botanicals. The best way to
put it. Gin's that are out there that are really
really tasty.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
Is that the Saint George that tastes like feet.
Speaker 1 (12:13):
Yeah, so no, that is their aged like Raye Posato gin.
Speaker 2 (12:18):
Yeah that I didn't love that where.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
They made it like it was like kind of a
mescal or age tequila style gin where it was gin,
but it had like some quality of like really like
long aged tequila. I think you weren't prepared for it.
I wonder if you'd like it now, knowing like what
it was going into it.
Speaker 2 (12:39):
Maybe.
Speaker 3 (12:40):
I mean, I'm always hip to try something, but I'd
love a good, high quality London dry gin.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
That's my jam.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
Sure, I mean, I'm with you. I just like the
more botanical ones these days than I used to, the Britannical,
the puritanical ones, the ones that don't have any alcohol
at all.
Speaker 3 (12:56):
So I think we should quickly talk about before we
take our first break, about just how you distill it,
because there's a couple of ways, and then we'll take
our break. But the first way is steeping, and that is,
you know, you steep tea, and it's the same thing. Basically,
you have your base spirit heating up and its simmers,
and then you have those botanicals right in there and
(13:18):
the oils are releasing and it's just infusing through the
whole thing exactly the other way. And you know, Emily
has a still now, I'd love to maybe get in
there and try some of this for real.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
I did not know that. Does she like carry a
Tommy gun around and wear it flooraling for coat?
Speaker 2 (13:33):
No, she's got a copper still.
Speaker 3 (13:34):
She goes to Athens, Georgia once a week to harvest
herbs and then distills herbs.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
For Oh, that's right, I did know that.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
Yeah, it's very cool.
Speaker 1 (13:43):
That is super cool.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
It's a lot of fun to see her out there
doing that stuff.
Speaker 1 (13:46):
Yeah, that's neat.
Speaker 3 (13:48):
And then the other way is vapor infusion, and that
is what Bombay sapphire does, and that is when you
have the botanicals in a basket hanging above the boiling
spirit and that vapor rises and it does it more
through like that steam, I guess right.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
So, or you can combine the two, which is what
another kind of saint, George jin Terroar does where they
use the steeping method for most of the botanicals and
then they use the vapor method for I think like
Douglas fir and bay Laurel leaves. So it's it's got
like kind of the tea of botanicals brewing and then
(14:25):
it's just vaporizing through those other those last two so cool,
it is pretty cool.
Speaker 3 (14:30):
Actually, all right, now we'll take a break, and we'll
come back and talk a little bit about the types
of gin, which also entails some history right after this.
Speaker 1 (15:03):
Okay, we've taken our break, we had our little half sandwiches,
were ready to talk about you.
Speaker 2 (15:08):
So I can't believe you still cut the crust off.
That's very interesting for a garner.
Speaker 1 (15:11):
Well, I just think it's a little I always has
like a crusty taste to it. Then I'm not fond.
Speaker 3 (15:16):
I've always maintained if they didn't call it crust, kids
might eat it, do you think. Yeah, I think if
you said, you know, the do you want the magic
ring left on your bread? The kids would probably have
a whole different view. But if you say do you
want the crust?
Speaker 1 (15:32):
I disagree. I think that magic ring would be a
gross term. Now you look at that magic ringy, old guy,
he keeps staring at us.
Speaker 3 (15:42):
We'll just insert Josh Clark's magic word of choice, magic ringy. Yeah,
I mean it doesn't even have to use the word magic.
But what would you call crust? That sounds better to
a kid.
Speaker 1 (15:53):
I'm saying, no matter what you called it, I think
it would become synonymous with something gross.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
I know, but I'm asking you to yes, and let's see.
Speaker 1 (16:02):
Yes and is not my strong suit. I failed out
of improv.
Speaker 2 (16:05):
Yours is more. No butt?
Speaker 1 (16:07):
Right, No, there's no butt. It's no The rainbow ring. Okay, great,
the rainbow circle.
Speaker 2 (16:17):
I love it.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
I don't like it. I'll go back and edit this party.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
All right. So let's talk about gin.
Speaker 3 (16:24):
We already talked about the fact that it has to
be if you asked me, really distilled with these botanicals
to be real gin. Otherwise flavored vodka that name is
can come up and that's a dirty word, yes, But distilled.
Speaker 2 (16:39):
London dry gin.
Speaker 3 (16:41):
Some of the big big cats Beefeeder and Gordon's and
Tanker Ray are some of those those big daddy London dryes.
Like I said, I'm a plymouth guy. I like yeah,
but these are not sweet. That's why they're called dry gins, right.
Speaker 1 (16:57):
Sweet gins are have a long history and they actually
pre date gin for by many, many years. But the
London dry gin is what most people think of when
they think of gin, and a London dry gin is
actually a subcategory of a larger category, which is distilled gin.
You got gin, which is basically flavor vodkas, which you
(17:20):
could literally put any flavor into this neutral spirit and
call it gin distill Gin means it went through that
process like we described before the break and London dry
is one of those.
Speaker 2 (17:31):
That's right, right, Huh?
Speaker 1 (17:33):
Is that basically what you just said? Yeah, I mean
I was listening and following it, but it just seemed off.
Speaker 2 (17:38):
Oh interesting, Well, I'm glad you cleared that up.
Speaker 1 (17:40):
I'm sorry.
Speaker 2 (17:41):
That's all right.
Speaker 3 (17:42):
Then we get to Old Tom gin and this has
an interesting history of etymology. And I got this from
Mark Vierthaler at talesothococktail dot com. Apparently the name Old
Tom comes from these plaques that hung outside of pubs
that looked like there was like the shape of an
(18:04):
old tomcat's head.
Speaker 2 (18:06):
And get this, and this is amazing.
Speaker 3 (18:09):
Apparently in London, if you had this sign hanging up
in the window, underneath the cat's paw was a slot
and a lead pipe and attached to a funnel, and
you could go down the street in England and drop
a coin in the slot and get a shot of
gin in your mouth.
Speaker 1 (18:26):
Yeah, from under the cat's paw.
Speaker 2 (18:28):
Amazing.
Speaker 1 (18:28):
I saw that too. I saw that it originated Chuck
with this guy named Captain Dudley Bradstreet. And the whole
reason he started doing this was because there was a
law that said that the informant had to know the
name of the person who was selling the illegal gin
for the cops to have probable cause to raid a place.
Oh interesting, So he holed himself up in this house
(18:51):
on this one alley, Blue Anchor Alley, and started selling
gin that way anonymously, and because no one knew who
was selling it, the cops could never raid the place.
Speaker 2 (19:01):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
But yeah, it was under the paw of an old
like like a statue or sign or something of an
old paw or an old Tom Kat.
Speaker 2 (19:10):
I love it too, Old Tom went away. It was
very much sweeter.
Speaker 3 (19:14):
That was when they were using sugar and a lot
of botanicals because the base spirit wasn't that great taste wise,
so they loaded it up with sugar and this other stuff,
and prohibition basically killed Old Tom gin for a long time.
By the time people started, you know, prohibition was over.
They didn't really have a taste for it anymore. And
(19:35):
it has made a comeback in recent years, though a
bit of a comeback.
Speaker 1 (19:38):
You if you are interested in trying you should start
with ransoms old Tom gin. Yeah, it's just beautiful. Is
it good?
Speaker 2 (19:47):
What about Navy strength gin?
Speaker 1 (19:49):
I love that stuff. Have you ever had that?
Speaker 2 (19:51):
Nah? I don't know if I have or not.
Speaker 1 (19:53):
Actually, it will make you blind. Really, your hangover is
noticeably worse the next day for the same amount of booze.
It's just what's a brand and stronger stuff? I think Anchor.
I believe Anchor makes a Navy strength gin.
Speaker 2 (20:09):
That would make sense.
Speaker 1 (20:11):
I'm almost positive that's who's I've had. But it's it's
just like this higher proof. I think, like gin can
be as low as like thirty seven and a half percent,
and Navy's strength is at least fifty percent, okay, And
there's just a noticeable difference in it. And the taste
is it's you know, it's not terribly much different. It's
(20:32):
just the potency of it.
Speaker 2 (20:33):
But it's gotcha.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
It got its name from a pretty great little legend
from what I understand.
Speaker 3 (20:38):
Yeah, that's in the Navy. They loved them some gin
in the Navy, and they actually got gin rations, and
so sailors would test it out to see if it was,
you know, up to snuff or if it was watered
down and they would drizzle it over a little pinch
of gunpowder and then light it and if it lit,
then it was navy strength.
Speaker 1 (20:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:57):
I love it.
Speaker 1 (20:58):
And it's not like a Lee classification or anything, is it.
It's just kind of like a.
Speaker 3 (21:03):
Well it says it says navy strength gen is at
least fifty seven point one percent. So at least I
don't know if there's a law in the EU or
if that's just a sort of a standard.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
But that's that's where the name came from at least.
Speaker 2 (21:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:17):
Yeah, and it's potent stuff.
Speaker 2 (21:19):
What about Geneva, So that is.
Speaker 1 (21:23):
Basically like the predecessor of gin, right, I mean this
Dutch drink that was first drunk for people to get
drunk off of.
Speaker 3 (21:30):
Yeah, that's made more out of a malt wine. I
think fifteen to fifty percent malt wine, and so it
you know, it can kind of it's sort of like
the maltiness of a whiskey, but the botanicals of a gin.
Speaker 1 (21:42):
I think I've always heard that Old Tom and Geneva
are a lot alike. Oh really, yeah, they bear a resemblance. Interesting,
but so Geneva is like a pretty good place to
start as far as this history of gin goes, because
it was, like I was saying, like a proto gin,
like one of the first I guess, the direct predecessor
(22:03):
of gin as we understand it today. But even further
back than that, that essential component of gin, the juniper berry,
has been used at least since the seventies and now
the nineteen seventies, I mean just the straight up seventies.
There's a recipe from Pliny the Elder from seventy six
or seventy seven CE that used juniper berries and you
(22:28):
just were supposed to boil some white wine with juniper
berries and then drink it, and it was a curative
and probably got you pretty drunk. And then I thought
about this. This was like two years before he died,
the eruption of Vesuvius. Oh, interesting, that weird kind of chilling. Well,
at least he had a nice couple of years there
at the end. He definitely did.
Speaker 3 (22:48):
The word Genever, g e n e v e r
is actually Dutch for juniper, and it is it does
come hail from Holland, and apparently in the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries these and this was when people were using
herbs as medicine. They you know, obviously still do that today,
that's what Emily's doing. But apothecaries there were experimenting with
(23:10):
all kinds of curative herbs and medical tonics and stuff
like that, and juniper was definitely in that category. But
where Geneva took a right turn was they said, wow,
let's just get drunk and like, it's not so much
a cure all but I mean maybe maybe it cures
some things. But it was a drink that you drank
(23:32):
to get drunk.
Speaker 1 (23:33):
It was like, yeah, the first spirit out of I believe,
out of Europe for that people drank. I mean they
had beer and wine and everything before, but Geneva was
like this, like the first hard blicker. I think that
people really drank. And like you said, it was a
malted wine, right, yeah, that's the base, which sounds like
something you buy in a convenience store, drink out a
paper bag, like malted wine, but they would add like
(23:57):
sugar to it, and it had juniper, which is why
a lot of people say this is the direct predecessor
of Gin, and it was how the UK was introduced
to Gin was Geneva. Because I think in the fifteenth
century maybe something like that. Sixteenth the sixteenth century, Queen
Elizabeth the First sent some of her royal soldiers to
(24:20):
the Netherlands to fight alongside the Dutch when they were
fighting for independence, and the Dutch said, hey, man, take
a couple of shots of this Geneva and you'll fight anybody.
You won't be scared at all. And the English like
that a lot, and so they brought Geneva back with them,
or it tastes for it at least, and Geneva eventually
got shortened to Gin. That's where we got the word
(24:42):
gin from.
Speaker 3 (24:43):
That's right, And about close to one hundred years later,
the end of the Anglo Dutch War meant you could
actually import it legally by the barrel, and they were
called strong water shops was what the early liquor stores
in London were called.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
I love that. I'm sure there are places in America
where they have ganged that title.
Speaker 1 (25:02):
Oh yeah, and they also wear arm guards probably, so
I'm so glad you taught me that word because I've
always just called it, you know, those like our old
timey arm bands, and it never had quite the punch.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
Yeah, arm guards.
Speaker 3 (25:15):
The first Gin distillery in Britain in Plymouth.
Speaker 1 (25:23):
Right, Okay, I had a lot of trouble figuring this
one out. I saw that in eighteen forty Booths was
the first really gin distiller Okay, but and that the
Plymouth one was Oh wait, maybe that was like the
seventeen hundreds. I'm not sure there was a big rush
(25:43):
to establishing gin distilleries in this period that we're talking about.
Speaker 2 (25:48):
All right, well, I don't have a date for the
Plymouth one.
Speaker 1 (25:50):
Actually, let me look it up while you're talking.
Speaker 3 (25:52):
All right, well, let's flash forward then to the gen craze,
because gin, depending on who you're asking, was the the
crack of the sixteen hundreds in England. William of Orange,
Protestant King of the Netherlands, went to assume the throne
of Great Britain during the Glorious Revolution, and they were
(26:14):
drinking that Geneva and they loved it as the royalty.
But the working class could not afford this stuff, so
they started making their own rot gut like bathtub gin.
And apparently bathtub gin is it is not brewed or
not brewed. It's not distilled in a bathtub. It can
be mixed with botanicals in a bathtub. But from what
(26:36):
I saw. The main reason it's called bathtub gin is
because to water it down and top it off with water,
you couldn't fit it in these bottles in a sink,
so you had to do that in a bathtub.
Speaker 1 (26:45):
Oh okay, but I.
Speaker 3 (26:46):
Think they were mixing up botanicals and stuff too. But
at any rate, this rot gut gin in the early
seventeen hundreds, and by the mid seventeen hundreds that was
a full on gin in the UK.
Speaker 1 (27:01):
Yeah, it was called the Gin craze, and like especially
if you read like kind of the tracks railing against
it at the time, and newspaper editorials and stories about
just the depravity that was going on because of gin,
Like the whole country was just totally off its rocker
on gin, and not even like good gin or even Geneva.
(27:24):
This bathtub rockcut stuff that you were talking about, where
they would add things like turpentine to give it a
piny flavor because they didn't have juniper berries. They would
add sulfuric acid to give it a hot aftertaste, like
it was supposed to have, just really really bad stuff
and it was making people crazy, and there were stories
(27:45):
about mothers who there's a woman named Judith Defour who
killed her own daughter so that she could sell her
clothes to buy more gin, or parents like selling their
kids into slavery to buy more gin. You know, people
turning in to sex workers just to get gin money.
And just supposedly it was, like you said, it was
(28:05):
just like the crack epidemic and the same kind of
response to it as well here in the United States.
But this is gin back in the early eighteenth century.
Speaker 2 (28:14):
Yeah, and for sure there was a gin problem.
Speaker 3 (28:18):
Now historians look back a little bit and they're like,
you know what, these articles were written, and these op
eds were written by the upper class in Britain, and
they had basically an obsession with the English character being
degraded and dragged through the mud by these Gin drunks.
So take it with a grain of salt. There for
(28:39):
sure was a gin problem. But they're basically like, is
a chicken or an egg thing going on? Because they're like,
urbanization is going rampant in London at the time, and
was the gin craze a product of this poverty or
the cause of it? And by all accounts these days,
it looks like it was sort of a product of it.
Speaker 1 (28:58):
I saw that there were at least two who documented
cases of spontaneous human combustion really from drinking this gin. Wow,
isn't that crazy?
Speaker 3 (29:07):
Yeah, it's some hardcore chin geez. There were eight different
gen Acts from Parliament over about a twenty two year period. Basically,
I mean they said different things, but one of the
big ones was, hey, you can't put these you can't
put sulfuric acid in this stuff and sell it anymore.
Speaker 1 (29:28):
Right, And little by little, these incremental laws over these
eight acts, like made it really expensive to have a
license to sell gin, really expensive to import neutral spirits,
and just basically made it so that unless you owned
a large distillery and an established like tavern, you could
not legally engage in selling or producing gin.
Speaker 2 (29:52):
And generally, yeah, I think that's what it said in
the act.
Speaker 3 (29:57):
Genery, yes, that'll shout not pat engenery of any kind.
Speaker 1 (30:01):
Right, okay, So especially if your name is my cocaine.
Speaker 2 (30:06):
Oh you finally did it?
Speaker 1 (30:09):
Did I do it? If I did it was accidental,
no you didn't, okay. So but over the course of
these acts that left just like these handful of huge
distilleries like Booths Plymouth, Plymouth, by the way, was the first.
It was in the late eighteenth century, oh nice, and
a couple others. I think boodles might have been around
by then, but all the small distilleries went away just
(30:32):
by law. And so when this artisanal revolution that we're
currently going in that's going on now swept over to England,
this company called Sipsmiths when to go start their own
and they found out that they couldn't buy law that
was two hundred years old, so they had to lobby
and they were the first company in two hundred years
(30:52):
to get a license to bruce or distill small batch
gin in England. Amazing because of those gin. That's pretty great,
I think so too.
Speaker 3 (31:03):
All Right, well let's take another little break here and
we'll talk more about jin right after this.
Speaker 2 (31:33):
All right, So.
Speaker 3 (31:36):
Jin is going strong in the seventeen hundreds, some might
say it's a problem. Flash forward to the eighteen hundreds, okay,
eighteen thirty, and the invention of the continuous still came about.
Speaker 1 (31:48):
That's pretty big.
Speaker 2 (31:49):
If you come over to my house, you see Emily
down there. She doesn't have it.
Speaker 3 (31:52):
She has a traditional copper pot still, which means that
you can do one thing at a time. Basically, you
boil your mash and the alcohol boil that off. You
collect that distilled spirit in the end, but then you
got to start all over again. The continuous still was
a very and the other bad part about that is
(32:13):
is your ABV is going to be pretty low if
you're doing the single pot.
Speaker 1 (32:17):
That's your alcohol by volume. That's right, because the longer
it was, say distilled, the pure and more alcoholic, the
ultimate spirit you captured would be right, that's right.
Speaker 3 (32:28):
Okay, So if you have a continuous still, which was
what was invented in eighteen thirty, that means you can
just keep going, man, You just keep throwing that mash
in there, and you keep that process going, and you
get more and more pure as you go, and you're
going to get that beautiful clear grain alcohol around ninety
six percent in the end. And that really really changed
the game.
Speaker 1 (32:49):
Yeah, because so like these continuous stills are coffee stills
after the man who invented them. It's like the spirit
rises through increasingly high up stages and it's reheated and
heated and heated, and so it becomes pure and pure
the higher up it goes, and then eventually it gets
tapped off and then you have that high test alcohol.
(33:11):
And because you could get pure alcohol to use as
the base spirit for gin, you had less of a funky, foul,
nasty taste that you needed to cover up with stuff
like botanicals or sugar or turpentine, which meant that you
could produce gin with a much pure gin that eventually
(33:34):
evolved into London dry gin.
Speaker 3 (33:36):
Yeah, and London dry gen again with the dry that
means it's not a sugary. Apparently Victorians in the upper
class at one point decided to basically lower their sugar intake.
I don't know if that was just a major health
kick going on.
Speaker 1 (33:52):
It sounds like John Harvey Kellogg's work here.
Speaker 2 (33:55):
Oh maybe so.
Speaker 3 (33:56):
But that's when they started getting rid of the sugar
and that's why you get this dryer version which became
the London dry gin, and.
Speaker 2 (34:04):
The rest is history.
Speaker 3 (34:07):
They started producing some really high quality gens in England
at the time.
Speaker 1 (34:12):
Yeah, they did. I think that's when the Booths and
Boodles and all those guys started beef feeder and that
was great. That was fine for a while. Like you said,
the Navy was getting their rations and then going out
to see with their gin and testing it on gunpowder
and all that. But one of the things that you'll
look at, especially with the London dried gin, is while
(34:34):
there's no sugar, there's like a really interesting combination of
those botanicals and a botanical. We didn't really say, but
I think it's kind of self evident. It's any kind
of like root, plant, seed, leaf, stem, bark, whatever that's
used to add a particular flavor profile to gin. Typically
(34:55):
juniper is like the chief botanical in a gin. But
if you look at like these lists of botanicals that
are frequently used in London dry gin, they come from
all over the world. And it's no coincidence that England
was at the height of its imperial colonial power at
a time when London dried gin developed, because it was
in a position to bring all these ingredients from all
(35:18):
over the world to the distilleries that had set up
shop in London.
Speaker 2 (35:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (35:22):
I mean, I think even the Bombay Sapphire has each
country listed behind the botanical and it's you know, they're
all from ten different places or eleven different places.
Speaker 1 (35:31):
Yeah, pretty cool, It is pretty cool.
Speaker 3 (35:33):
So the seafaring of the Brits, British sea power have
you ever heard of that band?
Speaker 1 (35:39):
Yeah, we're good.
Speaker 2 (35:39):
I used to love those guys.
Speaker 1 (35:41):
They were like early two thousands.
Speaker 2 (35:43):
Right, yeah, that was a big La band for me.
Speaker 1 (35:46):
Oh okay, I didn't know where they were from.
Speaker 2 (35:48):
No, no, no, when I lived in La.
Speaker 1 (35:50):
Oh.
Speaker 2 (35:50):
I see they're British.
Speaker 1 (35:51):
I always think so. They were from like the era
of like of Montreal and Someone Still Loves You, Boris
Yeltsin and all those kind of indie bands at the
same time.
Speaker 2 (36:00):
Right, yeah, yeah, I think so love those guys.
Speaker 3 (36:03):
British Power, But that had a lot to do with
Gin because the Brits in their navy were very strong
and they sailed a lot and traveled all over the
world obviously because they had certain interests like conquering your
country and making it their own.
Speaker 1 (36:17):
And getting their hands on your botanicals.
Speaker 3 (36:19):
That's right, and also getting there until like let's say
the tropics and saying like, wow, I've never been here before.
What are these things that we can eat and drink?
And what is this disease? Malaria? I don't want to
get that. And so they looked at the you know,
the people from there obviously to get their clue on like.
Speaker 2 (36:40):
They're fine, how can we be like them?
Speaker 3 (36:42):
And the natives of South America chewed on that chinchona
tree and that bark to combat malaria, and chinchona is
pretty wondrous. That bark has a natural chemical and that
is the quinine that you hear. You know, if you
look at a tonic bottle, it contains quinine and it
calms your you know, it.
Speaker 2 (37:02):
Makes you feel better if you have malaria.
Speaker 3 (37:04):
But it also disrupts the metabolism of the parasite and
kills it. So it's a medicament as well as a
help you feel better type thing.
Speaker 1 (37:13):
Oh allah, what medicament? I'm in a predicament because my
heart's all the flooded. Uh, something just happened to me.
Speaker 3 (37:24):
But these doctors were like, hey, yeah, you British soldier,
you should. They started prescribing this stuff, this tinchona bark
and colonists in India and South America, and they were
eating a ton of it, seven hundred tons actually in
the eighteen forties, seven hundred tons of chinchona bark a
year were being eaten by British soldiers and settlers yep.
Speaker 1 (37:47):
And so they figured out how to I guess distill quinine,
probably using a coffee still and started putting it into
tonic like making this tonic water. But basically, I'm sure
what you're buying is just distilled quinine from the chincono bark.
It's gotta be right, I mean, that's the.
Speaker 3 (38:06):
Kind of look at the other stuff in there, and
maybe I'll follow up with some ingredients.
Speaker 1 (38:10):
Okay, do and bring me something to please.
Speaker 2 (38:12):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (38:13):
But so with quinine like you were, you were basically
taking a dose of quinine in a shot of tonic water.
And so, because everybody was sailing around the world on
British ships with gin in one hand and tonic water
in the other hand, they eventually put the two together
and came up with the gin and tonic. Throw a
lemon or a lime slice in there to combat scurvy,
(38:36):
and you have a complete drink.
Speaker 2 (38:37):
That's amazing.
Speaker 1 (38:39):
It is.
Speaker 3 (38:39):
And apparently a lot of these gin cocktails were born
out of the nasty taste of the original alcohol.
Speaker 2 (38:48):
So they you know, we were talking about that rotgut gin.
What do you do.
Speaker 3 (38:51):
You're gonna mix it with a lot of stuff to
try and make it more drinkable. That is not the martini, however,
this is a pretty neat story. And the eighteen seventies
and eighties is when Martini's were born. And this is
from a gentleman named Richard Barnett. And this makes so
much sense. It's very cool, he said. The Martini is
an embodiment of American history at its most diverse. Dutch
(39:14):
in English gin mixed with French vermouth, served with Mediterranean olives,
German Jewish pickled onions or Caribbean lemons.
Speaker 1 (39:22):
Yep.
Speaker 3 (39:23):
And that glass, which, by the way, one of my
more annoyances in life. The biggest annoyances is when you
get a Martini these days it's a weird glass. Yeah,
just get a Martini glass.
Speaker 1 (39:36):
But do you like the big honkin nineties Karen from
Will and Grace style Martini glasses? Like the classic sixties
you know, Madman Martini glass? Well, okay, more compact version.
Speaker 2 (39:48):
I like them both.
Speaker 3 (39:49):
I'll take a I'll take either one, but just give
me that conical glass. Don't give me like a tulip glass.
Speaker 1 (39:57):
I've not seen a Martini in a tulip class.
Speaker 2 (40:00):
I have.
Speaker 3 (40:00):
There are places around town that serve them in these
little tulo classes.
Speaker 1 (40:03):
And just do it right, Yeah, do it right. I
mean it's literally called a martini glass. It's the glass
meant for it.
Speaker 3 (40:11):
Yeah, it's just like serving a margarita in a well,
you can serve a margarita and a lot of different things.
Speaker 2 (40:16):
I guess.
Speaker 1 (40:17):
Sure. You can just cut your hands and drink margarita
out of there, and people have, including me.
Speaker 2 (40:22):
That's true.
Speaker 1 (40:24):
You can. You can get the margarita ingredients poured down
your throat. You don't even need to use your hands,
that's true. It's Senor Frogs.
Speaker 3 (40:32):
The nineteen twenties is when the gin craze kind of
was rekickstarted again because of prohibition, and they even went
back to putting like disgusting ingredients in there.
Speaker 1 (40:44):
Yeah, you mean, like not the gin craze, Like, oh,
everybody likes chin, like the gin craze, Like everybody's going
bonkers because of the terrible gin they're drinking.
Speaker 3 (40:52):
Right, well, and everyone's drinking gin because it was it
wasn't just straight up ethyl alcohol from ain or like, hey,
at least let's throw some quote unquote ingredients in here.
Speaker 1 (41:05):
Oh yeah, turpentine again. Yeah, they use the same stuff
that they used in the original gin craze, sulfuric acid
in turpentine. I know, gross, it's a classic recipe. Yeah, gross, dude.
Speaker 3 (41:18):
What else was made? The Manhattan the gin Fizz, the gimlet. Yep,
these are all born out of that sort of nineteen
thirties post prohibition cocktail movement.
Speaker 1 (41:29):
Yeah. We talked a lot about the origin of some
of those drinks in that How Bars Work Live episode
of Farm. Yeah, correctly, those are good for shows. But
it's funny to think, like some of our favorite cocktails
were built to combat the tastes of nasty gin. Yeah,
which is why people are like, oh, yeah, don't don't
use the good stuff to mix, Like the whole reason
(41:49):
for mixing is to cover up the nasty stuff. Yeah,
just drink the good stuff straight, although I cannot imagine
just drinking like like a neat room temperature. That does
not sound good to me.
Speaker 3 (42:02):
Well, let me tell you the story of my first
gin experience in Athens and College. And Dave Bruce put
this article together for us, and he very astutely points
out that if you're a child of the seventies and eighties,
he probably didn't drink like a gin and tonic early on,
Like this is something you may have picked up on
later and that was the case for me. It was
(42:22):
late college and there was a fellow waiter at Mexicali
Grill that was there for just a brief period named Don.
Can't remember the guy's last name, and Don and I
ended up out on the river late night at Oconey
Springs Park with a half gallon of Seagram's Gin.
Speaker 1 (42:41):
Oh my god, just took it too.
Speaker 3 (42:43):
Far and we're drinking it right out of the bottle
and wading out into the river and not being very safe.
Quite frankly, it doesn't tell, but I'll always remember Don
for that. He introduced me to gin, and he introduced
me unsuccessfully to the Dave Matthews band.
Speaker 1 (42:59):
It didn't stick.
Speaker 2 (43:00):
I don't know why those always stick out to me.
Speaker 3 (43:01):
But Don was the first guy who's like, man, this
band was playing across the street and like it's crazy
as kind of jazzy, and they're multiracial, and it's like
you never heard anything like it.
Speaker 2 (43:11):
And that was Dave Matthew's band.
Speaker 1 (43:12):
Yeah, he was right about that.
Speaker 2 (43:14):
He was actually correct about two things. It's jazzy and multiracial.
Speaker 1 (43:20):
Man Seagrum's right out of the handle.
Speaker 3 (43:22):
Oh boy, it was bad, but I remember very distinctly
like tasting that piny gin and thinking like, ooh, this
isn't a good thing to drink like this.
Speaker 1 (43:31):
No, it took me many years to finally come around
to gin and be like, Okay, I liked vodka Martini's
for that was one of my first drinks ever, was
vode Camartini's.
Speaker 2 (43:41):
When you were thirteen.
Speaker 1 (43:43):
Yeah, pretty much in my treehouse was smoking cigarettes and
drenching vlog of Martinis the summer before ninth grade. But
like so, I would drink vod Mamartinez. It wasn't like
I just couldn't take the taste of like straight up alcohol.
But for some reason I did not like gin. And
then I finally gave it a chance. I was like, actually,
this is way better than vodka. I never been a
(44:05):
vodka guy, unless you're talking about that delightful birthday cake
flavored vodka.
Speaker 2 (44:10):
Oh is that a thing?
Speaker 1 (44:12):
Yeah? Yeah, hey, we don't judge, man, if that's what
you know.
Speaker 3 (44:15):
Oh, sure, of course Jen is making a big comeback now, though,
like we said, it may have started in the late
nineties when Bombay Sapphire first came to the US. Apparently
it was a pretty big hit. Then Hendrix came along
in the US in two thousand and three.
Speaker 2 (44:31):
Yeah, I love that. Hendrix were saying as many brands
as possible, so.
Speaker 1 (44:35):
In the hopes that they'll send us pretty stuff.
Speaker 2 (44:38):
We get a lot of whiskey. We never get gin.
Speaker 1 (44:40):
Yeah. No, no, every once in a while we've gotten gin,
but not ever. No, not really.
Speaker 2 (44:46):
But the genisance is on.
Speaker 1 (44:47):
Still nice. Did you just coin that I did? That
was really good? Thanks Genissance and medicant medicament. Oh, even better.
Speaker 2 (44:57):
That's a real word though. I didn't make that up,
I know.
Speaker 1 (45:00):
But you just pull it out of the ether.
Speaker 2 (45:04):
It's great, fantastic.
Speaker 1 (45:09):
No, I thought you were still going and I'd interrupted you,
and you're gonna pick up again. You'd think after like
twelve years of doing this, we would have had that
figured out by now.
Speaker 2 (45:17):
Oh, I got nothing else.
Speaker 1 (45:19):
I don't have anything else either except the gin is great.
It is great if.
Speaker 3 (45:24):
You're of legal age, ye, drink responsibly, yep. Don't drive certainly, Nope.
Make it really easy on you to not drive these days, yeah, man,
advantage of.
Speaker 1 (45:34):
It, ride hailing apps, you have zero excuse these things. Well,
if you want to know more about Gin, well again,
I guess if you're twenty one, give it a try,
see what happens. But like Chuck said, drink responsibly. If
you're not twenty one, you're gonna have to wait. Sorry.
And since I said you're gonna have to wait, sorry,
it's time for listener mail, all.
Speaker 3 (45:56):
Right, So listener mail. This one is let me see here.
Oh this is a hand type letter. Look at this thing. Nice,
not an email. It's a printed email.
Speaker 1 (46:07):
It's also not written in the cutout magazine letters either,
so no thanks written.
Speaker 3 (46:12):
So this is from Westwood Sutherland and he's the guy
who sent us that beef turkey.
Speaker 1 (46:19):
Oh yeah, thanks west Hey.
Speaker 3 (46:20):
Guys, my name is Westwood Sutherland, currently a college sophomore
and environmental engineering at University of Colorado, Boulder.
Speaker 2 (46:28):
Sco buffs, He says, sure.
Speaker 3 (46:31):
I'd like to say I'm your biggest fan, but I
can't compete with my dad, who introduced me to your podcast.
He's been listening for years and even acts on some
of your information. After hearing your podcast about bees, the
first one, not the beekeeping, he became a beekeeper.
Speaker 2 (46:48):
Has reaped the rewards for years.
Speaker 3 (46:50):
Now in increased production from our fruit trees as well
as getting some honey. That's awesome, though he has to
deal with the bear. He'd sent in that picture of
the bear.
Speaker 1 (47:00):
That's the local cop that hassles them all the time.
Speaker 2 (47:02):
No, it's a bear go after his honey. And he
named the bear Jerry. How great is that?
Speaker 1 (47:07):
That's great? Give me so.
Speaker 3 (47:09):
He also invested money into a stock I'm sorry, into
any stock that.
Speaker 2 (47:13):
Worked with Crisper.
Speaker 1 (47:15):
Oh, smart guy.
Speaker 3 (47:17):
And after hearing your gene editing podcast, and he is
very happy with the results.
Speaker 2 (47:21):
Wank, pink cool.
Speaker 1 (47:22):
That's nice.
Speaker 2 (47:23):
I didn't I should have.
Speaker 1 (47:24):
Yeah, we didn't even take our own advice.
Speaker 2 (47:26):
What's my problem? Anyway?
Speaker 3 (47:28):
The reason I got into your podcast I started a
beef jerkey company when I was fourteen.
Speaker 2 (47:31):
I love that stuff, and.
Speaker 3 (47:33):
I was selling enough that I spent lots of hours cutting, marinating,
laying meat, and bagging jerky.
Speaker 2 (47:38):
During those long hours, my dad.
Speaker 3 (47:39):
Would help let me listen to stuff you should know,
one after the other and made time go by very quickly.
I just wanted to say thank you for your wisdom, comedy, insight,
and making my days of jerky production a bit easier.
I've included some samples of my jerky as a thank
you that is so cool, and that is Westwood Sutherland
and you can find his beef jerky at westside dot com.
Speaker 1 (48:02):
I believe Westwood comes from a pretty amazing family.
Speaker 3 (48:05):
And you know what, let me correct that too. He
does come from an amazing family. It is West's side
as in Westwood so w E s T s sid
e Jerky dot com.
Speaker 1 (48:18):
The extra S stands for.
Speaker 3 (48:19):
Super small batch flank steak, beef jerkey, gluten free and
one hundred percent not vegan. That's all right, that's what
he says on his card.
Speaker 1 (48:29):
Thanks Westwood, that was pretty cool, and hats off to
your dad too for being so cool as well.
Speaker 2 (48:33):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (48:34):
We need to do administrative details soon because I came
across the list. We've got stuff that was given to
us a year ago at like shows in October. Oh wow, yeah,
so we need to do it soon. Okay, totally, Okay. Well,
if you want to get in touch with us, like
Westwood did, you can go onto our social links start
at stuffishould know dot com and you can also send
(48:54):
us an email where you can send us a typewritten letter,
but try an email too. You can send it off
to stuff Podcasts said iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (49:04):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Should Know News
Hosts And Creators
Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
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Betrayal Season 5
Saskia Inwood woke up one morning, knowing her life would never be the same. The night before, she learned the unimaginable – that the husband she knew in the light of day was a different person after dark. This season unpacks Saskia’s discovery of her husband’s secret life and her fight to bring him to justice. Along the way, we expose a crime that is just coming to light. This is also a story about the myth of the “perfect victim:” who gets believed, who gets doubted, and why. We follow Saskia as she works to reclaim her body, her voice, and her life. If you would like to reach out to the Betrayal Team, email us at betrayalpod@gmail.com. Follow us on Instagram @betrayalpod and @glasspodcasts. Please join our Substack for additional exclusive content, curated book recommendations, and community discussions. Sign up FREE by clicking this link Beyond Betrayal Substack. Join our community dedicated to truth, resilience, and healing. Your voice matters! Be a part of our Betrayal journey on Substack.
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If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com