The HMS Surprise is anchored in San Diego Harbor and may be visited. Among the others tidbits of information available there is confirmation of the 4-1 water to rum mix for grog. However, grog was surprisingly rare in the British Navy. The main alcoholic beverage ration was beer: a gallon a day per man.
They needed it. The crew was served hard biscuit daily with all the weevils they could eat. The expression “knock on wood” apparently had to do with banging the biscuit against the ship’s timbers to dislodge the weevils.
I’m assuming you got your info from the tour of the ship. “Grog was rare?” Anywhere I can go to investigate that? YOU could be correct.
If you can give me a cite for “knock on wood” before 1908, I’d love to see it. It doesn’t go back to banging biscuits onboard ship. It’s a variant of “touch wood” from the British.
Since this is a comment on a Staff Report (which are written by Cecil’s evil minions and not by Cecil himself), I’ll move this thread to the Comments on Staff Reports forum.
It was my understanding – and my information doesn’t go too far beyond reading Patrick O’Brian and the like – is that grog wasn’t so much “rare”, as “depending on location”. Beer was the standard, and probably was the drink in home waters, but did not keep as well as rum, so ships moved over to grog after a few weeks away from England when the beer supply was exhausted. Grog would have been the staple in the West Indies fleet, where rum was abundant. Cheap red wine was the staple in the Mediterranean, and arrack in the far east, with there being the possibility of almost endless substitutions based on circumstances and the purser.
The recipe given omits the lime juice and sugar (http://www.pussersbar.de/grog.htm). I suspect the original purpose of the lime juice was just to make the stuff drinkable – looks like it wasn’t for another 50 years that they figured out that the lime juice would prevent scurvy.
Also, forget about the “tap water”. If you want to replicate the original recipe, you really need water with a history. Probably it would be best to take a cask of water, drop in some tar, and store it in a alternately hot and cold garage for a few months, occasionally splashing it with salt water and other nastier forms of bilge. But you could probably replicate the taste pretty well by scooping out water from a particularly scummy pond.
I guess there’s also some question about whether diluting the alcohol actually served any purpose. The crew did get the same absolute amount of alchohol – maybe they didn’t drink it as fast, though.
I think I remember reading somewhere that the Naval rum from which grog was made was considerably stronger than the stuff you would normally buy now, well over 100% proof (100% proof being approximately 50% alcohol I believe). In that case, even after watering down the stuff would still have been pretty strong, and you are not going to get the authentic taste and effects for your party if you water down your regular Bacardi or Captain Morgan in the given proportions.
I came across that reference as well, but browsing through historical accounts in naval books loaned to me indicated that while the lime juice and sugar were recommended, they were also not often available on-board to the average sailor at the time. However, whether or not the rank and file, or the officers, or both actually had it with lime and sugar was difficult to confirm one way or another. You’d think sugar might have been scarce, but it was a trade item from the same places which supplied rum, so perhaps it was more available. I suppose I should have thrown that out as the “recommended” mixture, rather than just focusing on the “likely” one. The Oxford dictionaries, etymology, and Brewer’s didn’t even make mention of lime and sugar…which they likely should have…which influenced my decision not to speculate that much.
You are very correct, but there’s only so much I felt comfortable recommending in a Staff Report when it dealt with things that some idiot out there might actually try, and then decide to sue the Chicago Reader because they ended up getting poisoned mixing asphalt roofing sealant with rum…or scooping water from a scummy pond…ugh. Don’t ever invite me to one of your grog parties.
IIRC the Greek wine retsina is supposed to contain pine resin in it to try to match the original taste of wines which were stoppered with resin, but I’m not certain if that is the true origin of the flavour.
My understanding was that this was done to preserve the water.
If you have a cask of fresh water with no preservatives in it (e.g. no chlorine), it’ll pick up all sorts of microbes and become pretty much undrinkable after a couple of months. By mixing a little alcohol with the water, you could preserve it for years.
Grog is also the name of a sugar alcohol widely made in the Cabo Verde (Cape Verde) islands, an African archipelago west of Senegal. Though possible, it certainly seems more than coincidence that the two beverages share the same name. Note that Cabo Verdean grog has nothing to do with being dilluted with water. I would think it a safe assumption that the production of grog in Cabo Verde, if not the name, predates Admiral Vernon. I’m curious how and when, then, the term came to use in the archipelago. Of course Cabo Verde was an important stop in the Atlantic salt and slave trade at the time and a number of British ships have recorded stays there. Anyone with more info on the link to Cape Verdean grog?
Well, I’m no expert, but I think “a few days” is a bit strong. There were large brewers in Britain at least as early as the 18th century, and they couldn’t have been marketing something that had to be sucked up immediately, given how bad the transportation system was. And there are numerous references to sailors drinking beer. (And of course, if the beer was just a bit off, the sailors would still have sucked it down.)
Certainly, though, the beer wouldn’t have lasted as long as modern Budweiser. (With certain provisoes – “India Pale Ale”, as the name suggests, was made to survive a trip to India.)
The sailor tourguide on the USS Constitutiontold me something similar when. He further claimed that if you mix water and rum, it will go bad and be undrinkable after 3-4 days.
This doesn’t sound right to me :dubious:, and I was hoping for some clarification in the column or in this thread. It makes more sense that it was just difficult to save several days rations because of the increased volume.
And what could go bad with a mix of water and alcohol?
