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Comment by gwern | Hacker News Reader

This makes me wonder about old-timey drink. I vaguely know what 'grog' is, and I can sort of guess what they mean by 'punch', but what is 'flip', 'slings', and is 'pepper in rum' really what it sounds like?

Wikipedia can help with the first, which is an interesting concoction which sounds like hard work (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flip_(cocktail) : " a mixture of beer, rum, and sugar, heated with a red-hot iron ("Thus we live at sea; eat biscuit, and drink flip"). The iron caused the drink to froth, and this frothing (or "flipping") engendered the name. Over time, eggs were added and the proportion of sugar increased, the beer was eliminated, and the drink ceased to be served hot."), but 'slings' WP entry is rather vague, and while I can find various combinations of pepper and rum in Google, I'm not sure any of them are what is meant.

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All of them roughly map onto the more modern category we typically use for anything involving mixing spirits with something acidic, sweet or bitter: cocktail. "Sling" still survives via an old-timey British cocktail, the Singapore Sling. Says Wikipedia: "a sling was originally a North American drink composed of spirit and water, sweetened and flavored."

As for pepper in rum, I had to look that up too. I suspect that Benjamin Rush would've been referring to something similar to this, because Jamaican rum was so dominant in the British colonies: https://www.sbs.com.au/food/recipes/pepper-rum

Edit: Confusingly, this source from the 1780s [1] says "rum, whisky, brandy, gin, stinkibus, bitters, toddy, grog, slings and fifty other liquors, all come under the denomination of spirits." But this is presumably what Rush had in mind because it's direct from his book: "After a while nothing would satisfy him but slings made of equal parts of rum and water, with a little sugar." [2]

[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=VyRTvziJuecC&dq=sling%20sp... [2] https://books.google.com/books?id=PnZVb3esMk4C&dq=sling%20sp...

If you are in Silicon Valley and want to experience a flip, try out 'the haberdasher' in san jose. So good. If they have a good thick stout on tap, get the 'beer flip' - I can't tell you what's in it, other than it's cold and sweet and slightly carbonated and involves a whole egg and some stout. How good it is depends a lot on what kind of stout they use; the best I've had was with a peanut butter stout.

Their 'fenway flip' is also pretty great.

The rest of their drinks are pretty good, too, and the bartenders are very knowledgeable if you come on a weeknight when they aren't too busy.

Traditionally, grog was a British Navy mixture of rum and water in 1:4 (ish) proportions. Circa-late 1700s.

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