Selects: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Gin

Hey guys, it's me Josh, and for this week's select, I've chosen our December twenty nineteen episode on Gin. I don't take much of a tipple anymore, but I still find that I appreciate Gin, and this episode does justice to it in my opinion. It has history, distillation, laws, junipers, everything you can imagine to make a well rounded, floral forward Stuff you Should Know episode. I hope you enjoy it very much.

Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles w Chuck Brian, there's Jerry over there, and we are wasted waste it on excitement about talking about Gin.

Waste it on excitement?

Uh huh.

I like that.

That's a great motto. Yeah, and not a not the worst band name, but not the best.

It's not the best at all.

Like an album title, more like, oh yeah, it's.

A good album title. Maybe it's Jungle x Ray's second album wasted on excitement?

Yeah, or Bathtub Gin wasted on excitement.

Bathtub Jin's of fish song.

Oh it is it's funny.

I was I was walking in the neighborhood yesterday and I saw a car that was clearly like the child home for Thanksgiving. It was like this kind of beat up jeep from Florida, and it had a fish sticker and a grateful dead sticker and like one other thing college.

And this really nice thing.

And I was like, oh, man, I bet I wonder how much weed is hidden in that thing.

That's funny.

Welcome home, son. What's that smell?

Right?

Oh? Were you being the sun where we play acting?

No, it just it was that that sip of coffee. It's took one down the wrong pipe.

The wrong pipe, man, What is up with those faulty flaps?

I don't know, man, Probably too much gin.

I love Gin, and I love reading about it and researching it, and I might have a martini tonight as a result.

I don't think there's any way you could not have a martini after reading about Gin for hours and hours and hours.

Yeah, because Gin and Tonic season is over for me, sadly. Oh yeah, and I'm into wine season. But wine season and martini season there's some comorbidity there.

Martini seasons year round.

Not for me.

I mean, I don't drink that many martinis. It's a mood thing or if I'm with Hodgmen, we pound them.

Sure you can't not drink martinis when Hodgman's around.

Yeah, of course, yeah, no comment, okay, but correct.

So we're talking Gin because Gin is great. We love Gin, and it turns out Jin's got a pretty pretty interesting history to it.

I think so too.

And we did an episode not too long ago on a short stuff actually on the difference between bourbon and whiskey.

Right, has that been out yet, even with the way our schedule works.

Oh wait, it's coming out tomorrow. Nok about it?

Yeah, yeah, tomorrow is in today, or tomorrow is in after this is released.

Tomorrow is in the people who are listening to this the day it comes out tomorrow, to them, that very select group of humans as far as the dimension of time goes.

That's right.

So tomorrow, everybody, you'll hear short stuff about the difference between whiskey and bourbon. And one of the things that really stands out is there are a lot of laws surrounding whiskey, especially in the United States. What makes whiskey whiskey, what you can call a specific kind of whiskey, what you can put on the label of some kinds of whiskey, lots and lots of laws exists.

A lot of the country. Don't forget that one.

The spirit of America, the native spirit of America. That's what it was, Okay, Gin, It's quite the opposite. Basically, as long as you have a neutral, grained spirit that is distilled a I think eighty proof or higher, you can add whatever flavor you want to it, and that you can call it gin, okay, which is not whatever you're if you buy that thing that I just described, Although it's technically legally gin, it's not really gin. A lot of people call it flavored vodkas. But for gin,

Yeah, that used to be very much the case now, and we've talked a little bit about this on other episodes. Just tangentially, I think is that there are many artists and gin makers now that are doing all kinds of crazy gins, and some many issueing the juniper altogether, that beautiful little evergreen shrub and those little cones that have

I would like to try that. I've had like smoked Manhattans and smoked whiskey drinks, oh yeah, wood smoked kine.

And did they do the same thing.

Yeah, same process. But I've never ever heard of a smoked gin and tonic. So hats off to Ben if he did invent that.

Yeah, it was good.

And I also want to know shouted it out before. But I get this local tonic, now, that's delicious. That is the real deal, you know, the chinchona bark. And it's very different than if you're used to traditional like schweps.

Tonic. Doesn't taste anything like that.

No, it's you cut it with soda water and it's a very very lovely taste.

Oh yeah, like good tonic water is just amazingly good.

Yeah, and that's you know, if you're talking about like fever tree will buzz market. Sure that is still a little more of a traditional tonic. This stuff is brown, right and syrupy, and then you mix it with the soda and it becomes sort of a real version of that stuff.

So it's probably very similar to stuff they're drinking in India in the nineteenth century, I think. So, so we'll get all we'll get to all that.

Let's go back to gin, all right, So you start off if you want to make gin, and I have a gin making kit from last Christmas I still haven't used. And this has inspired me to go home today and actually make my own gin.

And then pound it.

I'll bring some in. We can all take a.

Sip, all right, just a sip. But you start with that base spirit ethyl alcohol that's ninety six percent.

ABV that you can power a car on.

Yeah, and then you read distill gin, and that is one of the keys here, a real real gin. You redistill that spirit with whatever botanicals you end up choosing.

Right, But typically, the main botanical that's used in the main flavor profile of gin, aside from alcohol that you can power your car on is that juniper berry. That's that tradition juniper and a piny evergreeny. Some people call it like drinking a Christmas tree. What makes gin gin? Once you've had a sip of gin, you will never mistake it for anything else for the rest of your life.

That's right. And that base spirit it can.

Be also, and you should also wait until you're twenty one to have that sure.

So of course that base spirit can be wheat, it can be a rye, can be corn, it can be barley, but it can be really anything. You can make potato gin or apple gin. I saw this company in Ireland. There was an article on Vice by Elizabeth Rousche. Ireland's best gin is made out of milk.

Yeah, I saw that too, Bertha's Gin.

They make it and this is produced fully in Ireland, which is a great thing because it's a byproduct of cheese making that way sweet way they use that to make gin. It's crazy.

Yeah, They ferment the way and then use that they distill that fermented beer basically, and then you distill that further in the process of the presence of botanicals, and then you have gin. It's just this multi step process.

Yeah, and apparently that fermented way is what makes Bailey's as well, which I didn't.

Know Bailey's Irish whiskey.

Yeah, fermented way cool.

I did not know that either.

In this I gotta try this stuff though. It's called Bertha's Revenge.

For Bailey's Irish Cream.

I'm sorry, Yeah, what'd you say Irish whiskey?

Yeah, no, no, it's the it's the coffee additive.

That's that Connor McGregor stuff for grandma birth is revenge.

I looks delicious and it is fully made in Ireland.

And Bertha apparently is a cow they heard after.

Yeah, she died at like age forty nine after giving birth to thirty something calves over her life. Yeah, Yeah, she was a very prolific milk.

Cow in many ways.

Yeah, but they they're not the only game in talent making way based gin. There are others as well, but supposedly again it's they say that there's something in the way that even once it's distilled into its spirit, some there's some mouthfield to it or some flavor profile. A lot of people argue that that's just not the case, that no matter what you make it from, you're going to arrive at basically the same base neutral spirit. Okay, okay, we'll find out. I'll just let me have some. I'll try it.

Bombay sapphire, which we'll learn later on perhaps kickstarted the resurgence of gin.

Yeah.

Did you know that in the United States?

No, But it makes it a little bit of sense now that I see the dates in the timelines of when it came over. But they very proudly display their ten different botanicals on the bottle licorice of course, kubeb berries, angelica, root almonds, coriander, cassia, bark iris, root lemon, peel, and grains of paradise. Very nice, And I like a bombasedapphire martini.

I'll get a Hendrix martini when I'm out and about, but if I'm like making it myself, I used to like the more boring, straightforward London dried gins, right, the traditional ones for the martini. And then I realized, like, no, man, you want to go the exact opposite of that. You want like the most botanical gin you can find for a gin martini, because I mean it's basically gin with a little bit of vermouth, right, so you want to taste your gin. So I've kind of gravitated toward stuff

Is that the Saint George that tastes like feet.

Yeah, so no, that is their aged like Raye Posato gin.

Yeah that I didn't love that where.

They made it like it was like kind of a mescal or age tequila style gin where it was gin, but it had like some quality of like really like long aged tequila. I think you weren't prepared for it. I wonder if you'd like it now, knowing like what it was going into it.

Maybe.

I mean, I'm always hip to try something, but I'd love a good, high quality London dry gin.

That's my jam.

Sure, I mean, I'm with you. I just like the more botanical ones these days than I used to, the Britannical, the puritanical ones, the ones that don't have any alcohol at all.

So I think we should quickly talk about before we take our first break, about just how you distill it, because there's a couple of ways, and then we'll take our break. But the first way is steeping, and that is, you know, you steep tea, and it's the same thing. Basically, you have your base spirit heating up and its simmers, and then you have those botanicals right in there and the oils are releasing and it's just infusing through the

I did not know that. Does she like carry a Tommy gun around and wear it flooraling for coat?

No, she's got a copper still.

She goes to Athens, Georgia once a week to harvest herbs and then distills herbs.

For Oh, that's right, I did know that.

Yeah, it's very cool.

That is super cool.

It's a lot of fun to see her out there doing that stuff.

Yeah, that's neat.

And then the other way is vapor infusion, and that is what Bombay sapphire does, and that is when you have the botanicals in a basket hanging above the boiling spirit and that vapor rises and it does it more through like that steam, I guess right.

So, or you can combine the two, which is what another kind of saint, George jin Terroar does where they use the steeping method for most of the botanicals and then they use the vapor method for I think like Douglas fir and bay Laurel leaves. So it's it's got like kind of the tea of botanicals brewing and then it's just vaporizing through those other those last two so cool, it is pretty cool.

Actually, all right, now we'll take a break, and we'll come back and talk a little bit about the types of gin, which also entails some history right after this.

Okay, we've taken our break, we had our little half sandwiches, were ready to talk about you.

So I can't believe you still cut the crust off. That's very interesting for a garner.

Well, I just think it's a little I always has like a crusty taste to it. Then I'm not fond.

I've always maintained if they didn't call it crust, kids might eat it, do you think. Yeah, I think if you said, you know, the do you want the magic ring left on your bread? The kids would probably have a whole different view. But if you say do you want the crust?

I disagree. I think that magic ring would be a gross term. Now you look at that magic ringy, old guy, he keeps staring at us.

We'll just insert Josh Clark's magic word of choice, magic ringy. Yeah, I mean it doesn't even have to use the word magic. But what would you call crust? That sounds better to a kid.

I'm saying, no matter what you called it, I think it would become synonymous with something gross.

I know, but I'm asking you to yes, and let's see.

Yes and is not my strong suit. I failed out of improv.

Yours is more. No butt?

Right, No, there's no butt. It's no The rainbow ring. Okay, great, the rainbow circle.

I love it.

I don't like it. I'll go back and edit this party.

All right. So let's talk about gin.

We already talked about the fact that it has to be if you asked me, really distilled with these botanicals to be real gin. Otherwise flavored vodka that name is can come up and that's a dirty word, yes, But distilled.

London dry gin.

Some of the big big cats Beefeeder and Gordon's and Tanker Ray are some of those those big daddy London dryes. Like I said, I'm a plymouth guy. I like yeah, but these are not sweet. That's why they're called dry gins, right.

Sweet gins are have a long history and they actually pre date gin for by many, many years. But the London dry gin is what most people think of when they think of gin, and a London dry gin is actually a subcategory of a larger category, which is distilled gin.

That's right, right, Huh?

Is that basically what you just said? Yeah, I mean I was listening and following it, but it just seemed off.

Oh interesting, Well, I'm glad you cleared that up.

I'm sorry.

That's all right.

Then we get to Old Tom gin and this has an interesting history of etymology. And I got this from Mark Vierthaler at talesothococktail dot com. Apparently the name Old Tom comes from these plaques that hung outside of pubs that looked like there was like the shape of an old tomcat's head.

And get this, and this is amazing.

Apparently in London, if you had this sign hanging up in the window, underneath the cat's paw was a slot and a lead pipe and attached to a funnel, and you could go down the street in England and drop a coin in the slot and get a shot of gin in your mouth.

Yeah, from under the cat's paw.

Amazing.

I saw that too. I saw that it originated Chuck with this guy named Captain Dudley Bradstreet. And the whole reason he started doing this was because there was a law that said that the informant had to know the name of the person who was selling the illegal gin for the cops to have probable cause to raid a place.

Wow.

But yeah, it was under the paw of an old like like a statue or sign or something of an old paw or an old Tom Kat.

I love it too, Old Tom went away. It was very much sweeter.

That was when they were using sugar and a lot of botanicals because the base spirit wasn't that great taste wise, so they loaded it up with sugar and this other stuff, and prohibition basically killed Old Tom gin for a long time. By the time people started, you know, prohibition was over. They didn't really have a taste for it anymore. And it has made a comeback in recent years, though a bit of a comeback.

You if you are interested in trying you should start with ransoms old Tom gin. Yeah, it's just beautiful. Is it good?

What about Navy strength gin?

I love that stuff. Have you ever had that?

Nah? I don't know if I have or not.

Actually, it will make you blind. Really, your hangover is noticeably worse the next day for the same amount of booze. It's just what's a brand and stronger stuff? I think Anchor. I believe Anchor makes a Navy strength gin.

That would make sense.

I'm almost positive that's who's I've had. But it's it's just like this higher proof. I think, like gin can be as low as like thirty seven and a half percent, and Navy's strength is at least fifty percent, okay, And there's just a noticeable difference in it. And the taste is it's you know, it's not terribly much different. It's just the potency of it.

But it's gotcha.

It got its name from a pretty great little legend from what I understand.

Yeah, that's in the Navy. They loved them some gin in the Navy, and they actually got gin rations, and so sailors would test it out to see if it was, you know, up to snuff or if it was watered down and they would drizzle it over a little pinch of gunpowder and then light it and if it lit, then it was navy strength.

Yeah.

I love it.

And it's not like a Lee classification or anything, is it. It's just kind of like a.

Well it says it says navy strength gen is at least fifty seven point one percent. So at least I don't know if there's a law in the EU or if that's just a sort of a standard.

But that's that's where the name came from at least.

Yeah.

Yeah, and it's potent stuff.

What about Geneva, So that is.

Basically like the predecessor of gin, right, I mean this Dutch drink that was first drunk for people to get drunk off of.

Yeah, that's made more out of a malt wine. I think fifteen to fifty percent malt wine, and so it you know, it can kind of it's sort of like the maltiness of a whiskey, but the botanicals of a gin.

I think I've always heard that Old Tom and Geneva are a lot alike. Oh really, yeah, they bear a resemblance. Interesting, but so Geneva is like a pretty good place to start as far as this history of gin goes, because it was, like I was saying, like a proto gin, like one of the first I guess, the direct predecessor

The word Genever, g e n e v e r is actually Dutch for juniper, and it is it does come hail from Holland, and apparently in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries these and this was when people were using herbs as medicine. They you know, obviously still do that today, that's what Emily's doing. But apothecaries there were experimenting with all kinds of curative herbs and medical tonics and stuff

It was like, yeah, the first spirit out of I believe, out of Europe for that people drank. I mean they had beer and wine and everything before, but Geneva was like this, like the first hard blicker. I think that

That's right, And about close to one hundred years later, the end of the Anglo Dutch War meant you could actually import it legally by the barrel, and they were called strong water shops was what the early liquor stores in London were called.

I love that. I'm sure there are places in America where they have ganged that title.

Oh yeah, and they also wear arm guards probably, so I'm so glad you taught me that word because I've always just called it, you know, those like our old timey arm bands, and it never had quite the punch.

Yeah, arm guards.

The first Gin distillery in Britain in Plymouth.

Right, Okay, I had a lot of trouble figuring this one out. I saw that in eighteen forty Booths was the first really gin distiller Okay, but and that the Plymouth one was Oh wait, maybe that was like the seventeen hundreds. I'm not sure there was a big rush to establishing gin distilleries in this period that we're talking about.

All right, well, I don't have a date for the Plymouth one.

Actually, let me look it up while you're talking.

All right, well, let's flash forward then to the gen craze, because gin, depending on who you're asking, was the the crack of the sixteen hundreds in England. William of Orange, Protestant King of the Netherlands, went to assume the throne of Great Britain during the Glorious Revolution, and they were drinking that Geneva and they loved it as the royalty. But the working class could not afford this stuff, so they started making their own rot gut like bathtub gin.

Oh okay, but I.

Think they were mixing up botanicals and stuff too. But at any rate, this rot gut gin in the early seventeen hundreds, and by the mid seventeen hundreds that was a full on gin in the UK.

Yeah, it was called the Gin craze, and like especially if you read like kind of the tracks railing against it at the time, and newspaper editorials and stories about just the depravity that was going on because of gin, Like the whole country was just totally off its rocker on gin, and not even like good gin or even Geneva. This bathtub rockcut stuff that you were talking about, where they would add things like turpentine to give it a

Yeah, and for sure there was a gin problem.

Now historians look back a little bit and they're like, you know what, these articles were written, and these op eds were written by the upper class in Britain, and they had basically an obsession with the English character being degraded and dragged through the mud by these Gin drunks. So take it with a grain of salt. There for sure was a gin problem. But they're basically like, is

I saw that there were at least two who documented cases of spontaneous human combustion really from drinking this gin. Wow, isn't that crazy?

Yeah, it's some hardcore chin geez. There were eight different gen Acts from Parliament over about a twenty two year period. Basically, I mean they said different things, but one of the big ones was, hey, you can't put these you can't put sulfuric acid in this stuff and sell it anymore.

Right, And little by little, these incremental laws over these eight acts, like made it really expensive to have a license to sell gin, really expensive to import neutral spirits, and just basically made it so that unless you owned a large distillery and an established like tavern, you could not legally engage in selling or producing gin.

And generally, yeah, I think that's what it said in the act.

Genery, yes, that'll shout not pat engenery of any kind.

Right, okay, So especially if your name is my cocaine.

Oh you finally did it?

Did I do it? If I did it was accidental, no you didn't, okay. So but over the course of these acts that left just like these handful of huge distilleries like Booths Plymouth, Plymouth, by the way, was the first. It was in the late eighteenth century, oh nice, and a couple others. I think boodles might have been around by then, but all the small distilleries went away just

All Right, well let's take another little break here and we'll talk more about jin right after this.

All right, So.

Jin is going strong in the seventeen hundreds, some might say it's a problem. Flash forward to the eighteen hundreds, okay, eighteen thirty, and the invention of the continuous still came about.

That's pretty big.

If you come over to my house, you see Emily down there. She doesn't have it.

She has a traditional copper pot still, which means that you can do one thing at a time. Basically, you boil your mash and the alcohol boil that off. You collect that distilled spirit in the end, but then you got to start all over again. The continuous still was a very and the other bad part about that is is your ABV is going to be pretty low if you're doing the single pot.

That's your alcohol by volume. That's right, because the longer it was, say distilled, the pure and more alcoholic, the ultimate spirit you captured would be right, that's right.

Okay, So if you have a continuous still, which was what was invented in eighteen thirty, that means you can just keep going, man, You just keep throwing that mash in there, and you keep that process going, and you get more and more pure as you go, and you're going to get that beautiful clear grain alcohol around ninety six percent in the end. And that really really changed the game.

Yeah, because so like these continuous stills are coffee stills after the man who invented them. It's like the spirit rises through increasingly high up stages and it's reheated and heated and heated, and so it becomes pure and pure the higher up it goes, and then eventually it gets tapped off and then you have that high test alcohol.

Yeah, and London dry gen again with the dry that means it's not a sugary. Apparently Victorians in the upper class at one point decided to basically lower their sugar intake. I don't know if that was just a major health kick going on.

It sounds like John Harvey Kellogg's work here.

Oh maybe so.

But that's when they started getting rid of the sugar and that's why you get this dryer version which became the London dry gin, and.

The rest is history.

They started producing some really high quality gens in England at the time.

Yeah, they did. I think that's when the Booths and Boodles and all those guys started beef feeder and that was great. That was fine for a while. Like you said, the Navy was getting their rations and then going out to see with their gin and testing it on gunpowder and all that. But one of the things that you'll look at, especially with the London dried gin, is while there's no sugar, there's like a really interesting combination of those botanicals and a botanical. We didn't really say, but

Yeah.

I mean, I think even the Bombay Sapphire has each country listed behind the botanical and it's you know, they're all from ten different places or eleven different places.

Yeah, pretty cool, It is pretty cool.

So the seafaring of the Brits, British sea power have you ever heard of that band?

Yeah, we're good.

I used to love those guys.

They were like early two thousands.

Right, yeah, that was a big La band for me.

Oh okay, I didn't know where they were from.

No, no, no, when I lived in La.

Oh.

I see they're British.

I always think so. They were from like the era of like of Montreal and Someone Still Loves You, Boris Yeltsin and all those kind of indie bands at the same time.

Right, yeah, yeah, I think so love those guys.

British Power, But that had a lot to do with Gin because the Brits in their navy were very strong and they sailed a lot and traveled all over the world obviously because they had certain interests like conquering your country and making it their own.

And getting their hands on your botanicals.

That's right, and also getting there until like let's say the tropics and saying like, wow, I've never been here before. What are these things that we can eat and drink? And what is this disease? Malaria? I don't want to get that. And so they looked at the you know, the people from there obviously to get their clue on like.

They're fine, how can we be like them?

And the natives of South America chewed on that chinchona tree and that bark to combat malaria, and chinchona is pretty wondrous. That bark has a natural chemical and that is the quinine that you hear. You know, if you look at a tonic bottle, it contains quinine and it calms your you know, it.

Makes you feel better if you have malaria.

But it also disrupts the metabolism of the parasite and kills it. So it's a medicament as well as a help you feel better type thing.

Oh allah, what medicament? I'm in a predicament because my heart's all the flooded. Uh, something just happened to me.

But these doctors were like, hey, yeah, you British soldier, you should. They started prescribing this stuff, this tinchona bark and colonists in India and South America, and they were eating a ton of it, seven hundred tons actually in the eighteen forties, seven hundred tons of chinchona bark a year were being eaten by British soldiers and settlers yep.

And so they figured out how to I guess distill quinine, probably using a coffee still and started putting it into tonic like making this tonic water. But basically, I'm sure what you're buying is just distilled quinine from the chincono bark. It's gotta be right, I mean, that's the.

Kind of look at the other stuff in there, and maybe I'll follow up with some ingredients.

Okay, do and bring me something to please.

Okay.

But so with quinine like you were, you were basically taking a dose of quinine in a shot of tonic water. And so, because everybody was sailing around the world on British ships with gin in one hand and tonic water in the other hand, they eventually put the two together and came up with the gin and tonic. Throw a lemon or a lime slice in there to combat scurvy, and you have a complete drink.

That's amazing.

It is.

And apparently a lot of these gin cocktails were born out of the nasty taste of the original alcohol.

So they you know, we were talking about that rotgut gin. What do you do.

You're gonna mix it with a lot of stuff to try and make it more drinkable. That is not the martini, however, this is a pretty neat story. And the eighteen seventies and eighties is when Martini's were born. And this is from a gentleman named Richard Barnett. And this makes so much sense. It's very cool, he said. The Martini is

Yep.

And that glass, which, by the way, one of my more annoyances in life. The biggest annoyances is when you get a Martini these days it's a weird glass. Yeah, just get a Martini glass.

But do you like the big honkin nineties Karen from Will and Grace style Martini glasses? Like the classic sixties you know, Madman Martini glass? Well, okay, more compact version.

I like them both.

I'll take a I'll take either one, but just give me that conical glass. Don't give me like a tulip glass.

I've not seen a Martini in a tulip class.

I have.

There are places around town that serve them in these little tulo classes.

And just do it right, Yeah, do it right. I mean it's literally called a martini glass. It's the glass meant for it.

Yeah, it's just like serving a margarita in a well, you can serve a margarita and a lot of different things.

I guess.

Sure. You can just cut your hands and drink margarita out of there, and people have, including me.

That's true.

You can. You can get the margarita ingredients poured down your throat. You don't even need to use your hands, that's true. It's Senor Frogs.

The nineteen twenties is when the gin craze kind of was rekickstarted again because of prohibition, and they even went back to putting like disgusting ingredients in there.

Yeah, you mean, like not the gin craze, Like, oh, everybody likes chin, like the gin craze, Like everybody's going bonkers because of the terrible gin they're drinking.

Right, well, and everyone's drinking gin because it was it wasn't just straight up ethyl alcohol from ain or like, hey, at least let's throw some quote unquote ingredients in here.

Oh yeah, turpentine again. Yeah, they use the same stuff that they used in the original gin craze, sulfuric acid in turpentine. I know, gross, it's a classic recipe. Yeah, gross, dude.

What else was made? The Manhattan the gin Fizz, the gimlet. Yep, these are all born out of that sort of nineteen thirties post prohibition cocktail movement.

Yeah. We talked a lot about the origin of some of those drinks in that How Bars Work Live episode of Farm. Yeah, correctly, those are good for shows. But it's funny to think, like some of our favorite cocktails were built to combat the tastes of nasty gin. Yeah, which is why people are like, oh, yeah, don't don't use the good stuff to mix, Like the whole reason for mixing is to cover up the nasty stuff. Yeah, just drink the good stuff straight, although I cannot imagine

Well, let me tell you the story of my first gin experience in Athens and College. And Dave Bruce put this article together for us, and he very astutely points out that if you're a child of the seventies and eighties, he probably didn't drink like a gin and tonic early on, Like this is something you may have picked up on later and that was the case for me. It was late college and there was a fellow waiter at Mexicali Grill that was there for just a brief period named Don.

Oh my god, just took it too.

Far and we're drinking it right out of the bottle and wading out into the river and not being very safe. Quite frankly, it doesn't tell, but I'll always remember Don for that. He introduced me to gin, and he introduced me unsuccessfully to the Dave Matthews band.

It didn't stick.

I don't know why those always stick out to me.

But Don was the first guy who's like, man, this band was playing across the street and like it's crazy as kind of jazzy, and they're multiracial, and it's like you never heard anything like it.

And that was Dave Matthew's band.

Yeah, he was right about that.

He was actually correct about two things. It's jazzy and multiracial.

Man Seagrum's right out of the handle.

Oh boy, it was bad, but I remember very distinctly like tasting that piny gin and thinking like, ooh, this isn't a good thing to drink like this.

No, it took me many years to finally come around to gin and be like, Okay, I liked vodka Martini's for that was one of my first drinks ever, was vode Camartini's.

When you were thirteen.

Yeah, pretty much in my treehouse was smoking cigarettes and drenching vlog of Martinis the summer before ninth grade. But like so, I would drink vod Mamartinez. It wasn't like I just couldn't take the taste of like straight up alcohol. But for some reason I did not like gin. And then I finally gave it a chance. I was like, actually, this is way better than vodka. I never been a vodka guy, unless you're talking about that delightful birthday cake flavored vodka.

Oh is that a thing?

Yeah? Yeah, hey, we don't judge, man, if that's what you know.

Oh, sure, of course Jen is making a big comeback now, though, like we said, it may have started in the late nineties when Bombay Sapphire first came to the US. Apparently it was a pretty big hit. Then Hendrix came along in the US in two thousand and three.

Yeah, I love that. Hendrix were saying as many brands as possible, so.

In the hopes that they'll send us pretty stuff.

We get a lot of whiskey. We never get gin.

Yeah. No, no, every once in a while we've gotten gin, but not ever. No, not really.

But the genisance is on.

Still nice. Did you just coin that I did? That was really good? Thanks Genissance and medicant medicament. Oh, even better.

That's a real word though. I didn't make that up, I know.

But you just pull it out of the ether.

It's great, fantastic.

No, I thought you were still going and I'd interrupted you, and you're gonna pick up again. You'd think after like twelve years of doing this, we would have had that figured out by now.

Oh, I got nothing else.

I don't have anything else either except the gin is great. It is great if.

You're of legal age, ye, drink responsibly, yep. Don't drive certainly, Nope. Make it really easy on you to not drive these days, yeah, man, advantage of.

It, ride hailing apps, you have zero excuse these things. Well, if you want to know more about Gin, well again, I guess if you're twenty one, give it a try, see what happens. But like Chuck said, drink responsibly. If you're not twenty one, you're gonna have to wait. Sorry. And since I said you're gonna have to wait, sorry, it's time for listener mail, all.

Right, So listener mail. This one is let me see here. Oh this is a hand type letter. Look at this thing. Nice, not an email. It's a printed email.

It's also not written in the cutout magazine letters either, so no thanks written.

So this is from Westwood Sutherland and he's the guy who sent us that beef turkey.

Oh yeah, thanks west Hey.

Guys, my name is Westwood Sutherland, currently a college sophomore and environmental engineering at University of Colorado, Boulder.

Sco buffs, He says, sure.

I'd like to say I'm your biggest fan, but I can't compete with my dad, who introduced me to your podcast. He's been listening for years and even acts on some of your information. After hearing your podcast about bees, the first one, not the beekeeping, he became a beekeeper.

Has reaped the rewards for years.

Now in increased production from our fruit trees as well as getting some honey. That's awesome, though he has to deal with the bear. He'd sent in that picture of the bear.

That's the local cop that hassles them all the time.

No, it's a bear go after his honey. And he named the bear Jerry. How great is that?

That's great? Give me so.

He also invested money into a stock I'm sorry, into any stock that.

Worked with Crisper.

Oh, smart guy.

And after hearing your gene editing podcast, and he is very happy with the results.

Wank, pink cool.

That's nice.

I didn't I should have.

Yeah, we didn't even take our own advice.

What's my problem? Anyway?

The reason I got into your podcast I started a beef jerkey company when I was fourteen.

I love that stuff, and.

I was selling enough that I spent lots of hours cutting, marinating, laying meat, and bagging jerky.

During those long hours, my dad.

Would help let me listen to stuff you should know, one after the other and made time go by very quickly. I just wanted to say thank you for your wisdom, comedy, insight, and making my days of jerky production a bit easier. I've included some samples of my jerky as a thank you that is so cool, and that is Westwood Sutherland and you can find his beef jerky at westside dot com.

I believe Westwood comes from a pretty amazing family.

And you know what, let me correct that too. He does come from an amazing family. It is West's side as in Westwood so w E s T s sid e Jerky dot com.

The extra S stands for.

Super small batch flank steak, beef jerkey, gluten free and one hundred percent not vegan. That's all right, that's what he says on his card.

Thanks Westwood, that was pretty cool, and hats off to your dad too for being so cool as well.

That's right.

We need to do administrative details soon because I came across the list. We've got stuff that was given to us a year ago at like shows in October. Oh wow, yeah, so we need to do it soon. Okay, totally, Okay. Well, if you want to get in touch with us, like Westwood did, you can go onto our social links start at stuffishould know dot com and you can also send us an email where you can send us a typewritten letter,

Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.