So here's a predicament I know we've all been in.
You're getting ready to host a Victorian style soiree for all of your closest friends
and it turns out all you have is beer sugar and eggs.
What do you do? Well you make beer punch of course and that's what we're making today.
We'll also talk about the infamous and quite literal London beer flood of 1814,
this time on Drinking History.
So there aren't that many beer cocktails around today. There are a few but not that many,
and frankly I think that's probably for the best but in his 1896 book "Fancy Drinks
and "Fancy Drinks and Popular Beverages" by the Only William.
The Only William gives us a recipe for beer punch.
"Boil one quart of beer with one-fourth of a pound of lump-sugar, and a stick of cinnamon;
beat 4 eggs into foam and mix it with a wine glass of old Jamaica rum. Take the
beer from the fire and add it to the mixture while continually stirring it. Serve in punch glasses."
Sounds kind of weird but one of the very first episodes of Tasting History was
a buttered beer from the 16th century which had butter and eggs in it so
maybe this is like a descendant.
Anyway for this recipe what you'll need is: one quart or one liter of beer.
Now the beer is really up to you he's very specific in other recipes what beer to use.
He's not in this one so I figure pretty much
anything is going to be fine I'd probably use something like a darker ale
or I'm using a dark porter because that ties into our history today.
A heaping half cup or about 115 grams of sugar. Now I'm using an unrefined raw sugar.
You can also use regular sugar. It calls for lump sugar which is less
sweet than a regular granulated sugar so I think that this is probably the way to go.
One cinnamon stick. Four eggs, I've already cracked mine,
and two ounces of rum. Now he calls for an old Jamaica rum
which was a darker rum like this this one is actually from Hawaii but it'll work for this.
I wouldn't use- well no flavored rums and probably not a white rum for this either.
So first go ahead and pour your beer into a pot or a saucepan. Then we're going to mix in the sugar
using an adorable little Pikachu spatula and we'll also kind of mix it in.
It's probably not going to dissolve
very well at the beginning but once it gets once it gets heated up it will
throw in your cinnamon stick should add some good flavor and then start heating it.
We're going to bring it up to a simmer, calls for a boil but let's go a light boil, like a simmer.
While that heats up go ahead and whisk your eggs. You want to get them nice and foamy,
they're not going to get too big like if they were just egg whites
but they should get nice and foamy it's just going to take you a while.
It'll take a few minutes for them to get foamy but the beer is going to take even longer to
start to simmer so while I wait for that let me tell you about this really crazy day in 1814.
Our story begins as so many do in foggy old London Town on the corner of Tottenham Court
Road and Oxford Street in an area then known as Saint Giles Rookery and frankly it was
not a very nice place. And it hadn't been since the 12th century when Queen Matilda
opened Saint Giles hospital there and it was used as a leper colony for centuries.
By the 15th century they had added gallows for executions which oddly enough did not
help real estate prices and then in 1606 as if they needed to make it official
Parliament condemned the area as "deep foul and dangerous"
and in 1665 the Great Plague of London broke out in that neighborhood.
Really just that you just couldn't catch a break though there were times when it was a bit of a
destination spot seeing as it was on the route from Newgate prison to the gallows at Tyburn
and the condemned were often allowed to pop in one last time to an inn called The Angel. The
clergy at the church next door would pay for them to have one last drink called a Saint Giles Bowl.
This was a neighborhood whose inhabitants were described by the writer Henry Mayhew
as "a noisy and riotous lot, fond of street brawls and fat ragged and saucy."
Which coincidentally is the name of my exotic dance trio.
Let's welcome to the stage Fat, Ragged, and Saucy!
So naturally this was the neighborhood that Henry Meux decided to invest in in
1809 when he bought the Horseshoe Brewery
and based on the neighborhood's track record
he could not have been that surprised at what happened just a few years later.
See Meux had built a wooden vat capable of holding 18,000 barrels of porter,
and it was held together by several massive 700 pound iron bands.
Well around 4:30 in the afternoon on October 17, 1814 the storehouse clerk George Crick
saw that one of the bands was slipping and when he went to his supervisor to
tell him about it the supervisor just said 'Yeah that that happens sometimes.
Go write a letter to one of the partners. They'll handle
it when they have the time and money.' Unfortunately an hour later standing
only 30 feet away from the vat probably with that little letter in his hand the vat burst.
A torrent of porter ripped through the facility knocking over other vats
releasing an estimated 320 thousand gallons of beer. The wave of which knocked down the
25-foot wall at the back of the brewery sending a 15-foot wave of beer into the streets of London.
And the first casualty was when that wall fell on fourteen-year-old Eleanor Cooper
as she was washing pots outside of the Tavistock Arms where she worked.
The wave moved on to destroy several houses in one of which Hannah Banfield, a four-year-old,
and her mother were having tea and swept Hannah into the street killing her almost instantly.
In another house people were holding an Irish wake for a two-year-old boy who had just passed away
and the beer came in and killed all of the mourners.
As there were no drains in the street the cellars in the buildings surrounding the street filled up
with porter nearly drowning some and injuring many others and in total eight people died.
In the aftermath the morning post said that it was a "scene of desolation that presents a most
awful and terrific appearance equal to that which fire or earthquake may be supposed to occasion."
Now the press at the time made no mention of drunken riots or people going out into the streets
filling up their cups with beer but due to an anti-Irish sentiment in the city at the time,
and this was a very Irish neighborhood, those stories began to crop up in the following weeks.
But there's no reason to think that it actually happened because the fact that
it didn't appear in any of the papers, which weren't terribly pro-Irish either.
What also didn't happen was any kind of accountability for the brewery itself.
As an inquest reached the verdict that it had been an act of God
and the 8 people who had lost their lives had done so "casually, accidentally and by misfortune."
Instead of paying restitution to the victims Parliament decided that
Meux and company didn't have to pay excise tax on the beer that they had lost
saving the company from any kind of bankruptcy.
Nothing went to the families it's good to see that some things just never change.
One good thing that did come from the incident was that they phased
out the use of those big wooden vats replacing them mostly with concrete vats.
Now oddly enough this is not the only alcohol flood in history.
There are several others that I won't be talking about today but
we'll definitely be making appearances in future Drinking History videos.
As for our beer punch this is starting to simmer so I'm going to finish up the eggs so we can try this out.
Now once your eggs are nice and frothy go ahead and add two ounces or about 60 milliliters of that rum,
and then beat that in.
Now I could probably do this all in this little bowl but he says to
serve it in punch glasses so I'm going to mix it in this punch bowl, very carefully.
Take this out.
So as you can see the eggs nice and frothy
and very slowly stirring the entire time you're going to add the beer
to the eggs, stirring the entire time very, very slowly. You don't want scrambled eggs.
Just a little bit at a time. If you pour it all in there at once you're going to end up with
little pieces of scrambled egg in your punch and nobody wants that.
A lot of people who made the buttered beere, that's what they ended up with and it's probably because I wasn't terribly
specific in those early days with how slowly you had to do it. I can't remember honestly but go slow.
And there we are, that's our beer punch let's give it a taste.
As I said he says to serve it in a punch glass you could use it and put it in like a mug or anything
just make sure that it since it's hot it's something with a handle.
It's so frothy which I like.
So I have to say it's August when I'm recording this, the end of August, and it's like 90 degrees out.
Not sure why I chose something- hot beer to drink but I did so here we go.
It's weird, it's good though.
It's like
there's a creaminess. It's not an egginess. There's a creaminess to it.
You can you can smell just a hint maybe of the egg
but it's more of the cinnamon you get more of that cinnamon. Though I think this would be really
good with even more spices in it. Add maybe some nutmeg or cardamom, maybe a little bit of clove
or just more cinnamon. Also I think a big thing with this is what kind of beer you
end up using because that's of course the dominant flavor, that's the main ingredient so
using something like this works. A porter I think, like a chocolate stout or a vanilla flavored
darker beer would be really, really nice. I'd probably steer away from something on the lighter side,
like don't use a lager or pilsner or anything like that but anyway that's our beer punch
and it's perfect for the holidays which are kind of coming up. So maybe hold off on making
this one for a couple months but eventually I think it's worth it.
So make sure to follow me on Instagram @tastinghistorywitmaxmiller and I will see you next time on Drinking History.
Now I need Christmas carols... it's August.