Stuff You Should Know - Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Gin

Episode Date: December 10, 2019

If there's one thing we've learned about Chuck over the years it's that he loves his gin. And he loves it even more now that understands it. Pour yourself a martini and cozy up to the gin-cast.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey friends, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lisa in Manitoba, who got the idea to Airbnb the Backyard Guest House over childhood home. Now the extra income helps pay her mortgage. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at Airbnb.ca slash host. On the podcast, Hey Dude the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back

into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude the 90s called on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Step You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry over there, and we are wasted. Wasted on excitement about talking about gin. Wasted on excitement. I like that. That's a great motto, and not the worst band name, but not the best. It's not the best at all. It's 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 Gin's a fish song. Oh it is. It's funny, 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 son? Were we play acting? No, it just, it was that, that sip of coffee it took went down the wrong, 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 season's year round. Yeah, not for me. I mean, I don't drink that many martinis. It's a mood thing. Or if I'm with Hodgman, we pound them. Sure. You can't not drink martinis when Hodgman's around. Yeah, of course. Yeah, no comment. But correct. So we're talking gin,

because gin is great. We love gin. And it turns out, gin'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 and I'll think about it. Yeah, yeah. Tomorrow is in today or tomorrow's 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 a 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 exist. The law of the country. Don't forget that one. The spirit of America. The native spirit of America. That's what it was. Okay. Okay. But with gin, it's quite the opposite. Basically, as long as you have a neutral grain spirit that is distilled at, I think, 80 proof or higher, you can add whatever flavor you want to it and then 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 vodka. But for gin, there's specific steps you want to follow. There's specific things you want to do. And more than anything, there's probably going to be a taste of juniper to it. 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 eschewing the juniper altogether, that beautiful little evergreen shrub and those little cones that have that piney, citrusy, peppery taste that we love so much. By the way, I should say, our buddy Ben Harrison. Yeah. Of the greatest generation in Friendly Fire. I've seen this online elsewhere,

but as far as he knows, he invented it. A smoked gin and tonic where he gets a little like a chef's torch and smokes juniper berries and then throws the glass on top of it upside down and lets it just smoke up and then turns it over and adds the ice and the rest of the mixins there. I would like to try that. I've had smoked Manhattan's and smoked whiskey drinks. Oh yeah? Wood smoked kind. 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, and I know I 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 Schwepp's 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, we'll buzz market. Sure. That is still a little more of a traditional tonic. This stuff is brown 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 were drinking in India in the 19th century. I think so. So 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 96% ABV. That you can power a car on. Yeah. And then you redestill gin, and that is one of the keys here, a real gin. You redestill 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 tastes like juniper. That kind of piney, evergreen-y, 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 you should also wait until you're 21 to have that sip. That base spirit can be wheat, it can be rye, it 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 Roosh. Ireland's best gin is made out of milk. Yeah, I saw that too. Birth is 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, but because you're starting out with such a ridiculously high-proof alcohol, like neutral alcohol, you can use basically an old shoe to make that neutral grain spirit. It's going to taste virtually the same as neutral grain spirit made from or neutral spirit made from barley or from whey or from potatoes or grapes. It's just the alcoholic essence of those things. Yeah, and apparently, that fermented whey is what makes Baileys as well, which I didn't know. Baileys? Irish whiskey? Yeah, it's fermented whey. Oh, that's cool. I did not know that either. And this, I got to try this

stuff though. It's called Bertha's Revenge. Or Baileys Irish Cream, I'm sorry. Yeah, would you say Irish whiskey? Yeah. No, no, it's the coffee additive. That's the Conor McGregor stuff for grandma. Bertha's Revenge looks delicious, and it is fully made in Ireland, and Bertha apparently is a cow that they named it after. Yeah, she died at like age 49 after giving Bertha 30-something calves over her life. Yeah, she was a very prolific milk cow. In many ways. Yeah, but they're not the only game in town making whey-based gin. There are others as well, but supposedly again, they say that there's something in the whey that even once it's distilled into its spirit, there's some mouth feel 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. 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 a little bit of sense now that I see the dates and the timelines of when it came over, but they very proudly display their 10 different botanicals on the bottle, licorice, juniper, of course, kubeb, berries, Angelica root, almonds, coriander, cassia bark, iris root, lemon peel, and grains of paradise. Very nice. And I like a Bombay sapphire martini. That's a good fallback for me, although I'm a Plymouth man

through and through when it comes to martinis. Yeah. And I like, generally I like the Hendricks and I like Tankeray, good old fashioned Tankeray for the Tonics. I'll get a Hendricks martini when I'm out and about, but if I'm like making it myself, I used to like the more boring straightforward London dry gins, right? This is 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 like the botanist or St. George's Botanivore. Those are two really,

really like, I guess, botanicals, the best way to put it, gins that are out there that are really, really tasty. Is that the St. George that tastes like feet? Yeah. So no, that is their aged like Ray Posado gin. Yeah, that didn't love that. Where they made it like, it was like kind of a mezcal or aged 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 botanical? The pure botanical 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 it simmers, and then you have those botanicals right in there, and the oils are releasing, and it's just infusing through the whole thing. Exactly. The other way, and you know, Emily has a still now. I'd love to maybe get in there and try some of this for real. I did not know that. Does she like carry a Tommy gun around and wear

a floor link for code? No, she's got a copper still. She goes to Athens, Georgia once a week to harvest herbs, and then distills herbs for her products. 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 St. George gin terroir 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 got like kind of the tea of botanicals brewing, and then it's just vaporizing through 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. Hey, everybody. When you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So, I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren and Nova Scotia, who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse, and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So, yeah, you might not

realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at Airbnb.ca slash host. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No,

it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, we've taken our break. We had our little half sandwiches, and we're ready to talk about you some more. I can't believe you still cut the crust off. That's very interesting for a grown man. Well, I just think it's a little, I always

has a crusty taste to it that I'm not fond of. I've always maintained if they didn't call it crust, kids might eat it. Do you think? Yeah, I think if you said, do you want the magic ring left on your bread? I think 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. Look at that magic ring-y old guy, he keeps staring at us. Well, just insert Josh Clark's magic word of choice. Magic ring-y. Yeah, I mean, Dunny, you 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

this. Fine. Let's see. Yes and is not my strong suit. I failed out of improv. Yours is more no but. No, there's no but. It's no. Here's why you're wrong. The rainbow ring. Okay, great. The rainbow circle. I love it. I don't like it. I'll go back and edit this part out. All right, so let's talk about gin. We already talked about the fact that it has to be, if you ask me, really distilled with these botanicals to be real gin. Right. Otherwise, flavored vodka, that name can come up and that's a dirty word. Yes. But distilled London dry gin, some of the big cats, beef eater and Gordon's and Tanqueray are some of those big daddy London drys. Like I said, I'm a Plymouth guy. I like Plymouth too. Yeah, but these are not sweet.

That's why they're called dry gins. Sweet gins have a long history and they actually predate 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. You got gin, which is basically flavored vodkas, which you could literally put any flavor into this neutral spirit and call it gin. Distilled gin means it went through that process like we described before the break and London dry is one of those. That's right. Right. 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 about that. That's

all right. Then we get to old Tom gin and this has an interesting history of its etymology and I got this from Mark Vierthaler at talesofthecocktail.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 touched 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. Interesting. So he holed himself up in this house on this one alley, Blue Anchor alley and started selling gin that way anonymously and because no one knew who was selling it, the cops could never raid the place. Wow. But yeah, it was under the paw of an old, like a statue or sign or something of an old Tomcat. I love it. 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 is, it has made a comeback in recent years though, a bit of a comeback. If you are interested in trying, you should start with Ransom's old Tom gin. It's just beautiful stuff. Is it good? What about Navy strength gin? I love that stuff. Have you ever had that? No, I don't know if I have or not actually. It will make you blind. Oh, really? Your hangover is noticeably worse the next day for the same amount of booze. It's just 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 just like this higher proof. I think like

gin can be as low as like 37.5% and Navy strength is at least 50%, 50%. Okay. And there's just a noticeable difference in it. And the taste is, you know, it's not terribly much different. It's just the potency of it, but it's got its name from a pretty great little legend from what I understand. Yeah, that's in the Navy. They love 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 gun powder and then light it. And if it lit, then it was Navy strength. I love it. And it's not like a legal classification or anything, is it? It's just kind of like a...

Well, it says Navy strength gin is at least 57.1%. So 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 where the name came from at least. 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 15 to 50% 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. Yeah, 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 of gin as we understand it today. But even further back than that, that essential component of gin, the juniper berry, has been used at least since the 70s. And not the 1970s. I mean, just the straight up 70s. There was a recipe from Pliny the Elder from 76 or 77 CE that used juniper berries, and you just were supposed to boil some white wine with juniper berries and then drink it. And it was a curative

and probably got you pretty drunk. And then I thought about this. This was like two years before he died at the eruption of Vesuvius. Oh, interesting. Isn't that weird kind of chilling? Well, we see he had a nice couple of years there at the end. He definitely did. The word Geneva, 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 13th and 14th centuries, these... And this was when people were using herbs as medicine. They 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 like that. And juniper was definitely in that category. But where Geneva took a right

turn was they said, wow, let's just get drunk. And like, it's not so much a cure all, but I mean, maybe it cures some things. But it was a drink that you drank to get drunk. 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 the first hard liquor, I think, that people really drank. And like you said, it was a malted wine, right? Yeah, that's the base. Which sounds like something you buy in a convenience store and drink out of a paper bag, like malted wine. But they would add like sugar to it. And it had juniper, which is why a lot

of people say this is the direct predecessor of gin. And it was how the UK was introduced to gin, was Geneva. Because I think in the 15th century, maybe something like that. 16th. The 16th century, Queen Elizabeth I sent some of her royal soldiers to the Netherlands to fight alongside the Dutch when they were fighting for independence. And the Dutch said, hey, man, take a couple shots of this Geneva and you'll fight anybody. You won't be scared at all. And the English liked that a lot. And so they brought Geneva back with them, or it tastes for it at least. And Geneva eventually got shortened to gin. That's where we got the word gin from.

That's right. And about close to 100 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 a gank that title. Oh yeah. And they also wear arm garters. Probably so. I'm so glad you taught me that word because I've always just called it, you know, those like full-timey armbands. And it never had quite the punch. Yeah, arm garters. The first gin distillery in Britain in Plymouth, right? Okay. I had a lot of trouble figuring this one out. I saw that in 1840, booths was the first

gin distiller. Okay. And that the Plymouth one was, wait, maybe that was like the 1700s. 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 gin craze because gin, depending on who you're asking, was the crack of the 1600s 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 royalty. But the working class could not afford this stuff. So they started making their own rotgut like bathtub

gin. Right. And apparently bathtub gin is, it is not brewed or not brewed. It's not distilled in a bathtub. It can be mixed with botanicals in a bathtub. But from what I saw, the main reason it's called bathtub gin is because to water it down and top it off with water, you couldn't fit it in these bottles in a sink. So you had to do that in a bathtub. Oh, okay. But I think they were mixing up botanicals and stuff too. But at any rate, this rotgut gin in the early 1700s and by the mid 1700s, that was a full on gin problem 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 rotgut stuff that you were talking about where they would add things like turpentine to give it a piney flavor because they didn't have juniper berries. They would add sulfuric acid to give it a hot aftertaste like it was supposed to have just really, really bad stuff. And it was making people crazy. And there were stories about mothers who, there's a woman named Judith Dufour who killed her own daughter so that she could sell her clothes to buy more gin or parents like selling their kids into slavery to buy more gin, people turning into sex workers just to get gin money. And just supposedly, it was like you said, it was just like the crack

epidemic and the same kind of response to it as well here in the United States. But this is gin back in the early 18th century. 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 a chicken or an egg thing going on? Because they're like, urbanization is going rampant in London at the time. And was the gin craze a product of this poverty or the cause of it? And

by all accounts these days, it looks like it was sort of a product of it. I saw that there were at least two documented cases of spontaneous human combustion gin from drinking this gin. Wow. Isn't that crazy? Yeah. It's some hardcore gin. Geez. There were eight different gin acts from parliament over about a 22 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 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 tavern, you could not legally engage in selling or producing gin. In January? Yeah. I think that's what it said in the act. In January? Yes. Thou shalt not partake in January 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, it left just like these handful of huge distilleries like Booth's Plymouth, Plymouth by the way was the first. It was in the late 18th century. Oh, nice. And a couple others, I think Boodles might have been around by then, but

all the small distilleries went away just by law. And so when this artisanal revolution that's going on now swept over to England, this company called Sipsmiths went to go start their own and they found out that they couldn't by law. That was 200 years old. So they had a lobby and they were the first company in 200 years to get a license to Bruce or distill small batch gin in England. Wow. Amazing. Because of those gin acts. That's pretty great. I think so too. All right. Well, let's take another little break here and we'll talk more about gin right after this. Hey friends, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised

to hear about Lisa in Manitoba, who got the idea to Airbnb the backyard guest house over childhood home. Now the extra income helps pay her mortgage. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co stars, friends and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friends beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Alright, so Jen is going strong in the 1700s. Some might say it's a problem. Flash forward to the 1800s, 1830, 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 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, and the other bad part about that 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 1830, 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 96% in the end. And that really, really changed the game. Yeah, because these continuous stills or coffee stills after the man who invented them, it's like the spirit rises through increasingly higher 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. And because you could get pure alcohol to use as the base spirit for gin, you had less of a funky, foul, nasty taste that you needed to cover up with stuff like botanicals or sugar or turpentine, which meant that you could produce gin with a much pure gin that eventually evolved into London dry gin. Yeah, and London dry gin, 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 drier version, which became the London dry gin. And the rest is history. They started producing some really high-quality gins in England at the time. Yeah, they did. I think that's when the booths and bootles and all those guys started... Beef eater. Beef eater. 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 dry 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 I think it's kind of self-evident.

It's any kind of like root, plant, seed, leaf, stem, bark, whatever that's used to add a particular flavor profile to gin. Typically juniper is like the chief botanical in a gin. But if you look at these lists of botanicals that are frequently used in London dry gin, they come from all over the world. And it's no coincidence that England was at the height of its imperial colonial power at a time when London dry gin developed, because it was in a position to bring all these ingredients from all over the world to the distilleries that had set up shop in London. 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 10 different places or 11 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, they're good. I used to love those guys. They were like early 2000s, 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 sea power. But that had a lot to do with gin because the Brits and 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 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, wow. What? A medicament. I'm in a predicament because my heart's all afloat. Oh, look at you.

Something just happened to me. But these doctors were like, hey, yeah, you British soldier. You should, they started prescribing this stuff, this chinchona bark and colonists in India and South America. And they were eating a ton of it, 700 tons actually in the 1840s. 700 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 chinchona bark.

It's got to be, right? I mean, that's tonic. I think I'm going to look at the other stuff in there and maybe I'll follow up with some ingredients. Okay, do. And bring me some too, please. Okay. But so with quinine, like 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 going to mix it with a lot of stuff to try and make it more drinkable.

Right. And that is not the martini, however, this is a pretty neat story. And the 1870s and 80s is when martinis 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 an embodiment of American history at its most diverse Dutch and English gin mixed with French vermouth, served with Mediterranean olives, German Jewish pickled onions or Caribbean lemons.

Yeah. And that glass, which by the way, one of my more annoyances in life, 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 90s Karen from Will and Grace style martini glasses? I do. Or like the classic 60s, 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 glass. I have.

There are places around town that serve them in these little tulip glasses 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. That's just like serving a margarita and a, well, you can serve a margarita and a lot of different things, I guess. Sure.

You can just cup your hands and drink a margarita out of there. And people have, including me. That's true. You can, you can get a margarita ingredients poured down your throat. You don't even need to use your hands. That's true. It's seen your frogs. The 1920s is when the gin craze kind of was re-kickstarted 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 gin. 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 a moonshiner. 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 and turpentine. I know. Isn't that 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 1930s post-prohibition cocktail movement. Yeah. We talked a lot about the origin of some of those drinks and how bars work live episode if I remember correctly. Yeah. Those are very 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 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 just drinking like a neat room temperature gin. That does not sound good to me.

Well, let me tell you the story of my first gin experience in Athens in college. And Dave Ruse put this article together for us and he very astutely points out that if you're a child of the 70s and 80s, you 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. I can't remember the guy's last name.

It doesn't matter. And Don and I ended up out on the river late night at Oconee Springs Park with a half gallon of Seagram's gin. Oh my God. And just took it too far and we're drinking it right out of the bottle and waiting out into the river and not being very safe, quite frankly. It doesn't sound like it. 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 was like, man, this band was playing across the street and they're like, it's crazy. It's kind of jazzy and they're multiracial and it's like, you never heard anything like it. And that was Dave Matthews band.

Yeah. He was right about that. He was factually correct about two things. It's jazzy and multiracial. Man, Seagram's right out of the handle, huh? Oh boy. It was bad. But I remember very distinctly tasting that piney 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, oh, okay. I liked vodka martinis for, that was one of my first drinks ever was vodka martinis and When you were 13. Yeah. Pretty much in my tree house there's smoking cigarettes and drinking vodka martinis with the summer of the 4th, 9th grade.

But like, so I would drink vodka martinis. 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've never been a vodka guy unless you're talking about that delightful birthday cake flavored vodka. Is that a thing? Yeah.

Hey, we don't judge men if that's what you like. Oh, sure. Of course. Gin 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 U.S. Yeah. Apparently it was a pretty big hit.

Then Hendricks came along in the U.S. in 2003. Yeah. Love that Hendricks. We're saying as many brands as possible. In the hopes that they'll send us free 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 genoscence is on still. Nice. Did you just coin that? I did. That was really good. Thanks.

Genoscence 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. That's great. Fantastic.

I thought you were still going and I interrupted you and you're going to pick up again. You'd think after like 12 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 that gin is great. It is great stuff. If you're of legal age, drink responsibly, don't drive certainly, make it real easy on you to not drive these days. Yeah, man.

Take advantage of it. Ride hailing apps, you have zero excuse these days. That's right. Well, if you want to know more about gin, well, again, I guess if you're 21, give it a try. See what happens. But like Chuck said, drink responsibly. If you're not 21, you're going to have to wait.

Sorry. And since I said you're going to 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. No.

It's a printed email. It's also not written in the cut out magazine letters either. No, thank goodness. It's a nice type written. So this is from Westwood, Sutherland, and he's the guy who sent us that beef turkey. Oh, yeah. Thanks, Westwood. Hey guys, my name is Westwood Sutherland, currently a college sophomore in 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. Wow.

Has reaped the rewards for years now and increased production from our fruit trees as well as getting some honey. That's awesome. Though he has to deal with the bear, he sent in that picture of the bear. That's the local cop that hassles them all the time? No, it's a bear going after his honey and he named the bear Jerry. How great is that? That's great.

Give me some miso. He also invested money into a stock, I'm sorry, into any stock that worked with CRISPR. Oh, smart guy. And after hearing your gene editing podcast and he is very happy with the results, wink, wink. That's cool. That's nice. I didn't.

I should have. Yeah, we didn't even take our own advice. That's my problem. So I joined your podcast. I started a beef jerky company when I was 14. 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 me listen to stuff you should know one after the other and made time go by very quickly. 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 Westsidejerky.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 Westside as in Westwood. So W-E-S-T-S-S-I-D-E jerky.com. The extra S stands for super. Small batch, flank steak, beef jerky, gluten free. And 100% not vegan.

That's 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 shows in October.

Oh, wow. Yeah. So we need to do it soon, okay? Totally. Okay. Well, if you wanted to get in touch with us like Westwood did, you can go on to our social links, start at StuffYouShouldKnow.com, and you can also send us an email, or you can send us a typewritten letter, but try an email, too.

You can send it off to StuffPodcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. All podcasts are wherever you visit your favorite shows. On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s, called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to HeyDude, the 90s, called on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. Get a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life.

Tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.