The Black Swan - eulogised in my last post as one of my favourite pubs of all time - was also once home to (and possibly still is) the nastiest and most ill-conceived drink it has ever been my misfortune to encounter.
During my trip to Jamaica some years earlier I had discovered (and subsequently tried but failed to erase the traumatic memory of) Wray & Nephew's Overproof White Rum: its 100º proof rating was initially appealing, but the first sniff of it defused all such enthusiasm forever - it had an absolutely VILE smell, positively emetic (a chemist friend who had also tried it on a trip out there thought that it might be spiked with pyridine - a pungent chemical they use in methylated spirits). This disgusting, chemically smell - and taste - was so powerful, so pervasive that it was vain to try to dilute it; if you tried putting a lot of coke in it, you just got a big glass of coke that smelled and tasted every bit as foul as the neat rum had. This is definitely a drink to be avoided.
Which was easy enough, since it used to be only available in Jamaica, and was not even, I think, widely popular there. Then came Hurricane Gilbert: the island was devastated; and over the next couple of years, to try to fund the rebuilding, the country resorted to all sorts of strange initiatives to try to earn more money from its export trade..... including the promotion if W & N Overproof in England (very high profile advertising campaign on the London Underground for a while, I recall). I don't think that particular idea ever bore any fruit.
Jamaica's finest marketing brains were not to give up so easily, though. Some time later, they came up with a more sophisticated ploy to try to introduce the idiosyncratic Wray & Nephew product to the unsuspecting British drinker. They mixed it with cream (to ape the very successful Irish whiskey cream liqueur, Bailey's).... and sold it in little individual-serving bottles (like Babycham in the good old, bad old days..... ah, whatever happened to Babycham? I suppose it got killed by the French Champagne producers - bastards!).
This wasn't a great success either. The stuff actually curdled in the bottles. Eileen, the Black Swan's landlady, had a small stock - a case, I suppose - on display behind the bar throughout the time I was going there. Not even Glen, the mountainous Jamaican bar-prop there (a man who would eat or drink pretty much anything with very little prompting) would go near the stuff. I don't think anybody touched one bottle of it in those two or three years I was hanging out there.
No-one except me. The spirit of curiosity got the better of me. The self-destructive, thrill-seeking, better-to-burn-out-than-to-fade-away side of my personality got the better of me.
It was a mistake. It tasted BAD. Imagine advocaat mixed with petrol - and you're only just starting to get close.
I suspect the other 11 bottles might still be gathering dust behind the bar there.....
3 comments:
Ah, yes - but don't forget Jamaica's Finest.... Tia Maria.
It always used to make me giggle when I drove past the hideously ugly Tia Maria FACTORY in Spanish Town - belching filthy black smoke and a monument to rust and concrete cancer - that this was where the island's allegedly most 'romantic' product originated...
For some reason I read that as 'Tia Malaria' at first. Another possible band name??
I didn't realise Tia Maria was a Jamaican product.
Ho, yus! (Rare for me to reveal a drinking fact that remains outwith your cyclopaedic knowledge). And made with Blue Mountain Coffeee (allegedly). Mind you, one of the more interesting parts of my research into the Jamaican coffee industry revealed that the island produced something like 20,000 barrels of 'Blue Mountain Coffee' per year...and the world consumption of 'Blue Mountain Coffee' was something like 35,000 barrels per year.
Go figure, as our friends across the pond would say.
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