Lost Spirits – Grog

Mike Gibson

My ancestors lived far more interesting lives than I’ll ever hope to. They were lumberjacks, voyageurs, bootleggers, French royalty, Union soldiers, war heroes. In some small way, many of them impressed their mark on history and helped forge this nation. Meanwhile, it’s a Saturday evening and I’m sitting here in my underwear drinking rum, using most of my available effort to prevent the condensation on my glass from falling onto my stomach. Clearly, I’m living the dream.

The only one of these ancestors I’ve ever actually known was my grandfather, a sailor, war veteran, and all-around badass. He joined the United States Navy when he turned eighteen—an age at which I was still struggling to learn how to cook a frozen pizza.

Duly inspired, I frequently find myself diving down a bottle of rum and dreaming about the sea, dreaming of an alternate reality where I can look at a lake freighter without getting violently seasick.

And since a life at sea is obviously not in my future, I eventually settled upon the next closest alternative—grog, the mixed drink that everyone’s heard of yet no one knows how to make.

But before I get to that, a brief historical rundown is in order. The English Navy customarily served rations of French brandy to its sailors while at sea, since fresh water is traditionally hard to find in the oceans, and during the 17th century no one had yet thought to found Aquafina.

At some point during the 1600s, England managed to snatch up a bevy of islands in the Caribbean, and some bloke discovered that sugar cane grew pretty well there. The sugar industry exploded, and in a few years the islands were saddled with molasses, an industrial byproduct that no one had any idea what to do with. Eventually some other bloke thought it would be a fine idea to ferment and distill it, and thus rum was born.

Soon the Royal Navy was serving rum to its sailors instead of French brandy. Remember, of course, that the English and French weren’t exactly good mates at this point in history, and this dietary transition makes perfect sense.

Consider the insurmountable complexities of sailing on an old tall ship. Have a few shots of rum and consider it again. If piloting a sailing ship suddenly seems like a bad idea, the Royal Navy probably would have agreed with you. Eventually they decided to dilute sailors’ daily rum rations with a bit of water.

If this doesn’t sound very potable, those sailors probably would have agreed with you. To compensate, they started mixing in their rations of lime and sugar as well. (A fun fact for all you ethnic slur hobbyists out there—this daily lime ration is why the rest of the world started calling Englishmen “limeys.”) They started calling this concoction “grog,” in honor of one Admiral Vernon, whose nickname was apparently “Old Grogrom.”

More than any other drink, grog has become emblematic of the sailing life, though in the last century it’s been overshadowed in this regard by rum, its primary ingredient. This may be because most bars these days can’t mix a drink that hasn’t featured prominently on Sex and the City.

Bearing that in mind, it looks like you’ll have to make it yourself. And since I suspect you’ll do it wrong, let me offer some advice.

As far as rum goes, you’re going to need something full-bodied and aged. This means no white rum, and no spiced rum. (Captain Morgan and Sailor Jerry can stay below deck for this one.) If you’re shooting for historical accuracy, use Pusser’s Rum—if you can find it. If you can’t, Mount Gay Eclipse will do. I’ll keelhaul you if you try using Bacardi.

As for the sugar, keep in mind that the white, refined variety that we’re used to didn’t come along until the close of the 19th century. Use brown sugar instead. Its slightly richer flavor profile complements the rum much more nicely than does modern superfine sugar, but it’s a lot more difficult to mix into the water. If you’re having problems, just use Splenda. I won’t tell anyone.

And of course you’ll want to use the juice of a real lime, so keep that little plastic lime-shaped bottle in your fridge where it belongs.

Grab an old-fashioned glass and add a couple ounces of water. Mix in a teaspoon of sugar and half an ounce of lime juice, stir vigorously. Add two ounces of rum, stir vigorously. Make the sure the sugar dissolves; otherwise, your drink will be depressingly tart. And although I can’t imagine that 18th century sailors had much access to ice, you’ll likely find this more refreshing on the rocks.

These instructions are all approximate, of course. In the nascent days of the drink, the sailors were likely adjusting the ingredients (sans rum) to taste, and so should you.

My more cocktail-savvy readers are surely remarking that this sounds an awful lot like a rum sour. And maybe it is, but it’s a rum sour with an anchor tattooed on one arm and a hula girl on the other. Make one or two for yourself and you’ll understand. It’s the closest you’ll ever come to having the ocean in a glass short of a dram of seawater.

Drink up, and you’ll be one step closer to understanding what it was like to see the world from the prow of a rickety old schooner, what it was like to be an oceangoing transient who saw whole lunar cycles pass without a glimpse of land, what it was like to have one’s memory of home and family recede from the mind’s eye like an already forgotten harbor town.

I sometimes wonder if that’s what it was like for my grandfather, who, by my age, had seen more of the world than most of us will in our entire lives. I’ll never know, at any rate, so I’ll stick to my grog. I’m feeling a bit seasick anyway.