Beyond Punch: Colonial American Drinks
Posted on July 21, 2011
Filed Under Marleigh Riggins | Leave a Comment
There are cocktail people all over the place at Tales–enthusiasts, bartenders, brand reps, bloggers–and you can’t turn anywhere but you run into a cocktail conversation in progress. As such, a 10am seminar seems, besides being pretty early in NOLA time, very much like a continuation of last night’s discussions.
Until you walk in on Wayne Curtis dressed like a Son of the American Revolution.
Wayne is a writer and historian of cocktails, and the author of the excellent book “And a Bottle of Rum.” As you might guess from that title Wayne knows quite a lot about rum, which was the spirit of colonial America–the perfect background for the history of early American drinking.
Sponsored by Cruzan Rum, attendees woke up to a glass of Pineapple Syllabub, a vinegar-rum-cider Stone Fence, a spruce beer-rum-Zirbenz Calibogus and a hot beer-and-rum flip.
Picking up where punch, the famous tipple of American taverns, leaves off, Wayne took the audience on a tour of the history, ingredients and process of making colonial favorites like syllabub, cider, cherry bounce, sangaree and the flip–including the red-hot cast iron poker used to mix it (fire!).
Fire is an excellent strategy to, as Wayne hoped, turn out a room full of people dying to know where to buy a tri-cornered hat. Time to visit the hat shop…
