On the drinker's frontier

Humans...are so fragile.

In a concerted effort not only to explore the (legal) borders of drinking but also to maintain HIPAA compliance, I want to report the following.  At an unnamed medical institution I am currently visiting, the good-health Fascists have taken over.  All regular vending machines are gone, replaced by "HUMAN" Vending.  Even the staff of ER admission rolled their eyes at the loss of Coke and candy bars.  I love, love, love Pirate Booty (it's pirates...and cheese!), but don't get me wrong.  Stevia--"sweetleaf," whatever you want to call it--in its ginger ale form as Zevia is a cocktail killer, just too damned, well, green, to keep the purpose of drinking true.  Sure, I'm starting with cheap rum, but add ginger ale, even and perhaps especially organic ginger ale, and you should have classic, palatable tipple.  But Stevia lingers like a bad licorice candy; not only do I not like licorice (oddly, raw anise is good with me), but it just doesn't communicate with aged rum and ginger.  My only solution was to cut this with orange Pellegrino, just to add an element that was not Stevia.  I deem this most desperate of concoctions the West Tower Wipeout...a recipe I urge my fellow mixologists and scalawags NOT to take on.

and a Bottle of Rum: The Playlist

A number of months ago, I read Wayne Curtis' superb and immensely enjoyable and a Bottle of Rum:  A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails.  It's all here really:  Rum, history, pirates, the Royal Navy, old Havana, Tiki bars, anthropology, and even recipes.  As I was reading--and drinking--my way through Curtis' socio-historical tale of the New World's definitive tipple, I also started thinking of music.  Keep in mind that the real Lou, besides playing a pirate, is a Doctoral Candidate in Ethnomusicology (the anthropology of music) and a former public radio DJ.  So, when I finished Curtis' book, I went back and figured out how to make a sort of soundtrack to it.  Some of the tunes I already had, others I quickly snatched from iTunes.  At Pauline's request (it didn't take much urging, really), I have posted the annotated playlist here.  Consider this music not just to drink by but to contemplate by...a playlist for the thoughtful rumpot.  We start, in time, at the beginning...

Chapter One:  Kill-Devil
The simplest definition of rum is distilled sugar cane juice.  Whether it comes directly from the cane, from sugar, or from molasses is just one of the variables that make the many varieties of rum different.  Sugar was, with a due nod to historian Sidney Mintz, along with tobacco, the foundation of North American economics, the goods that made the Colonies profitable.  Someone, perhaps in Barbados, figured out that what Curtis calls the "industrial waste" of the sugar plantation could be made into alcohol, and so not only did North America have a native booze but also another tidy means of making cash.  Some called it "rumbullion," meaning "tumult," while others called it "kill-devil."  Let's just say that the earliest rum was hard and rough, the moonshine of the Caribbean.

I lead my playlist with a sort of theme song, performed by my favorite folk trio led by Gordon Bok, Maine's premier maritime folk singer.  "My Images Come" is an ode to to the many inspirations of the songwriter, with "a bottle of rum" a constant in every verse.  It seemed appropriate to acknowledge the slaves that worked the plantations and may in fact have invented rum themselves.  For this I turned, naturally, to possibly the best songcatcher in Ethnomusicology, Alan Lomax, but unable to locate anything from Barbados I instead found a couple good songs from Grenada...

1.  "My Images Come" by Bok, Muir and Trickett from The First Fifteen Years - Volume II -->

2.  "Work Song" by Norman Miller from The Alan Lomax Collection: Caribbean Voyage - Grenada Creole and Yoruba Voices

3.  "Roll, Roll, Roll and Go" by Irene McQueen from The Alan Lomax Collection: Caribbean Voyage - Grenada Creole and Yoruba Voices

Rum recipe: The Nassau Chaise

I was going through my pocket notebook, writing in my (other) Journal, and came across this cocktail recipe from a few weeks ago:
--Sailor Jerry rum.  This is second only to Cruzan Aged as my stock rum.
--Coco Solo.  This is a coconut-flavored soda that you can often find at the local Latin market. It's from Cuba, where Coco Solo is the name of a neighborhood in Havana.
--sweet lime.  This tastes almost like tangerine...a lot less tart than a regular lime, something you could actually eat raw (tho' I knew plenty Tejanos in San Antonio that ate raw limes).  It's apparently very popular in the Middle East and India, tho' it's originally from Southeast Asia.
--ginger ale, just to cut.  You could leave this out if you wanted the Coco Solo to take over, but keep in mind the Coco Solo is strong in coconut flavor.

This has a lot of flavors going on, not in the least because it's using spiced rum, and I leave it to the mixer's discretion how to proportion and which flavor you want to dominate.  I named this concoction Nassau Chaise because I was picturing this as drink in hand while reclining in the Bahamas.  I didn't know until after that a Nassau chaise is actually a style of chaise longue.