What is in a Kill Devil cocktail?

Answer 1

Well, to begin, "Kill Devil" is the old term for what we now call rum. Kill Devil cocktails or Kill Devil Flips have two possible recipes, one clearly more appetizing than the other.

The first recipe is intertwined with the lore surrounding the pirate Black Beard (aka Edward Teach). His "Kill Devil Flip" was drunk prior to battle and is a combination of a heavy handed shot of rum with some gunpowder sprinkled on to it. You light the gun powder and knock it back. This is only recommended if you think you are as tough as Black Beard, which you are not.

The more likely recipe, and the one that has history backing it up involves a giant pewter bucket, beer, sweetener (molasses), rum (kill devil), and a hot iron (aka a lagerhead). Several quarts (3 or 4) of dark beer, a little molasses (to taste), a pint of rum, all get mixed in the bucket. Then the lagerhead, a long iron rod with a large iron ball on the end, is stoked in a fire until red hot. The red hot lagerhead is then plunged into the concoction and allowed to bubble for a while as it mixes the ingredients. Then drink up!

I must be honest this knowledge is not my own, I found it while listening to an NPR interview of Wayne Curtis author of And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails.

To Black Beard!!!!!