Drinking whiskey like a gentleman, at your club, in 1858


Although I tend to picture whiskey as something that was drunk by cowboys out of a flask, or a small bottle, warm and straight, there was a different way to drink it, like a gentleman, at your club. Let's time-travel back to 1858, and be gentleman, drinking whiskey made by Hiram Walker in our club.

Our club is in Detroit, Michigan, which where the distillery is. Hiram Walker, who was born in Massachusetts, is only twenty years old, but he makes some fine whiskey, and he markets it to gentlemen's Clubs.

Gentlemen's Clubs never really became as popular in the United States as in England, but they were around. In the Jeeves and Wooster stories, Bertie Wooster is a member of the Drones Club in London. And it seems as if they were clubs for any type of gentleman, based on who you would choose to rub shoulders with, and which clubs would let you in. And of course these clubs had a LOT of rules, one of which was to drink like a gentleman. Yeah, women weren't allowed into men's clubs in those days, they couldn't even walk into them. By the way, the closest I ever came to seeing a gentleman's club was a brief visit to the Playboy Club in downtown Phoenix in the late 1970s. A friend of mine had a membership, and I have no real memories of it, other than being hypnotized by what our waitress was (barely) wearing.

But let's get back to 1858, and order some of Hiram Walker's Club Whiskey. And before we go any further, this was before the company moved to Ontario Canada, and was forced to write the word "Canadian" on their product in order to sell it in the U.S. At first it was in tiny letters, the way that "Made in China" is today, but it turned out to be a huge selling point so they added the word Canadian to the label in big letters. Now it's hard to imagine it before it was C.C., but that's how it started.

Hiram Walker 1838-1899

Anyway, whiskey is kind of like condensed soup, you need to thin it with water in order for the flavor to bloom. Yes, of course you can drink it straight (or "neat" if you prefer), but in a gentlemen's club that would be an abomination, and eyebrows would be raised. Someone may even be tempted to write a stern letter to the committee about your actions! Speaking for myself, I like to pour a tiny amount of whiskey over ice, and sip it slowly. In 1858 many club members would consider this poor manners (yes, you could get ice, it was cut out of frozen lakes and stored before it could be made with electricity), so I'd probably not do that. They would have ordered it with water. The water, of course, would be the purest water that could be found, like from a stream, which where the term "bourbon and branch water" comes from. A branch is just a creek, which hopefully isn't downstream from Bambi!

Sipping a glass of whiskey is a very gentlemanly thing to do. Having too much, becoming intoxicated, staggering around, inviting people to fight you, that sort of thing, wasn't. Decorum was observed in gentleman's clubs, and some things just weren't done. The club members would carry you out, throw you on the pavement, close the door, and you would lose your membership. That's all.

Thank you for drinking some whiskey with me, at my favorite gentleman's club, my backyard!
If you like pictures of old-time Phoenix, please become a member of History Adventuring on Patreon. I share a LOT of cool old photos there, copyright-free, with no advertising. Your support makes it happen! Thank you!

Click here to become a Patron!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me
Read more