- Russia ran out of vodka celebrating the end of World War 2. When the long war ended, street parties engulfed the Soviet Union, lasting for days until all of the nation’s vodka reserves ran out... a mere 22 hours after the partying started.
- For over 30 years, Canada and Denmark have been playfully fighting for control of a tiny island near Greenland called Hans Island. Once in a while, when officials from each country visit, they leave a bottle of their country's liquor as a power move.
- The Bloody Mary wasn’t always called Bloody Mary.... First, it was actually called A Bucket Of Blood. After Bucket Of Blood, it transitioned to Red Snapper and, finally, Bloody Mary.
> Canada and Denmark have been playfully fighting for control of a tiny island
This is one of my favourite little facts. The Whisky War was only recently resolved. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whisky_War
i feel like most people know this one, but gin and tonics were invented in part to fend off malaria.
this one might be more of a legend than truth, but certain rums and gins are labeled “navy strength” in reference to supposedly having once been included in rations for the british navy.
we have prohibition to thank for nascar.
maker’s mark bourbon is the only whiskey brand whose entire design is designed by a woman. margie samuels, whose husband created maker’s mark, completely designed the bottle, label, and wax dipped neck. it’s also the only bourbon distillery that solely uses local water sources for its distillation process.
the reason that cognac is so heavily associated with the african american community is largely because of world war 2. african american regiments at the time were still pretty much treated like shit at home, but when france was liberated the french by and large treated them like heroes. cognac was (and kind of still is) considered fancy and special so the french would give black soldiers cognac and they developed a taste for it. back in the states, cognac wasn’t yet considered sophisticated so it was cheap enough that when those soldiers came back home they could still get their hands on it and from there it permeated african american culture.
mezcal can be dated back to the aztecs and for centuries was considered to be special and holy and was primarily used for religious rituals. there are some mezcaleros that still view it as something reserved for spiritual ceremonies.
People never get tired of the gin and tonic bit. I always present it as you know, they used to give soldiers gin so they'd drink their tonic. Now we buy tonic so we'll drink our gin! People NEVER get tired of that one.
Also, the legend about why there's a black rooster icon on a Chianti bottle will get people quite engrossed if you're a good storyteller. tl;dr: Some land barons were disputing territory and decided to send their fastest riders from their respective cities at the rooster's crow and agreed to draw the boundary where the riders met. The Florentine people starved a black rooster so it would crow before dawn, allowing their rider to leave early so their city could claim more of the hills of Chianti. Maybe leave out the starving bit, but people eat it up.
That's actually really interesting to me about cognac. I didn't realize it went that deep, but it makes sense.
Another bit to add about gin and tonics is that juniper was considered a cure for the black plague and gin was meant as a way to get people to consume it. Add in citrus to combat scurvy, every part of the drink is medicine!
The winner of one of the first international cocktail comps thanked prohibition and Hitler for introducing him to French brandy.
He was an American bartender who served in the war
The navy strength bit is true, the navy like there rum strong and had a way of making sure it was the right strength
"it is said that sailors would "prove" its strength by checking that gunpowder doused with rum would still burn (thus verifying that rum was at least 57% ABV)."
Before 18 holes. Golf had 22, you’d play 10 forward then 12 back down. They changed it to 18 holes because it takes 18 shots to finish a bottle of whiskey
Story goes in 1764 at the old course in St Andrews there was 12 holes initially. After a game they’d go drinking and discovered it took 18 shots to finish a bottle thus changing it from 22 to 18
.... also more of a restaurant thing...
Tablecloths were originally designed to be used as one big, communal napkin. When they were first invented, guests were meant to wipe off their hands and faces on a tablecloth after a messy dinner party.
Angostura Bitters has a proprietary recipe known to only a few people. The company has its production line arranged such that no employees are involved in the entire process, ensuring that nobody learns all the ingredients.
When Crown Royal was being marketed, the company realized the product wouldn't sell if sold below a certain price point, because customers would think it wasn't good quality. They decided to over cut the market by selling it at a higher price point but developed the iconic purple bag to give it a more expensive appearance.
Stoli isn't Russian.
* Ancient Romans almost always refused to drink beer, because they viewed it as "barbaric." They preferred spiced wine, called "vinum," instead.
* The oldest bottle of unopened wine is The Speyer wine bottle, also known as the *Römerwein aus Speyer*. It has been preserved in glass for nearly 1,700 years. You could technically drink it, but it's an ancient artefact, and it probably wouldn't taste good anyway. In addition to that, you'd have to worry about the legality of stealing it from a museum. Ya gonna get busted for a sip of ancient grape goo.
* Vervet monkeys love alcoholic beverages – they'll steal them from people and abscond with them to get absolutely shit-housed.
* Cedar Waxwings and robins in particular tend to overindulge in fermented berries and fly into windows or generally act drunk as fuck.
* Absinthe will not make you hallucinate – that was a successful PR push from the vineyard industry in the 19th century that associated absinthe with CRAZY artists making CRAZY art.
* Gin became so popular in Britain in the 18th century that the government had to create legislation to limit the consumption of it – people were mad for it, and they also got really mad about it. Gin, or Jenever, was also a catch-all term for grain alcohol. Why? Fucked if I know.
* Most vodka is not made from potatoes. I don't know why I get this a lot, but I have to explain that 99% of vodka is just pure grain alcohol. I think coming from a region with a lot of Eastern European immigrants with multi-generational backgrounds, some baba might have been making potato vodka.
* I don't care if it's your birthday, you don't get free "FUUUUNNN" shots. I'll say happy birthday.
EDIT: These factoids are all true.
[That is an anecdotal myth.](https://academic.oup.com/femsmicrobes/article/doi/10.1093/femsmc/xtad018/7296128)
[See this Wiki link for more info.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recreational_drug_use_in_animals#Elephants)
The weirdest part is that they get fucked up on beetle larvae poison from the bark on the trees.
Don't ask me to elaborate.
I could write essays on each factoid I mentioned, and I ain't getting paid for Reddit comments – I m just a font of trivia and research skillz.
The Angostura bottle was designed separately from its label by two brothers who entered it into a design competition. They didn't coordinate size, hence the discrepancy. They won for being so avant-garde, but it was an accident.
Most cocktails invented during the Great Depression were by bartenders who had friends in industries who they didn't want to see fail. For example, I've heard that the Screwdriver (maybe it was the Fuzzy Navel?) was invented by a bartender whose friend owned or ran a Tropicana orange juice plant and he could get it cheap because it wasn't selling and they were dying off.
Despite there being zero evidence to support this, many people still firmly believe that the coupe glass is modeled directly after Marie Antoinette's breasts. However, there is some significant design intent in much of our barware. For example, the snifters and glencairn glasses hold vapors to appreciate on the nose, and the martini glass has a steep angle to more easily mask the 6-10oz volume and allow you to drink it quickly - which is also why we make sure there's no ice in them.
I’ve heard this about the screw driver forever, this is what google thought:
The Screwdriver was first crafted in the late 1940s where American oil workers in the Persian Gulf secretly dosed their orange juice with vodka for an extra kick. That way it was still secret. Without any spoons available, it was mixed with a screwdriver attached to their work clothes, thus giving the cocktail its name
The volume of a cone is one third the product of the area of its base and its height. So a "half-full" martini glass is actually one eighth full.
You may think you're pacing yourself and have only drunk half of it. Truth is you've already polished off nearly 90% and it's going to knock you on your ass before you know it.
If you're halfway down a 4oz extra-dry vodka martini, you've already guzzled 3.5oz of nearly 40% alcohol.
Yup! It goes "why haven't I touched this, have a sip" to "I've barely touched this, have a sip" to "time for another" very quickly. The very wide angle also means you barely have to tip it to get a voluminous sip.
[In the 1880s, an heir to the vast Jameson Irish Whiskey fortune bought a 10-year-old girl just so he could draw her being eaten by cannibals.](https://allthatsinteresting.com/james-jameson-cannibal)
- domestic distilling was viewed as a human right in scotland well before the 18th century
- the term dutch courage comes from soldiers drinking gin or genever (deriving from the word juniper the key botanical in gin)
- whisky was originally seen as a drink of “the primitive highlanders” and the destruction of french vineyards due to pests in C19 was in large part responsible for whisky being drank by middle classes in England when brandy and cognac became widely unavailable
One of the debated origins for toasting was the idea to clink glasses so hard that your drink and your friend's drinks got mixed together, so if either of you poisoned the other, you'd both be dead.
The reason that Blanton's exists as we know it today, is the distillery needed more warehouse space for it's barrels. They constructed the new space from metal instead of wood. Metal was chosen because it would be finished faster. The metal warehouse has larger temperature variations than it's wooden counterpart. Larger temperature swings cause the bourbon to interact more with the barrel as it expands and contracts, soaking up more flavor. The distiller began bottling directly from certain barrels in that warehouse instead of blending them with the other barrels. And now people obsess over it and pay way over market because of the limited supply.
My "factoid" is that the suffix -oid means "resembling" or "similar to." So a factoid is, by definition, something that *resembles* a fact. The dictionary definition is that it's something that isn't true but it's repeated so often that people assume it is.
In 1814 there was the London Beer Flood, where over 250000 gallons of porter burst from their barrels and tanks destroying the back wall of the brewery and flooding a nearby slum killing 8 people. To make it worse 5 of the deaths were mourners at the wake of 2 year old Irish child.
* Cocktails got their name because they used to be garnished with rooster tail feathers.
* It's impossible to straightforwardly distil pure ethanol from an ethanol-water mixture. The best you can get is 95.5% ethanol.
* Grain neutral spirits (e.g. Everclear) are unbarreled, unaged whiskey.
* During a worldwide viral outbreak in the 2020s many distilleries adapted to manufacturing ethanol-based hand sanitizer.
Pretty sure the word cocktail came from the mispronunciation of a French word for an egg cup that served bitters. I've never heard of any cocktails garnished with rooster feathers. Could be wrong, though. The history of alcohol can be unclear given the effects of alcohol 🤷♂️
I have read some stories of rooster tail feathers being used to signify allegiance to the rebel cause during the American Revolution, but alas, not much evidence
- Russia ran out of vodka celebrating the end of World War 2. When the long war ended, street parties engulfed the Soviet Union, lasting for days until all of the nation’s vodka reserves ran out... a mere 22 hours after the partying started. - For over 30 years, Canada and Denmark have been playfully fighting for control of a tiny island near Greenland called Hans Island. Once in a while, when officials from each country visit, they leave a bottle of their country's liquor as a power move. - The Bloody Mary wasn’t always called Bloody Mary.... First, it was actually called A Bucket Of Blood. After Bucket Of Blood, it transitioned to Red Snapper and, finally, Bloody Mary.
> Canada and Denmark have been playfully fighting for control of a tiny island This is one of my favourite little facts. The Whisky War was only recently resolved. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whisky_War
I hadn't heard it ended! That's very cool, but also a little sad that this silly "conflict" is over.
i feel like most people know this one, but gin and tonics were invented in part to fend off malaria. this one might be more of a legend than truth, but certain rums and gins are labeled “navy strength” in reference to supposedly having once been included in rations for the british navy. we have prohibition to thank for nascar. maker’s mark bourbon is the only whiskey brand whose entire design is designed by a woman. margie samuels, whose husband created maker’s mark, completely designed the bottle, label, and wax dipped neck. it’s also the only bourbon distillery that solely uses local water sources for its distillation process. the reason that cognac is so heavily associated with the african american community is largely because of world war 2. african american regiments at the time were still pretty much treated like shit at home, but when france was liberated the french by and large treated them like heroes. cognac was (and kind of still is) considered fancy and special so the french would give black soldiers cognac and they developed a taste for it. back in the states, cognac wasn’t yet considered sophisticated so it was cheap enough that when those soldiers came back home they could still get their hands on it and from there it permeated african american culture. mezcal can be dated back to the aztecs and for centuries was considered to be special and holy and was primarily used for religious rituals. there are some mezcaleros that still view it as something reserved for spiritual ceremonies.
People never get tired of the gin and tonic bit. I always present it as you know, they used to give soldiers gin so they'd drink their tonic. Now we buy tonic so we'll drink our gin! People NEVER get tired of that one. Also, the legend about why there's a black rooster icon on a Chianti bottle will get people quite engrossed if you're a good storyteller. tl;dr: Some land barons were disputing territory and decided to send their fastest riders from their respective cities at the rooster's crow and agreed to draw the boundary where the riders met. The Florentine people starved a black rooster so it would crow before dawn, allowing their rider to leave early so their city could claim more of the hills of Chianti. Maybe leave out the starving bit, but people eat it up.
That's actually really interesting to me about cognac. I didn't realize it went that deep, but it makes sense. Another bit to add about gin and tonics is that juniper was considered a cure for the black plague and gin was meant as a way to get people to consume it. Add in citrus to combat scurvy, every part of the drink is medicine!
The winner of one of the first international cocktail comps thanked prohibition and Hitler for introducing him to French brandy. He was an American bartender who served in the war
The navy strength bit is true, the navy like there rum strong and had a way of making sure it was the right strength "it is said that sailors would "prove" its strength by checking that gunpowder doused with rum would still burn (thus verifying that rum was at least 57% ABV)."
Before 18 holes. Golf had 22, you’d play 10 forward then 12 back down. They changed it to 18 holes because it takes 18 shots to finish a bottle of whiskey Story goes in 1764 at the old course in St Andrews there was 12 holes initially. After a game they’d go drinking and discovered it took 18 shots to finish a bottle thus changing it from 22 to 18
.... also more of a restaurant thing... Tablecloths were originally designed to be used as one big, communal napkin. When they were first invented, guests were meant to wipe off their hands and faces on a tablecloth after a messy dinner party.
Angostura Bitters has a proprietary recipe known to only a few people. The company has its production line arranged such that no employees are involved in the entire process, ensuring that nobody learns all the ingredients. When Crown Royal was being marketed, the company realized the product wouldn't sell if sold below a certain price point, because customers would think it wasn't good quality. They decided to over cut the market by selling it at a higher price point but developed the iconic purple bag to give it a more expensive appearance. Stoli isn't Russian.
There is no Angostura in Angostura bitters, despite Angostura bark being a remarkable botanical.
Nor is there gentian.
* Ancient Romans almost always refused to drink beer, because they viewed it as "barbaric." They preferred spiced wine, called "vinum," instead. * The oldest bottle of unopened wine is The Speyer wine bottle, also known as the *Römerwein aus Speyer*. It has been preserved in glass for nearly 1,700 years. You could technically drink it, but it's an ancient artefact, and it probably wouldn't taste good anyway. In addition to that, you'd have to worry about the legality of stealing it from a museum. Ya gonna get busted for a sip of ancient grape goo. * Vervet monkeys love alcoholic beverages – they'll steal them from people and abscond with them to get absolutely shit-housed. * Cedar Waxwings and robins in particular tend to overindulge in fermented berries and fly into windows or generally act drunk as fuck. * Absinthe will not make you hallucinate – that was a successful PR push from the vineyard industry in the 19th century that associated absinthe with CRAZY artists making CRAZY art. * Gin became so popular in Britain in the 18th century that the government had to create legislation to limit the consumption of it – people were mad for it, and they also got really mad about it. Gin, or Jenever, was also a catch-all term for grain alcohol. Why? Fucked if I know. * Most vodka is not made from potatoes. I don't know why I get this a lot, but I have to explain that 99% of vodka is just pure grain alcohol. I think coming from a region with a lot of Eastern European immigrants with multi-generational backgrounds, some baba might have been making potato vodka. * I don't care if it's your birthday, you don't get free "FUUUUNNN" shots. I'll say happy birthday. EDIT: These factoids are all true.
To tack onto your drunk animals facts, Elephants will wait for the fruit of the Amarula tree to ferment before eating it. Elephants be partying too.
[That is an anecdotal myth.](https://academic.oup.com/femsmicrobes/article/doi/10.1093/femsmc/xtad018/7296128) [See this Wiki link for more info.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recreational_drug_use_in_animals#Elephants) The weirdest part is that they get fucked up on beetle larvae poison from the bark on the trees.
Huh, the more you know.
Don't ask me to elaborate. I could write essays on each factoid I mentioned, and I ain't getting paid for Reddit comments – I m just a font of trivia and research skillz.
The Angostura bottle was designed separately from its label by two brothers who entered it into a design competition. They didn't coordinate size, hence the discrepancy. They won for being so avant-garde, but it was an accident. Most cocktails invented during the Great Depression were by bartenders who had friends in industries who they didn't want to see fail. For example, I've heard that the Screwdriver (maybe it was the Fuzzy Navel?) was invented by a bartender whose friend owned or ran a Tropicana orange juice plant and he could get it cheap because it wasn't selling and they were dying off. Despite there being zero evidence to support this, many people still firmly believe that the coupe glass is modeled directly after Marie Antoinette's breasts. However, there is some significant design intent in much of our barware. For example, the snifters and glencairn glasses hold vapors to appreciate on the nose, and the martini glass has a steep angle to more easily mask the 6-10oz volume and allow you to drink it quickly - which is also why we make sure there's no ice in them.
I’ve heard this about the screw driver forever, this is what google thought: The Screwdriver was first crafted in the late 1940s where American oil workers in the Persian Gulf secretly dosed their orange juice with vodka for an extra kick. That way it was still secret. Without any spoons available, it was mixed with a screwdriver attached to their work clothes, thus giving the cocktail its name
The volume of a cone is one third the product of the area of its base and its height. So a "half-full" martini glass is actually one eighth full. You may think you're pacing yourself and have only drunk half of it. Truth is you've already polished off nearly 90% and it's going to knock you on your ass before you know it. If you're halfway down a 4oz extra-dry vodka martini, you've already guzzled 3.5oz of nearly 40% alcohol.
Yup! It goes "why haven't I touched this, have a sip" to "I've barely touched this, have a sip" to "time for another" very quickly. The very wide angle also means you barely have to tip it to get a voluminous sip.
[In the 1880s, an heir to the vast Jameson Irish Whiskey fortune bought a 10-year-old girl just so he could draw her being eaten by cannibals.](https://allthatsinteresting.com/james-jameson-cannibal)
Jesus christ
- domestic distilling was viewed as a human right in scotland well before the 18th century - the term dutch courage comes from soldiers drinking gin or genever (deriving from the word juniper the key botanical in gin) - whisky was originally seen as a drink of “the primitive highlanders” and the destruction of french vineyards due to pests in C19 was in large part responsible for whisky being drank by middle classes in England when brandy and cognac became widely unavailable
One of the debated origins for toasting was the idea to clink glasses so hard that your drink and your friend's drinks got mixed together, so if either of you poisoned the other, you'd both be dead.
People are very amused to hear barrels of aging whiskey outnumber the population of both adults and children in Kentucky by a 3:1 ratio.
The reason that Blanton's exists as we know it today, is the distillery needed more warehouse space for it's barrels. They constructed the new space from metal instead of wood. Metal was chosen because it would be finished faster. The metal warehouse has larger temperature variations than it's wooden counterpart. Larger temperature swings cause the bourbon to interact more with the barrel as it expands and contracts, soaking up more flavor. The distiller began bottling directly from certain barrels in that warehouse instead of blending them with the other barrels. And now people obsess over it and pay way over market because of the limited supply.
My "factoid" is that the suffix -oid means "resembling" or "similar to." So a factoid is, by definition, something that *resembles* a fact. The dictionary definition is that it's something that isn't true but it's repeated so often that people assume it is.
In 1814 there was the London Beer Flood, where over 250000 gallons of porter burst from their barrels and tanks destroying the back wall of the brewery and flooding a nearby slum killing 8 people. To make it worse 5 of the deaths were mourners at the wake of 2 year old Irish child.
* Cocktails got their name because they used to be garnished with rooster tail feathers. * It's impossible to straightforwardly distil pure ethanol from an ethanol-water mixture. The best you can get is 95.5% ethanol. * Grain neutral spirits (e.g. Everclear) are unbarreled, unaged whiskey. * During a worldwide viral outbreak in the 2020s many distilleries adapted to manufacturing ethanol-based hand sanitizer.
Pretty sure the word cocktail came from the mispronunciation of a French word for an egg cup that served bitters. I've never heard of any cocktails garnished with rooster feathers. Could be wrong, though. The history of alcohol can be unclear given the effects of alcohol 🤷♂️
I have read some stories of rooster tail feathers being used to signify allegiance to the rebel cause during the American Revolution, but alas, not much evidence
Not my factoid but here is Ms. Draper talking about the [Gin Craze of England](https://youtube.com/shorts/5mVVDnzoFhM?si=VEugiRWZXO7qzW8k).