In a History of New York During the Revolutionary War the diet of a hale old general was noted to contain a great deal of "flip" which was "A mixture of New England rum, pumpkin beer, and brown sugar. In winter this liquor is made warm by putting a red-hot poker into it. Every public-house in Connecticut has in the winter season one of these pokers (known among them by the name of loggerheads) always in the fire, ready upon the arrival of travellers or the arriving in of company. It is far from being disagreeable liquor, and is universally drank in Connecticut."
"Other names for the hospital loggerhead were flip-dog and hottle. The loggerhead was as much a part of the chimney furniture of an old-time New England tavern and farm-house as the bellows or andirons. In all taverns and many hospitable homes it was constantly kept warm in the ashes, ready for speedy heating in a bed of hot coals, to burn a mug of fresh flip for every visitor or passer by. Cider could be used instead of beer, if beer could not be had. Some wise old flip tasters preferred cider to beer. Every tavern bill of the eighteenth century was punctuated with entries of flip. John Adams said if you spent the evening in a tavern, you found it full of people drinking drams of flip, carousing, and swearing. The old taprooms were certainly cheerful and inviting gathering-places; where mine host sat behind his cagelike counter surrounded by cans and bottles and glasses, jars of whole spices and whole loaves of sugar; where an inspiring row of barrels of New England rum, hard cider, and beer ranged in rivalry at an end of the room, and
[Pg 113]“Where dozed a fire of beechen logs that bred
Strange fancies in its embers golden-red,
And nursed the loggerhead, whose hissing dip,
Timed by wise instinct, creamed the bowl of flip.”
These fine lines of Lowell’s seem to idealize the homely flip and the loggerhead as we love to idealize the customs of our forbears. Many a reader of them, inspired by the picture, has heated an iron poker or flip-dog and brewed and drunk a mug of flip. I did so not long ago, mixing carefully by a rule for flip recommended and recorded and used by General Putnam—Old Put—in the Revolution. I had the Revolutionary receipt and I had the Revolutionary loggerhead, and I had the old-time ingredients, but alas, I had neither the tastes nor the digestion of my Revolutionary sires, and the indescribable scorched and puckering bitterness[Pg 114] of taste and pungency of smell of that rank compound which was flip, will serve for some time in my memory as an antidote for any overweening longing for the good old times."
I live next to Putnam, Connecticut. I didn't know I was bang in the middle of the land of flip!
In another book, Customs and Fashions in Old New England, Earle reported "Flip was a vastly popular drink, and continued to be so for a century and a half. I find it spoken of as early as 1690. It was made of home-brewed beer, sweetened with sugar, molasses, or dried pumpkin, and flavored with a liberal dash of rum, then stirred in a great mug or pitcher with a red-hot loggerhead or hottle or flip-dog, which made the liquor foam and gave it a burnt bitter flavor."
"...The colonists at first were deprived of their beer. One of the earliest New-England poets, in boasting of the comforts around him, does it regretfully, after this fashion:
If barley be wanting to make into malt,
We must be contented, and think it no fault.
For we can make liquor, to sweeten our lips,
Of pumpkins and parsnips and walnut-tree chips.
They could not, however, have long been confined to their pumpkin-beer, for the General Court of Massachusetts, in 1687, regulated the brewers in the colony, and enacted that "no person shall brewe any beare, or malte, or other drinke, or sell in gross, or by retaile, but only such as shall be licensed by this Courte, on pain of £100;..."
"Colonial Americans also drank their pumpkin. An enterprising person can make an alcoholic beverage out of almost anything, and the Pilgrims seem to have been first to make pumpkin beer or ale. ...
The Pilgrim recipe was said to involve a mixture of persimmons, hops, maple syrup, and, of course, pumpkin.
Further south in Virginia, planter Landon Carter mentions pumpkins in his diary in 1765. He, too, concocted some sort of alcoholic beverage from fermented pumpkins. He christened it pumperkin.
Perhaps he used a method similar to an anonymous recipe of 1771:
Let the Pompion be beaten in a Trough and pressed as Apples. The expressed juice is to be boiled in a copper a considerable time and carefully skimmed that there may be no remains of the fibrous part of the pulp. After that intention is answered let the liquid be hopped culled fermented & casked as malt beer."
