The Christmas List - Paul Jones (Sort Of)

Not so sure about adding a bottle of Paul Jones blended whiskey to my Christmas list, but man dig the mid-century office desk and chairs! I definitely would like to see this set under my tree!

Thirsty Thursday - The Manhattan

Being the perennial Johnny-Come-Lately that I am, and resistant to anything that has the stink of a trend, I've kept away from Facebookery's "Throwback Thursday" with the sort of gusto politicians of the party in power resist electoral reform. I always say, if the masses love it, it's got to be a trick. Still, writing, especially blogging, loves a good meme and I do spend most of my time writing about the past. So my inner iconoclast and joiner got together and hammered out a deal. Today is Throwback Thursday, and the three of us have decided the thing most of us like to throw back is a good, stiff, drink. Yes, Thirsty Thursday, and I'm going to kick the whole thing off with a drink that's experiencing a bit of a resurgence, one that's been creeping around the cocktail lounge and bar long enough to have suffered all the slings and arrows fickle culture has to offer: the Manhattan.

Like many of the cocktails we'll be sampling, the true lineage of the Manhattan is uncertain. We know it emerged from the New York burrough for which it's named and that it was filling sherry glasses in trendier establishments there by the mid 1880s. The official history of the Manhattan Club lays claim the Manhattan's invention, going so far as attributing it to one Dr. Iain Marshall who supposedly concocted it for an 1874 reception thrown by Lady Randolph Churchill for presidential candidate Samuel Tilden. It's a nice story, but like most nice creation stories it probably isn't true. 

For one thing, Lady Churchill was in England giving birth to her daughter at the time of the Tilden reception. Also, there are competing creation stories that place the Manhattan's birth ten years earlier in a Broadway bar that's name has been lost to history. In the end, all we can say for certain is the Manhattan is an aptly named child of NYC's guided age.

Order a Manhattan at your corner bar today and you're likely to get a mix of rye or Canadian whisky, sweet red vermouth, and orange or Angostura bitters with a maraschino cherry for looks. Though the recipe hasn't changed much over the centuries, it has evolved. In the early 1900's your cocktail would have contained American whiskey and been sweetened with a dash of gum syrup or maybe Curacao with a lemon peel added for garnish. The change from American to Canadian whiskey is probably linked to prohibition. Bootleg whiskey came across the border from Canada to fill the gap left by American distillers and the change stuck once America's dry heaves subsided. Back in the late 1800's absinthe might be substituted for the Curacao in a pinch, an ingredient that would put a serious side-spin on the cherry and orange theme modern imbibers have come to expect from their Manhattan.

How big is the Manhattan in American culture? Aside from introducing vermouth to the cocktail shaker, it also claimed the title of the 1928 film Manhattan Cocktail. No, it's not surprising you don't know that one. It was a movie that had the misfortune of being released in the period when the silent film was era was coming to an end and the talkies just getting started. It starred a couple un-notables, Nancy Carroll and Richard Arlen, Haven't heard of either of them? That's a shame, Arlen appeared in over 140 films seeing not only the coming of sound, but the coming of color to the movies as well. His first appearance was in 1921 and his last in 1977.  Nancy Carroll appeared in over thirty feature films and went on to a stint in television that lasted until 1963. If you're looking for an appearance by the Manhattan that did better at the box office you need go no farther than the 1959 Marilyn Monroe comedy Some Like it Hot where Sugar and her co-stars were portrayed shaking cocktails in a hot water bottle due to prohibition. In the 2000's the popularity of Mad Men helped return swank and cocktail culture to the fore of the American conscience. Now the Manhattan has become a drink du jour at just about every watering hole from the swank to the simple and some hipster is probably substituting small-batch artisan hand crafted pomegranate bitters for Angostura. Whatever may come, the Manhattan survives, it always has and probably always will.

Old Quaker Whiskey

Old Quaker whiskey, apparently they thought Curly Joe would make a good spokesperson. Well actually it isn't Curly, but it must be his twin. I'm not sure who the guy is, apparently just a tux-clad whiskey enthusiast and part-time cue ball.

Schenley Industries, the outfit behind Old Quaker, had offices in the Empire State Building and a distillery in Lawrenceburg, Indiana where they distilled bourbon whiskeys including Schenley, Carstair's White Seal, and Golden Wedding Rye as well as Black Velvet, the only whiskey available to submarine officers at Midway during World War II (where it earned the nickname Schenley's Black Death).

Financier Meshulam Riklis bought Schenley in 1968 and then the company was sold to Guinness in 1987.

Sunny Brook Kentucky Whiskey

When I hear "Sunny Brook", I don't think of fine Kentucky Whiskey. I think of an institution with high walls, razor wire, and a staff of nice (brawny) fellows in white coats supervising recreational activities. In fact, the copy in this ad could be for Sunny Brook the institution and Sunny Brook the blended whiskey. Regardless, I'm pretty sure the codger in the ad should be in the former and shouldn't be drinking the latter.

Sunny Brook was bought by Jim Beam in 1987 and the brand still is available. Jim Beam must have been in a buying mood that year, because they bought another brand with an ad that showed up in the same magazine. Jim Beam eventually sold Old Taylor to the Sazerac Company.

National Bourbon Heritage Month

Welcome to National Bourbon Heritage month. There’s nothing like getting sauced before marching out in the woods armed with a shotgun to hunt forty-five pound rabbits! Something about this guy just screams Elmer Fudd and it suggests an alternate reason for the hapless hunter’s speech impediment. The G&W ad is from the November 1937 issue of Life Magazine and I think it features the least realistic rabbit I've ever seen sort of Bugs or Roger.

What makes any particular whiskey bourbon? Well, according to the Fed:

• Produced in the United States
• The grain used in its manufacturing must be at least 51% corn
• It must be aged in new, charred-oak barrels
• It must be distilled to no more than 160 (U.S.) proof (80% alcohol by volume)
• Though there isn’t any defined period for aging bourbon, it must placed into the barrel for the aging process at no more than 125 proof (62.5% alcohol by volume)
• It must be bottled at 80 proof or more (40% alcohol by volume)

The history of bourbon is as convoluted and confused as the dirt roads that wind through the hollows and hills of Kentucky from which the spirit is reputed to originate. The first distillers in Kentucky arrived in Bardstown in the 1770s and most historians agree that by 1783 when Louisville was founded some of the area’s earliest inhabitants had already started distilling whiskey. In the eastern reaches of Old Bourbon County exports of corn whiskey became widely known as “Bourbon”, a name that stuck. At some point the barrels used for aging bourbon were charred, something often accredited to Baptist preacher Elijah Craig, and now the practice of aging bourbon in charred oak barrels has become an earmark of good bourbon whiskey.

So, raise a glass of oak, smoked cornfields, and cold limestone springs and take a moment to sit in the year’s aging sunlight. Soon enough everything will be sleet and snow, but for the moment the mellow fire of summer burns inside and everything is softened.

 

National Whiskey Sour Day

I kid you not, today is National Whiskey Sour day. There's a lot of mumbo-jumbo on the web linking the classic sour to scurvy treatments administered shipboard during the 1700s, but to me that explanation sounds more than a little contrived.

Ships provided their crewmen rations of grog as a part of their pay, this much is true. Grog is a combination of small (weak) beer and some other spirit such as rum. By 1707 whiskey had become exorbitantly expensive due to the Acts of Union which merged England and Scotland and in 1725 the price of whiskey rose even more due to malt taxes. With whiskey fetching such a high price (whether it was legally produced or bootleg) no ship's captain would waste a bottle of the stuff on keeping their powder monkey fit.

In 1740 the British Navy began adding citrus juice (usually lemon or lime juice) to the recipe for grog, but this addition was merely intended to make what essentially was spoiled beer and rancid water more palatable. This addition, though they did not understand why, resulted in healthier sailors. In 1747 James Lind proved scurvy could be treated and prevented by supplementing the sailor's diet with citrus fruit and in 1753, Lind published A Treatise of the Scurvy, explaining how scurvy could be eradicated. His attempted to market lime juice as a medicine proved unsuccessful though and citrus wasn't adopted as a scurvy treatment until the 1790s, and the idea that any acid would suffice continued in Britain into the late 19th century.

To put it simply regardless of what About.com says, the whiskey sour was not invented to stave off scurvy nor was it served on any ship prior to the advent of the ocean liner.

Let us check a more reputable reference, say The Cocktail Chronicles blog which states:

"While not fancy, the whiskey sour has a history: It belongs to one of the old families of original cocktails, appearing in Jerry Thomas’ 1862 drinks book alongside the other cocktail ancestors, the juleps, slings, sangarees, cobblers and smashes that are mostly lost to the ages."