Drinks make us smarter. Despite the liquified livers, massive hangovers, and annhiliated brain cells, drinks have inspired epic societal changes throughout time. Civilized settlements. Debate. Storage techniques. Biology. Agriculture. And so on. We're radically changed by the drinks we create. So says Tom Standage, and so say I.
But in day to day life, it's nonetheless pretty rare to see anything as ingenious as these two fellows who are as determined to open a wine bottle as anyone I've ever seen. Learn from them, and learn from that drink sitting in front of you.
(You really only need to watch the first 15 and last 15 seconds of this second video to get the idea. It's a bit long.)
Baudelaire Eyo
My co-blogger and venerable restaurant reviewer Todd will soon have published a column about Jolly Pumpkin's new storefront brewpub in Ann Arbor. In anticipation of his moutherwatering wordsmithing, I thought it appropriate to post a few notes about a unique beer being served up at that location. Brewmaster Ron Jefferies has apparently been trying out some new recipes under assorted pseudo-brands that are as whimsical as his recipes. Among them is cleverly titled Baudelaire Eyo, a saison brewed with hisbiscus, rose, and other herbs and flowers. I've read a review or two online where the reviewer's bottle arrived with its contents flat and uninspired, but I'm pleased to say that mine was quite effervescent, exceptionally well-balanced, and very drinkable. It pours with a dark, amber-ish tone highlighted by pink-ish hues when struck by the window light. Aromatically, it's aggressively funky but almost sweet, surely a sign of its herbal heritage. Predominantly funky on the palate, the flavor is in lock-step with the nose, showing a bit of sweet, floral nuance in the mid-palate and finishing dry.
Jolly Pumpkin is, as a farmhouse brewery, known for some bottle variation, a notion with which I have no qualms. But if most bottles I had going forward were to drink like this, I'd say Eyo ranks with Bam Biere, Perseguidor, Oro de Calabaza, and Luciernaga as one of the epic classics among the growing number of American farmhouse ales, competitive even with its French and Belgian counterparts. It's my sincere hope he bottles this magic elixir and gets it on store shelves in the future.
A Mighty Fail
It seemed for a while that bagged tea was becoming passably drinkable. Restaurants were carrying Jasmine Oolong and White Tea in little silk bags with extra room to allow the broken leaves the chance to expand a bit and reveal their true flavors and aromas. For sure, no bagged tea will ever replicate the flavors or aromas of "real" leaf tea, but much like well-made boxed wine, it has its place in the market and, in a pinch, it was finally starting to serve me well.
Then tea got trendy.
* * *
Florida isn't a place I generally like to spend my time, and it's the last place I think of when I imagine sipping on a hot, fresh cup of tea. But when work took me to Orlando, away from my sizeable office stash of loose leaf, I needed a delicious cup despite the heat. The hotel, better than most, stocked Mighty Leaf-brand tea in pounches. Earl Grey, English Breakfast, Mint Verbena, and Orchid Oolong, among others.
Described on the box as being sweet and floral and presented in one of those pretty, roomy silken bags, the tea nearly moved me to sue for false advertising since it tasted more like Australian Shiraz than tea. Oolongs dried with blossoms still retain true tea flavor and usually have a light, natural sweetness and autumn leaf aroma from the flowers. Actual steeped flowers or sweet herbs can have sweetness, but again, there's an inherent natural depth. But this Orchid "Oolong" reeked of bubble gum and tasted like tropical fruit, suntan lotion, and pina colada.
Why ruin a good thing? Keep the silken bags, the overpriced boxes, the fancy packaging, the cheesy name, and the consultant-driven marketing plan. No problem. But why concentrate some quasi-natural orchid flavor and soak an oolong tea in it to the point it's more reminiscent of fruit punch than a quality cup?
The straight black and green teas weren't bad, but whether I'm in a steamy southern state or staying warm in Detroit, I'll be avoiding the Orchid Oolong in the future.
Then tea got trendy.
* * *
Florida isn't a place I generally like to spend my time, and it's the last place I think of when I imagine sipping on a hot, fresh cup of tea. But when work took me to Orlando, away from my sizeable office stash of loose leaf, I needed a delicious cup despite the heat. The hotel, better than most, stocked Mighty Leaf-brand tea in pounches. Earl Grey, English Breakfast, Mint Verbena, and Orchid Oolong, among others.
Described on the box as being sweet and floral and presented in one of those pretty, roomy silken bags, the tea nearly moved me to sue for false advertising since it tasted more like Australian Shiraz than tea. Oolongs dried with blossoms still retain true tea flavor and usually have a light, natural sweetness and autumn leaf aroma from the flowers. Actual steeped flowers or sweet herbs can have sweetness, but again, there's an inherent natural depth. But this Orchid "Oolong" reeked of bubble gum and tasted like tropical fruit, suntan lotion, and pina colada.
Why ruin a good thing? Keep the silken bags, the overpriced boxes, the fancy packaging, the cheesy name, and the consultant-driven marketing plan. No problem. But why concentrate some quasi-natural orchid flavor and soak an oolong tea in it to the point it's more reminiscent of fruit punch than a quality cup?
The straight black and green teas weren't bad, but whether I'm in a steamy southern state or staying warm in Detroit, I'll be avoiding the Orchid Oolong in the future.
A Weekend in Chippewa County
There’s a marked change in atmosphere where I-75 narrows somewhere north of Bay City. Farmland gives way to mixed hardwood and evergreen, M-23 separates off to the east taking a good portion of RV traffic with it, and gone are the concrete walls that divide road from country.
You’re up north.
Last spring a fire raged across the jack pine forest near Grayling, the sole habitat of the endangered Kirtland’s Warbler. The jack pine is a pioneer species, its small, hard cones opening only when exposed to the heat of flames, thus renewing a matured forest no longer useful to the birds. This is the natural order of things, though a few area homeowners no doubt complained of the nuisance. Today, blackened trunks of the dead stands of trees are still visible from the highway even at dusk while racing north at 75 mph. But it’s no more a graveyard than the rows of brown and dry corn stalks found further south that will be turned back into the soil. The earth eventually swallows itself one way or another.
Farther up flows the Indian River, part of the inland waterway that connects Lake Michigan to Lake Huron and also the range boundary of a small elk herd that still manages to roam the northern Lower Peninsula despite an abundance of predators gamboling about on four-wheelers. Beyond the river, forest, beyond the forest, the Mackinac Bridge, lights strung high along the topmost suspension cable a signpost for sailors traveling the straights both east and westbound.
Crossing the straights of Mackinac by bridge can either be a leisurely coast during mild weather or, when the wind is blowing across the span, a white-knuckled fright fest with every gust. In any case, I never fail to think about the unfortunate fate of Leslie Anne Pluhar and how her memory will forever be tied to a 1987 Yugo that was blown like a leaf to the depths below. It is said that divers searching for Leslie’s body found a junkyard’s worth of vehicles resting on the lakebed. Meanwhile, area Ford dealerships had a run on the new Explorer SUV.
The first thing my seven-year-old daughter, Audra, bid farewell to upon leaving for home after a long weekend in the UP were the dirt roads. I learned the hard way a few years back after a vacation near Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore that a low-slung family wagon was not the most appropriate vehicle for the area. It took three days to lose a piece of the nose and the entire undercarriage engine guard. I drive slower now and avoid the larger stones. If it weren’t for dirt roads there wouldn’t be anywhere to go. We stayed at a house on Piatt Lake, miles and miles of dirt roads back from M-123. Two-tracks and logging trails branch off in all directions. These are fun to explore though treacherous for owners of low-slung family wagons. Naturally, cell towers are not priority in a county with a population lower than the average inner-ring Detroit suburb.
Getting around late at night in the UP requires a different set of navigation skills. Driving directions may include mileage between dirt roads and spotting landmarks like a Smokey Bear sign or the little house with the candle in the window. When you eventually reach your destination it’s handy to have a bottle of whisky nearby. The glass to pour it in is optional.
We awoke Friday morning to a frigid wind blowing hard from the northeast and whipping up a small froth on Piatt Lake. Eager to begin our exploration we made a pot of coffee and a large breakfast of sausage gravy, scrambled eggs and fried potatoes. Soon after breakfast we headed north toward Whitefish Point.
Essentially fictional, the village of Whitefish Point is nevertheless known as the cranberry capital of Michigan. Presumably due to the one, century old cranberry bog two miles down Cemetery Road. The point itself is a compound of museum buildings commemorating the hundreds of ships Lake Superior has swallowed over the years. The main building houses artifacts recovered from wrecks near the point. There are photos and paintings and plaques detailing the last minutes of sailor’s lives. Gordon Lightfoot’s Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald is piped into the room. It’s all very reverent and sad. There’s a boathouse, the lighthouse keeper’s quarters, the lighthouse, a snack shop, and a gift shop with all the requisite mementos that people require when they travel to see far away things of interest.
A platform leads over the dunes and onto a coast where time falls away into the surf. Whole trunks of cedar, red pine and birch lay bleached and gray, some with their roots still intact, some forty feet in length, swept in from the Canadian shore and strewn about as if they were twigs. The northeast wind howls here, forcing white-capped rollers five and six feet high to break over flat stone disks of blue and orange that line the margin. Further in, sand the color of the stones drifts against the bones of trees making patterns only nature can. I stand and look where I’ve been as waves of sand obliterate my footprints in minutes as if I were never there.
Three fingers Riley roams these shores. Once a sailor on a doomed freighter heading east with a load of ore, Riley's body washed ashore near the point and soon froze in the surf ice. A young Coast Guard Petty Officer on duty after the wreck was charged with exhuming poor Riley from his wintry tomb. While chopping through the ice with an ax he unintentionally removed a finger. Nowadays, in the half-light of dusk, Riley searches on.
We escaped the ghosts of the point and headed into Paradise for a whitefish dinner. The wind had eased and a cold rain began to fall. We stopped at the IGA and picked up six packs of Bell's Two Hearted Ale and Wisconsin's Stevens Point Brewery Belgian White Ale. One advantage of vacationing in the Eastern UP near where the Two Hearted River flows into Lake Superior is that just about every convenience store and gas station has a six pack of Bell's for sale. Back at the house I donned my rain gear and roamed the woods with my Labrador, Ginger, until dark, and then relaxed fireside with a few bottles of beer.
A steady rain continued through the morning and eventually eased into sporadic drizzle. After a couple of hours of tossing Ginger's ball into the lake we drove to the lower falls of the Tahquamenon River. Tannins leached from the cedar and hemlock swamps that drain into the Tahquamenon River color the water amber. Besides being the second largest waterfall east of the Mississippi, the river is perhaps best known from the epic poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Song of Hiawatha.
The trails at the upper falls are paved and terminate at stairs that lead down to two outlooks, one at the brink of the falls, the other downriver. Signs indicate there are about 200 steps between both outlooks. We lost track before those counts could be verified. We suspect the signs are short by a step or two dozen. At any rate, climbing all those stairs made us thirsty. Fortunately for us, rebuilt on the site that was once logging camp #33, and adjacent to the upper falls parking lot, is a log complex containing a souvenir shop and Tahquamenon Falls Brewery & Pub. We settled in for a couple pints of balanced and tasty Falls Tannin Red Ale and whitefish sandwiches to refuel for one last hike.
Just north of the Tahquamenon lies a vast stretch of peat bog. A trailhead two miles down a rutted two track near the lower falls allows access to a network of hiking trails traversing this strange and beautiful ecology. This is moose country. Always the adventurer, Audra discovered a small foot trail that led to a narrow boardwalk over a quaking bog. A quaking bog is formed by a layer of peat about 18 inches thick that rests on top of water. It feels something like a water bed. Growing over this layer of peat are lichens, bright green and blood red mosses, and hundreds of pitcher plants. Another half mile stroll took us to Clark Lake. In the quiet of early evening we felt as if we were the only humans on earth. Not one of us wished to leave this place of peaceful beauty.
Our last night on Piatt Lake I stayed up late hanging around the fire and drinking from a growler of Falls Tannin Red Ale. Unseen animals rummaged in the brush. I wanted to get drunk by roasting the heart of my enemy on a stick and howling into the night but since I had no heart to roast I simply finished the growler and the rest of the Two Hearted besides. In a dim way I felt the sap running through the trees and the pull of the moon on my blood. Here I stood on a piece of country that can change a person, the details of which become a part of him and endure through all the small tragedies of routine. This is the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
The next morning we headed south toward home. Obligatory smoked whitefish was procured from a tiny smokehouse in St. Ignace. I splurged on a bag of beef jerky that Ginger promptly crawled into the front seat and ate while we ordered coffee and other goods at the fudgemaker's in Mackinaw City. After one last stop at Mackinaw Pastie and Cookie Company for a half-dozen frozen pasties the north was behind us but in no way forgotten.
You’re up north.
Last spring a fire raged across the jack pine forest near Grayling, the sole habitat of the endangered Kirtland’s Warbler. The jack pine is a pioneer species, its small, hard cones opening only when exposed to the heat of flames, thus renewing a matured forest no longer useful to the birds. This is the natural order of things, though a few area homeowners no doubt complained of the nuisance. Today, blackened trunks of the dead stands of trees are still visible from the highway even at dusk while racing north at 75 mph. But it’s no more a graveyard than the rows of brown and dry corn stalks found further south that will be turned back into the soil. The earth eventually swallows itself one way or another.
Farther up flows the Indian River, part of the inland waterway that connects Lake Michigan to Lake Huron and also the range boundary of a small elk herd that still manages to roam the northern Lower Peninsula despite an abundance of predators gamboling about on four-wheelers. Beyond the river, forest, beyond the forest, the Mackinac Bridge, lights strung high along the topmost suspension cable a signpost for sailors traveling the straights both east and westbound.
Crossing the straights of Mackinac by bridge can either be a leisurely coast during mild weather or, when the wind is blowing across the span, a white-knuckled fright fest with every gust. In any case, I never fail to think about the unfortunate fate of Leslie Anne Pluhar and how her memory will forever be tied to a 1987 Yugo that was blown like a leaf to the depths below. It is said that divers searching for Leslie’s body found a junkyard’s worth of vehicles resting on the lakebed. Meanwhile, area Ford dealerships had a run on the new Explorer SUV.
The first thing my seven-year-old daughter, Audra, bid farewell to upon leaving for home after a long weekend in the UP were the dirt roads. I learned the hard way a few years back after a vacation near Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore that a low-slung family wagon was not the most appropriate vehicle for the area. It took three days to lose a piece of the nose and the entire undercarriage engine guard. I drive slower now and avoid the larger stones. If it weren’t for dirt roads there wouldn’t be anywhere to go. We stayed at a house on Piatt Lake, miles and miles of dirt roads back from M-123. Two-tracks and logging trails branch off in all directions. These are fun to explore though treacherous for owners of low-slung family wagons. Naturally, cell towers are not priority in a county with a population lower than the average inner-ring Detroit suburb.
Getting around late at night in the UP requires a different set of navigation skills. Driving directions may include mileage between dirt roads and spotting landmarks like a Smokey Bear sign or the little house with the candle in the window. When you eventually reach your destination it’s handy to have a bottle of whisky nearby. The glass to pour it in is optional.
We awoke Friday morning to a frigid wind blowing hard from the northeast and whipping up a small froth on Piatt Lake. Eager to begin our exploration we made a pot of coffee and a large breakfast of sausage gravy, scrambled eggs and fried potatoes. Soon after breakfast we headed north toward Whitefish Point.
Essentially fictional, the village of Whitefish Point is nevertheless known as the cranberry capital of Michigan. Presumably due to the one, century old cranberry bog two miles down Cemetery Road. The point itself is a compound of museum buildings commemorating the hundreds of ships Lake Superior has swallowed over the years. The main building houses artifacts recovered from wrecks near the point. There are photos and paintings and plaques detailing the last minutes of sailor’s lives. Gordon Lightfoot’s Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald is piped into the room. It’s all very reverent and sad. There’s a boathouse, the lighthouse keeper’s quarters, the lighthouse, a snack shop, and a gift shop with all the requisite mementos that people require when they travel to see far away things of interest.
A platform leads over the dunes and onto a coast where time falls away into the surf. Whole trunks of cedar, red pine and birch lay bleached and gray, some with their roots still intact, some forty feet in length, swept in from the Canadian shore and strewn about as if they were twigs. The northeast wind howls here, forcing white-capped rollers five and six feet high to break over flat stone disks of blue and orange that line the margin. Further in, sand the color of the stones drifts against the bones of trees making patterns only nature can. I stand and look where I’ve been as waves of sand obliterate my footprints in minutes as if I were never there.
Three fingers Riley roams these shores. Once a sailor on a doomed freighter heading east with a load of ore, Riley's body washed ashore near the point and soon froze in the surf ice. A young Coast Guard Petty Officer on duty after the wreck was charged with exhuming poor Riley from his wintry tomb. While chopping through the ice with an ax he unintentionally removed a finger. Nowadays, in the half-light of dusk, Riley searches on.
We escaped the ghosts of the point and headed into Paradise for a whitefish dinner. The wind had eased and a cold rain began to fall. We stopped at the IGA and picked up six packs of Bell's Two Hearted Ale and Wisconsin's Stevens Point Brewery Belgian White Ale. One advantage of vacationing in the Eastern UP near where the Two Hearted River flows into Lake Superior is that just about every convenience store and gas station has a six pack of Bell's for sale. Back at the house I donned my rain gear and roamed the woods with my Labrador, Ginger, until dark, and then relaxed fireside with a few bottles of beer.
A steady rain continued through the morning and eventually eased into sporadic drizzle. After a couple of hours of tossing Ginger's ball into the lake we drove to the lower falls of the Tahquamenon River. Tannins leached from the cedar and hemlock swamps that drain into the Tahquamenon River color the water amber. Besides being the second largest waterfall east of the Mississippi, the river is perhaps best known from the epic poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Song of Hiawatha.
And thus sailed my HiawathaA boardwalk and a couple of overlooks allow access to two of the five lower falls. From here you can hike a moderately challenging four miles to the upper falls (we conquered this several years ago). There's also a loop that runs to the campground and along the entry road back to the gift shop. As we studied the trail map Audra went exploring a small stream that coursed down the high banks and under the boardwalk. Out of the corner of my eye I watched her foot slip into the ankle deep water getting a good soaker. She looked around to see if anyone noticed and casually shook the water off her foot and began leading the short but rigorous trail, skirting deep ravines, marching steadily forth beneath the trees.
Down the rushing Taquamenaw,
Sailed through all its bends and windings,
Sailed through all its deeps and shallows,
While his friend, the strong man, Kwasind,
Swam the deeps, the shallows waded.
Up and down the river went they,
In and out among its islands,
Cleared its bed of root and sand-bar,
Dragged the dead trees from its channel,
Made its passage safe and certain,
Made a pathway for the people,
From its springs among the mountains,
To the waters of Pauwating,
To the bay of Taquamenaw.
The trails at the upper falls are paved and terminate at stairs that lead down to two outlooks, one at the brink of the falls, the other downriver. Signs indicate there are about 200 steps between both outlooks. We lost track before those counts could be verified. We suspect the signs are short by a step or two dozen. At any rate, climbing all those stairs made us thirsty. Fortunately for us, rebuilt on the site that was once logging camp #33, and adjacent to the upper falls parking lot, is a log complex containing a souvenir shop and Tahquamenon Falls Brewery & Pub. We settled in for a couple pints of balanced and tasty Falls Tannin Red Ale and whitefish sandwiches to refuel for one last hike.
Just north of the Tahquamenon lies a vast stretch of peat bog. A trailhead two miles down a rutted two track near the lower falls allows access to a network of hiking trails traversing this strange and beautiful ecology. This is moose country. Always the adventurer, Audra discovered a small foot trail that led to a narrow boardwalk over a quaking bog. A quaking bog is formed by a layer of peat about 18 inches thick that rests on top of water. It feels something like a water bed. Growing over this layer of peat are lichens, bright green and blood red mosses, and hundreds of pitcher plants. Another half mile stroll took us to Clark Lake. In the quiet of early evening we felt as if we were the only humans on earth. Not one of us wished to leave this place of peaceful beauty.
Our last night on Piatt Lake I stayed up late hanging around the fire and drinking from a growler of Falls Tannin Red Ale. Unseen animals rummaged in the brush. I wanted to get drunk by roasting the heart of my enemy on a stick and howling into the night but since I had no heart to roast I simply finished the growler and the rest of the Two Hearted besides. In a dim way I felt the sap running through the trees and the pull of the moon on my blood. Here I stood on a piece of country that can change a person, the details of which become a part of him and endure through all the small tragedies of routine. This is the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
The next morning we headed south toward home. Obligatory smoked whitefish was procured from a tiny smokehouse in St. Ignace. I splurged on a bag of beef jerky that Ginger promptly crawled into the front seat and ate while we ordered coffee and other goods at the fudgemaker's in Mackinaw City. After one last stop at Mackinaw Pastie and Cookie Company for a half-dozen frozen pasties the north was behind us but in no way forgotten.
Enjoying the apple harvest
Apple harvest is our favorite time of year. Not only do we ferment several gallons of unpasteurized apple juice from local orchards into cider to drink in the winter, there are all sorts of deals on bulk apples at Detroit’s Eastern Market. This Saturday we purchased a mixed bushel of Granny Smith and Northern Spy for $5 and got the dehydrator cranking.
Wash them good. We like tart apples for drying.
Slice them thick and sprinkle with a little ground cinnamon.
Store them with the rest of your Michigan harvest. They make a fantastic and healthy snack.
Wash them good. We like tart apples for drying.
Slice them thick and sprinkle with a little ground cinnamon.
Store them with the rest of your Michigan harvest. They make a fantastic and healthy snack.
2004 Domaine de la Louvetrie Muscadet Sèvre et Maine "Le Fief du Breil"
My favorite Muscadet wines all seem to share a similar aroma that is difficult to describe, something like clean, white cotton sheets in a spring breeze, like laundry detergent makers want you to think their product smells like. Or it could be the smell of rain, a few, fat drops that fall on sun-baked concrete and immediately vaporize. It’s not exactly that either. It’s more like the core of the fruit, it’s essence, the smell of it and all the Melon de Bourgogne grapes before it. Or it could just be the result of aging on the lees. Whatever it is, all my favorite Muscadet wines have it.
Jo Landron’s 2004 Domaine de la Louvetrie Muscadet Sèvre et Maine "Le Fief du Breil" has it. That and crusty bread and lemon peel and the most distant note of fruit trees in bloom. A mouthful is marked with a bracing acidity that brings with it more citrus and eventually levels out across the taste buds to finish crisp. Our friends at Gang of Pour will vouch. Good luck finding a $14 bottle of white wine better than this one.
Jo Landron’s 2004 Domaine de la Louvetrie Muscadet Sèvre et Maine "Le Fief du Breil" has it. That and crusty bread and lemon peel and the most distant note of fruit trees in bloom. A mouthful is marked with a bracing acidity that brings with it more citrus and eventually levels out across the taste buds to finish crisp. Our friends at Gang of Pour will vouch. Good luck finding a $14 bottle of white wine better than this one.
She's a Fiiish... Hooouse
Drinks generally share the same type of genesis as food: Culture, weather, geography, and available resources conspire to force food and drink in a direction. Rice and fish in Japan. Smoking tough cuts of meat in historically poorer areas. Mussels off the coast of Belgium. Leveraging every last part of highland animals to create haggis in Scotland. And so on.
Beer and wine, of course, fit that mold. Low alcohol, lighter, drier beers or whites in fish-friendly regions. Big wines in regions with spice. Family-brewed beers that fit farming lifestyles or pubs for high-density cities. But I hadn't really thought much about spirits in that context until this weekend when I brought some Fish House Punch to my co-blogger's house for a Saturday evening party.
Ted Haigh, aka Dr. Cocktail, writes about the punch:
The recipe I used was based on Haigh's, with a substitution of some pretty piss poor apricot brandy for his suggested top-shelf peach brandy -- in and of itself a choice made because Detroit doesn't see a big selection of peach brandies.
Fish House Punch
Beer and wine, of course, fit that mold. Low alcohol, lighter, drier beers or whites in fish-friendly regions. Big wines in regions with spice. Family-brewed beers that fit farming lifestyles or pubs for high-density cities. But I hadn't really thought much about spirits in that context until this weekend when I brought some Fish House Punch to my co-blogger's house for a Saturday evening party.
Ted Haigh, aka Dr. Cocktail, writes about the punch:
In 1732, fully 104 years before Texas declared itself a Republic, Schuylkill (pronounced “SKOO-kull”), home of Fish House Punch, was its own colony, and later its own sovereign state. It must’ve been quite a place, too. It had a Navy (well, two boats). It had an army (OK, a cannon). At its core it was a club: The Schuylkill Fishing Company... A recipe as old as Fish House Punch, fervently slurped by the Father of Our Country, has inevitably gone through many fanciful formulations. Jerry Thomas related a simple (and probably accurate) recipe using lemon juice, sugar, water, peach brandy, Cognac and rum in 1862. Another was contributed by Mrs. Goodfellow’s Cooking School in 1907 that added oranges, strawberries or pineapple but called the addition of green tea “an abomination.”The variations are interesting, and I can't help but think these variations were spurred on by available ingredients. And more to the point, why rum and brandy? The answer, I suspect, is because of the importance of rum to the early colonies and which would have easily made its way into the areas near Philadelphia, a wealthy city in those days. Not surprisingly, the colonies and territories that would go on to form middle America seemed to acquire a fondness for bourbon, and while they had their own punches and juleps, Fish House Punch was created in a time and place that almost required its invention. Rum was available, and over time, those with access to strawberries or different types of teas or brandies would have altered the recipe to suit their needs, of course. Family recipes would have emerged all around three common ingredients: rum, brandy, and a need to make them easily quaffable.
The recipe I used was based on Haigh's, with a substitution of some pretty piss poor apricot brandy for his suggested top-shelf peach brandy -- in and of itself a choice made because Detroit doesn't see a big selection of peach brandies.
Fish House Punch
- 2 quarts Jamaica rum (I used Mount Gay silver)
- 1 quart brandy (I used Hennessey and some from another bottle)
- 1/2 pint peach brandy
- 1/2 pint Maraschino liqueur
- 1 quart fresh-brewed green tea
- 1 pint fresh lemon juice
- 1 pound sugar
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