Dark and Stormy

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Opened up a sample bottle of my ginger beer and it is all systems go for a Dark and Stormy weekend in a few days.

By the mid-nineteenth century, the official daily rum ration of the British Royal Navy consisted of 2 ounces a head of a peculiarly heavy blend of dark rums, dominated by the deeply funky stuff made along the Demerara River in Guyana. Some time after 1860, Gosling Bros., of Hamilton, Bermuda, began marketing its "old rum" -- a peculiarly heavy blend of dark rums. Between 1860 and 1920 the Royal Navy added a ginger-beer bottling plant to its massive Ireland Island Dockyards complex; what the navy was doing bottling ginger beer we don't know, unless it was intended as a temperance measure. If it was, it failed: The swabbies, given the choice between Demon rum and temperance beverage, said, "Fanx, gov, we'll take both."