FIRST JOURNEYS - A RACE AROUND THE WORLD 2020 - PIN 19 OF 23
GOWANUS, New York, USA
AROUND THE WORLD, ONE BOTTLE AT A TIME.
PHILEAS FOGG WOULD SURELY APPROVE
Day 11 stop 2 ...
I'm back in the old Dutch colony of Brooklyn and paying a virtual visit to the New York Distilling Company, and once again stepping right outside my comfort zone when it comes to trying something new!
Gouwane was a legendary Chief of the Canarsees back when Brooklyn was still Dutch. He was very good to the settlers and the Gowanus area and bay were named after him.
At the time I originally wrote this post, I found a story that Manhattan was sold to the Dutch for the princely sum of $24 worth of beads and trinkets. Now, it turns out that story isn't quite as straightforward as I thought, but $24 certainly makes for a good story!
Chief Gowanus Gin is based on an American recipe from around 1809 which confirmed that the colonials used rye to produce a Dutch-style gin. NY Distilling Co use an unaged whiskey and redistil this with juniper and hops and then age it in an oak barrel.
It smells much more like a cognac to me than a gin, and in terms of flavour, it's really foreign to my juniper-trained tastebuds! However, it's not unpleasant - quite spicy, warm and woody and I think where the juniper comes in is the finish, which is slightly resinous.
In terms of the reference to Dutch-style, as much as I know about genever from back then, it was really spicy to cover up some really nasty ingredients, so spiciness is definitely spot on!
It's recommended to use in Negronis but they also have a recipe for a Martinez on their website, so I went with this instead. I will be trying to find other serves with this over time and will share those I enjoy.
The Martinez worked for me, although I may tweak ingredients next time and until I get used to this style of gin.
Chief Gowanus New Netherland Gin was created by New York Distilling Company with the help of drinks historian David Wondrich, who found the 1809 recipe in Samuel McHarry's The Practical Distiller. The recipe was essentially for making a version of “Holland gin” from American rye whiskey, and NY Distilling Co recreated it using their own unaged, double-distilled rye whiskey, juniper and Cluster hops. It was then aged in oak for three months.
The $24 Manhattan story is one of those wonderful pieces of history that turns out to be rather more complicated. The contemporary evidence is a 1626 letter from Dutch merchant Pieter Schagen, which says that the Dutch acquired Manhattan for 60 guilders. There is no surviving deed and no contemporary record saying that beads and trinkets were exchanged. The $24 figure was a later conversion of the 60 guilders into dollars, while the beads-and-trinkets version became part of the popular story afterwards.
So, $24 is part of the legend, rather than a figure we can confidently say was actually handed over for Manhattan. The bigger historical question is whether the Indigenous people involved understood the transaction as a permanent European-style sale of land at all.
And now after the history lesson, I'd better grab my passport — even if it is only a virtual one — and get moving!
"It's a smooth operator..."
"Show me a bottle
and I'll tell you a story."