This post is really just for fun!! For serious info about prospecting in Colorado, start on the home page: www.findinggoldincolorado.com
Ever wonder what the gold rush era miners drank besides beer and straight whisky? Here’s a couple popular cocktails you might like to experiment with yourself:
Cherry Bounce:
This drink stems from the early American “shrubs” – a combination of fruit and brandy or rum. When made properly, the “bounce” is a delicious liqueur that is full of history. Apparently even Martha Washington used to make it with the whiskey George produced on their farm. At the holidays she would add cinnamon and nutmeg.
During the gold rush, the cherries give the added bonus of a large dose of vitamin C, crucial to the diets of miners who ate a lot of game meat and beans and not much else.
Here’s the way it was made back in the days of the Colorado Territory where it could be found in almost every established saloon…
Ingredients:
5 pints dark cherries…Bing is great but locally grown is fine
1 quart dark rum or cognac…or whiskey if that’s all you can find on the frontier
1 lb. brown sugar or honey or whatever sweetener they have at the trading post 😉
Grind the cherries through a meat grinder, seeds and all. Transfer the ground cherries to a bottle holding the liquor. Cap the bottle and set aside at room temperature for at least a week.
Strain the liquor through cheesecloth into a container. Stir the sugar into it and pour the bounce into a sealable container. Set aside for a least 2 weeks before serving.
Here’s another version from the late 1700’s (you better be having a LOT of friends over if you make this recipe!) “Tak’ the juice of a bushel o’ cherries, dissolve twenty-four pound o’ sugar ower it, then ye put it into a forty-gallon cask and fill it up wi’ whisky.”
Here’s a modern version of the same drink:
Ingredients:
A dozen fresh or previously frozen cherries
1 1/2 Oz dark rum or cognac or bourbon or whiskey as you prefer
1-2 teaspoons brown sugar or honey (I wonder if maple syrup would be good too!)
Muddle the cherries with the sugar, add the liquor, shake with ice. Strain and serve with an ice cube and a luxardo cherry in a sugar rimmed glass.
Trader’s Whiskey
This is the version of whiskey preferred by both American Indians and trappers in the American West so it’s certain that early prospectors encountered it, and many learned to like it.
Ingredients:
1 cup water
2 tbsp. cut tobacco
4 small dried red peppers or a teaspoon of crushed red pepper
A fifth of bourbon whiskey
½ tsp. old-fashioned black powder (do not use modern, high-speed gunpowder; it is poisonous!)
Make a tea by boiling the water, tobacco and red pepper together for 5 minutes. Strain and add the tea to the whiskey, little by little, to taste. Add the black powder and enjoy. Occasional consumption only, as this is addictive due to the nicotine. No wonder the Indians and others on the frontier grew to prefer this stuff to regular whiskey.
If you try one of these, I’d love to hear what you think down in the comments 🙂
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