S2E13 Transcript: Rum

Ellie Brigida: Welcome to Sweetbitter, where we explore the untold history of women and queer pirates. We’re your hosts, Ellie Brigida…

Leesa Charlotte: …and Leesa Charlotte.

EB: This episode, we’ll be discussing rum.

LC: Delicious. It’s too early for rum unfortunately, but now we want a glass. But before we go into that, let’s welcome our resident pirate expert, Alyse, for a game of Fact or Fiction.

Alyse Knorr: Hey, friends.

EB: Hi, Alyse. 

AK: How’s it going?

LC: Alright, so I feel like I can guess what this Fact or Fiction is, based on what we’re chatting about today. But why don’t you tell us? What’s our Fact or Fiction for the day?

EB: Well, in, you know, pirate movies and all kinds of pop culture depictions of pirates, really, they’re constantly drinking massive amounts of rum. Is that true? Did that happen?

LC: Okay. I’m gonna say yes, because we know many pirates were around the Caribbean and whatnot. And rum is made from sugar, right? It’s like a sugar spirit. So it makes sense that they would drink rum if they were going to drink a liquor. But I’m just trying to read your face, Alyse. And I’m concerned. No, that sounds like a good answer. I’m going to say–let’s see. I’m going to say no, because we gotta go with no. And just say that pirates were not exclusively drinking rum. Oh, I see what you did there.

EB: Drink whatever the heck they wanted. Or another option, I’m going to say no. And I’m going to say actually, pirates were completely sober.

LC: No one was sober back in the day. The water wasn’t drinkable.

EB: They just wanted to stay pure. That’s exactly how I usually describe pirates. When people ask me, I describe them as pure.

LC: Pure and sober. So yeah, I will say that they drink all kinds of alcohol. Clearly, they were not sober. Not just rum. That’s my final answer. Well, they did drink a fuck ton of rum. And that is what today’s episode is about. So I’m not going to say too much because I don’t want to spoil anything. But we’re going to talk all about rum from two different experts. And also like, yeah, just colonialism and– Oh, back to that again.

AK: Yeah, you know, classic.

LC: It’s the classic Sweetbitter conversation. What’s your favorite rum drink, both of you? Like your favorite cocktail made from rum.

AK: I’m not much of a rum person. I’m more like a gin kind of girl. But if I have to pick, I’ll say when you go to one of those bars, and they give you a really tropical rum drink, like in a skull. Do you know what I mean? I like that.

EB: Yeah. Strawberry daiquiris are made with rum, right?

LC: I think so. Yeah.

EB: Yeah, I feel like it’s like when you’re on a tropical vacation, you have to drink rum.

LC: As all of us often are, right?

EB: Yeah. So often.

AK: I’m gonna change my answer, because if daiquiris are made with rum, then that’s what I like. I’m like, a basic bitch. I like anything with like, fruity, wweet, you know, like, it doesn’t taste like alcohol. I like those cocktails.

EB: Yeah, they’re also–I feel like this was a thing in college where like, you’re just trying to figure out like, what’s the liquor that you can drink, right? And we used to get dragonberry rum from Bacardi.

LC: I don’t know what this is, but it sounds cheap.

EB: And that was cheap, but also pretty good.

LC: Is it white rum?

EB: It was a much–yes, white rum.

LC: Okay.

EB: A much better alternative to like the horrible shitty vodka that we would buy.

LC: Yes, but it sounds like the bar was like low.

EB: It was like sophomore year of college. Oh, yeah, yeah. That was like when you graduated, you were like, “I want just like something a little bit better.”

AK: Did anyone drink Malibu? I feel like there was a moment for that.

LC: Yeah, my step-mom loves Malibu. She drinks it all the time now. Yeah, it’s her like thing. I like my rum with ginger beer and Tabasco. So it’s like lime and mint.

EB: Sugar and spice.

LC: I’m a really big fan of rum and Tabasco, and I started doing that when I used to work in like an after hours bar and all of the hospitality folk would have shots of rum with Tabasco in it. And then just like making the cocktail, and it’s like this really nice–because ginger is already kind of spicy and then Tabasco was like differently spicy and it’s like this really like, spicy drink. So that’s my way. That’s how I like my rum or shot it, shot of rum.

AK: That sounds amazing.

LC: Yeah, it’s really good.

EB: I also now am definitely a whiskey girl. That’s like all I drink.

LC: I’m so proud of you, Ellie.

EB: Yeah, no rum, sorry.

LC: But bourbon? Bourbon whiskey though?

EB: Honestly, any whiskey?

LC: I’m still proud. Yeah, amazing.

EB: Any whiskey.

AK: When I was in college, my favorite drink was–because I loved sweet things, and I like couldn’t get my head around like bitter or dry like wine or even beer was like, just too bitter. And so I would drink Manischewitz wine.

LC: I don’t know what that is.

AK: It’s the kosher wine, and it tastes like cough syrup or something because it’s so sweet and like syrupy. Oh, I loved Manischewitz wine. And now I’m a great–you know, I’m big fan of like any Seder dinner I can show up to I’m like, where’s the Manichevy?

EB: Ayyy.

LC: I never went through like a super cheap drinking phase. I think because my parents exposed me to nice wine young. I never did the cheap wine. But I did go through–when I was like, 18, 19, because obviously drinking age is lower in Australia, I had a big Canadian Club phase. I really liked Canadian Club.

EB: What’s Canadian Club?

LC: It’s like–it’s whiskey. But it’s like bad whiskey for young people, really is what it is nice. But it’s like got something different about it. I can’t exactly remember why it’s different. But I was like, really into Canadian Club. Me and my best friend used to drink this really cheap, sparkling wine called Omni Blue. I got her a bottle for her 30th actually. She said no presents, but it costs like $8, so–which is very cheap in Australia, that’s like five US dollars. And we do not have cheap wine like here, like here you can get a good bottle of wine for like 12 bucks. But in Australia, we spend like 25, 30 dollars to get a good bottle. So $8 is very cheap. It was like the premium right, because Passion Popo was only 4, but Omni Blue was 8, so like we were classy bitches.

EB: So that’s the fancy shit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We used to drink boxed wine. You could get a full box of wine for $20.

AK: I still have boxed wine. But I have a box of wine in my fridge.

LC: Yeah, we call that “goon” in Australia.

EB: Franzia.

AK: Goon?

LC: Yes. Yes, you can play a game where you spin it around on a Hills Hoyce clothesline, it’s like the most Australian thing I’ve ever said. And it’s called Goon of Fortune, and you spin it around and like whoever it lands on has to like drink the goon bag.

AK: Oh my god.

EB: We used to do Slap the Bag, so you would like–I don’t even know why you were slapping it, but you just slap the bag and drink.

LC: Oh, you just–that’s it? It’s just like slap and drink?

EB: Yeah, I feel like there was actually a real way to play it. But I feel like we never figured that out.

LC: So you’re just like, okay, well, we’ll just take it literally.

EB: You’re just like, oh, slap it. Yeah. That’s it.

LC: Oh, the classy days of our youth.

EB: I know. I will not drink cheap alcohol ever again, because–

LC: –It makes us sick now.

EB: Even with expensive alcohol.

LC: Ellie’s recently joined the 30s club, so–

AK: Ooh.

EB: I am. So, I can’t drink anything less than $12, right? I don’t know, I was just going for like, the nice wine. I can’t drink any wine unless it’s $12.

LC: You can get good wine for $12. Like we get house bottles for $12. Yeah, you can’t anymore, Ellie, that’s what no one tells you. You’re done. Your cheap alcohol drinking days are done.

EB: Oh no. They’ve been done for like five years, so–

LC: Oh, okay, cool. You outpaced us, you matured quickly.

EB: Yeah. I hit that peak early. So it’s fine. I don’t mind not drinking anymore, to be honest. Like I’ll just go out and have like a soda and I’m like wow, this caffeine is really getting me wild.

LC: I believe it, I believe it. Well, now that everybody knows our–

EB: –our drinking habits.

LC: Our shameful past.

EB: Thank you so much Alyse, for chatting with us. I wish we had made some rum drinks, but it is currently 10:45 AM, so…

AK: It’s 8:45 here.

LC: Yeah, I considered it.

EB: It’s probably best we didn’t.

LC: I just thought it’s way too early.

EB: It’s way too early.

LC: We’ll drink rum if we do a live event.

EB: Yes, we will be back after a quick break.

LC: And we’re back. So while today’s episode is not specifically about queer or women pirates, it is tied to the themes of colonialism, as Alyse said before, racism, and slavery that we’ve recently discussed, and we thought that it was important to include. And also because, you know, rum.

EB: Here’s Antonio Sanna, editor of the book Pirates in History and Pop Culture, and an expert in pirates and rum.

Antonio Sanna: I wrote an entire chapter on rum in this book. On the one time because I–how can I say–sometimes I quite enjoy the drink. It’s one of my favorite spirits. So I decided to study about the history of this drink. And its creation over 6,000 years ago. The very fact that it was produced around the world, especially in tropical areas, until the Caribbean became the major areas of its production. It became a currency. Rum was a currency during the 17th century. So you could pay for the goods, both with money or with rum. So it was a commodity, and rum was at the center of a triangle. They brought the slaves from Africa, to work in the plantations in the south of America, and even in the north of America, where rum was cultivated and produced. And then rum was sold to Europe. So it was the typical triangle. And exactly at the center of the triangle, there were the pirates who also had slaves, they had the rum. So rum was very important for them. What we can say about them is the fact that they did not have perhaps the capitalistic urge to save on rum, but they wanted to consume it. I cannot imagine how they would do that with a tropical climate. So imagine that it’s very–in the heat, being also drunk with rum, and certainly not define that kind of drama, the one we can chase. It was a very low quality of age. It was initially called rumbullion, or kill-devil, before the first name of rum in the testimonies of the 17th century, we have to remember it is a beverage made from the sugarcane in spite of its taste being dry, it’s not that sugary and sweet in the end. Many, many pirates were reported to be drunk, some of them even surrendering to the Royal Navy, because they were too drunk to fight against them. These are the real testimonies of the time I put into text, such as A General History of Pirates, which is attributed to Daniel Defoe. And I can I think quote certain parts of the text. For example, the description of Port Royale, which was one of the main centers pirates gravitated around, and according to some testimonies, in Port Royale, the super-abundance of imported alcohol struck contemporaries as remarkable. The city was renowned for the presence of a huge quantity of cheap local rum, originally called the rumbullion, and nicknamed kill-devil. Such a beverage was served in the many taverns for men from every social level and occupational category. Port Royale’s name thus came to be associated with debauchery, drunkenness, and promiscuity. In the words of one cleric who visited the town, Port Royale was the Sodom of the New World, inhabited mainly by pirates, cutthroats, horses, and some of the most violent persons in the whole of the world. This is a historical testimony of the time.

EB: Rum, the great unifier of all men.

LC: I think that can be alcohol often generally.

EB: Yes.

LC: At some point in the bar, we’re all a mess.

EB: Yes. It reminds me of Piano Man, you know, at the end of the night, everyone is equal.

LC: But I also love that they were like, you know, drinking until they were having to surrender.

EB: Yeah, I mean, to be fair, that’s the only reason I would have said in the beginning that this was like fiction, because I’m like, hey, they probably shouldn’t have gotten so drunk that they couldn’t fight. But no, they didn’t care.

LC: But like if you look at most of the wars in history, people were drunk. Like, people be drunk when they’re in war. Like, that’s how it’s been. And like, for a long period of time–look, I’m pulling this out of my ass. I did no research on this. But for a lot of history, people did drink beer and liquor and whatever, when the water supplies weren’t good enough, like beer was like a better alternative in some ways to water because it was safer. Yeah, probably wasn’t like, you know, hoppy IPA.

EB: Yeah.

LC: Bud Light, it’s basically water?

EB: Yes, basically water, but drinkable in certain conditions.

LC: We first started talking about doing this episode when I was chatting with my friend Kelvin about this season, and he had so much interesting background as someone who worked in the industry, so I’ll let him tell you more.

Kelvin Uffre: Yeah, so I’m Kelvin Uffre, I’m known as Susil Sommelier, AKA El Gusanito, AKA Aguita Vendita. I’m a spirit specialist, educator, cultural nerd, Dominican immigrant, Bronx raised, shout out to the BX. I mean, yeah I talk a lot about rum because, you know, I’m from the Caribbean. I was born there. It’s what, you know, my mom drank, my grandma, my grandpa. People made it in the mountains, very much like Haiti makes Clairin, you know, in DR, there’s people making clandestine sugar cane distillates. So it was just part of the everyday drinking. It was part of a lot of our rituals in Dominican voodoo, known as Las 21 Divisiones. You know, you sprinkle a little bit of rum on the door for the spirits, you got blessed with it, it was, you know, they would rub it on you if there was an illness. So it was just part of the everyday cultural fabric of how I grew up. So when I came to the States, a little bit different, you know, I was in the BX and we were wildin’ and so we drank Brugal and shit, and played dominoes. As I became more of a professional in the industry, it’s something that stayed near and dear to my heart. You know, the spirits industry, like all industries, have not done a good job of telling a diverse and equitable narrative. Essentially, you know, the winners, quote unquote, winners get to tell the story. Those that controlled the slave trade essentially gave birth to the systems that gave birth to capitalist slavery in the Caribbean. And all across the diaspora. Their narrative is told, so we rarely hear about the the Africans and the Tainos that were also responsible for that. And you got to do a little bit of digging, because also in white academia, there are not that many books that express that narrative. So there’s a few books, one called Consuming the Caribbean by Mimi Sheller, once again, she’s a white woman and an academic. And there’s still a lot of whitewashing, a lot of white storytelling. So it’s hard to find those transcripts. There’s some educators doing it. But I’ve tried to bring to life some of those narratives through digging and searching. Also, like it’s important not to demonize colonization. People tell me, we got to decolonize food, let’s say, and I’m like, please don’t do that. I like rice and peas. I like mangu con chicharrones. And we have to understand that as painful as colonization was, it was a melding of a lot of different things, all of our food came from colonization in DR. Plantains came from Africa. Yucca, the Tainos who were cultivating it, pigs were brought from the Spaniards. So rice was brought from Southeast Asia and planted out. So it’s important to look at colonization not as just this evil that happened to the world, that happened to us. But this thing that transformed a lot of the cultures, a lot of the terroir, and inherently the people and what they consume. I think what it means is, if you can look at colonization as less the white man coming in and ruining this utopia, and it’s their fault, and more of a cultural collaborative history and an exchange of power and transformation–I think you can see a lot more in that narrative than just the white devil coming in and fucking up the utopia, the white devil, like, if we only talk about the Europeans as colonizers, that’s just othering on the other end of the spectrum. They’re not allowed to also have a history and to be humanized. How are we going to ever humanize ourselves? We need to be able to–everyone is is entitled to being a human being and to have a story and intricacies, but I say like if I came on those boats in 1492, or whatever, with those goat fuckers–they used to fuck goats. That’s where syphilis came from. Straight up, look it up. They used to fuck goats and that’s how they got syphilis and spread it all over the Tainos, and amongst themselves and shit. If I was on the boat, I’d probably fucking some goats. Nine months or some shit on a voyage, I would have been hitting goat pussy like crazy. And then I would have got to the island and I would have been killing everything! We think that we would do something different because we have these tools now. Imagine you’re them on this voyage in a place you don’t know shit about? You’ve been taught by the Catholic Church that you’re going to do God’s ordained work. I don’t know if I would have the fucking tools to do anything different. And to think that we would is like a fallacy. You know what I’m saying?

LC: So I, like, you know, drink the rum that you usually find on the shelves at like a bar. But like, every time I talk to Kelvin, it’s like, I’ll be like, “What about this rum?” And he’s always like, “No, it’s bad.” Not that it’s like bad. It’s just that I think that most of the rum that we find on the shelf that would like, have an identifiably recognizable name to you, is probably not the rum that’s really coming out of these communities and is like authentically rum. It’s like sweeter and, you know, more produced and whatnot. So I usually call Kelvin like, “What should I drink?”

EB: Like Bacardi Dragonberry? You don’t think that one is the most authentic rum on the shelf?

LC: No, maybe not.

EB: I don’t think so either. I don’t drink rum anymore. But maybe I would drink more rum, if it was the type that Kelvin suggested. So send me some recommendations.

LC: Yes, next time, I’m definitely gonna buy some rum to celebrate when we finish the season. So I’ll definitely let you know.

EB: Amazing.

LC: Anyway, I’ll let him continue. Because he has a lot more interesting things to say about the history.

KU: The Tainos–those are the first people that the Europeans encountered in the Caribbean, right. And a lot of people, Professor Silvio Torres-Saillant, who’s a professor of Dominican Diaspora Studies in Syracuse, an amazing educator. He calls Dominican Republic the cradle of blackness in the Western Hemisphere. And why is that? Because the enslaved Africans who were brought from that coast, Nigeria, that’s the first place they stepped foot. And they were brought there because the Tainos began to die out. There were tons of diseases, syphilis, killing them off. They were also being worked, because, you know, the Europeans went there to find gold. And there was no gold in Dominican Republic. It was actually a colony that was kind of left to its own devices as they continued to colonize Mexico and South America, where there was an abundance of land, gold, and fruits. It’s still this little island, it was like–it wasn’t very lucrative for the Spanish. So as the Tainos began to die off, and also get married into Spaniard marriages, which is something that also happened–my great grandmother, Delila, was one of the Taina who ended up marrying a Spaniard. They brought in enslaved Africans to do the work. So that ended up changing the entire fabric of the island with them, they brought seeds and food and plantings and religion. You know, Las 21 Divisiones, it wouldn’t happen with the religions of Yoruba. Same with Haitian voodoo. So spirituality had to transform and meld the way they do in the melting pot. But also, they brought their knowledge of fermentation. Tainos had their way of fermenting. So did the Africans, and Africans would make palm wine and Tainos would make palm wine or whatever fermented drink they would make a multitude of them. And that’s how the Spaniards realized that they could make rum, they looked at this thing fermenting out there, and a lot of the enslaved folks would take their nips of it to ease the harsh realities of what it is to be out there. And knowing that, in Europe, if you ferment something and you run it through a still you get alcohol, which is an Arabic word, you get rum. So DR was colonized by the Spaniards and the French, but before it was colonized by the French, the Spaniards were there. But on the Haitian side, to the north, there was an island called Tortuga, the island of turtles. Not necessarily because there’s turtles out there, but I think the shit looks like a turtle or something. I don’t know. Anyways, Isle of Tortuga became a hub for pirates who were essentially mercenaries, you know, whoever paid them, the French crown, the British Crown, the Dutch–they were, you know, contractors, you know, you would pay them to go fuck some shit up for you or go steal some shit and give you a percentage and French pirates were, and British pirates and the Dutch, those are the three primary countries that were sort of licensing this type of business. They were doing it to fuck up the Spaniards. They were gonna rob the ships as they came in. It was a real easy way, if you were on Isle of Tortuga, you can intercept ships coming in and get away rather quickly. So that’s what it was. They were just, you know, fucking up the Spaniards. And then a lot of the French pirates, you know, known as buccaneers because, you know, they would grill meats on open fire, it was called the buccan, so buccaneer was a guy who ate, you know, charred meat on open fire. So buccaneer, the English can say it as buccaneers, became the word. So the English bounce, the Dutch bounce, but these French motherfuckers were still, you know, fucking up the Spanish, coming into it through what is now the Haitian side, that side of the island, and they would take livestock and run them back to Tortuga and the Spaniards were like, fuck this. So in like 1649, I think it was like Toledo or some Spanish dude that I don’t give a fuck about, kick them out and fortify the island. And this happened multiple times. They went there, they went to war, kicked them out. And they would just come back. So there were a series of events like this around 1777, they signed the Aranjuez Treaty. And I’m summarizing completely, the Aranjuez Treaty was the defining line–this is our side, that’s your ship, stay over there. And let’s fuck up these British. Part of the treaty was like, “Okay, we’ll help you fuck up these British people.” It was just–there was constant infighting on that island.

EB: Tortuga. We have definitely heard about them before–first of all, in Pirates of the Caribbean. And second of all, we did hear more about that earlier, all of the buccaneers were the ones who were doing matelotage, so where they were getting married to each other. So like that early version of same-sex marriage that we love so much.

LC: We love to see it.

EB: In Tortuga!

KU: The colonizer narrative branches off into the pirate narrative, from Indiana Jones to Pirates of the Caribbean, that narrative, that paradigm of the discoverer sort of proliferated. A lot of the information we get about rum and a lot of the ways we view and experience the Caribbean and other places that have been subject to piracy. You know, Indiana Jones was a pirate, you know, and if you look at these movies, and you look at how brown and black people are viewed and where they are in proximity to the white character protagonists who’s really going in to raid, you know, something of spiritual importance, most of the time–the pirate narrative centers the white, European male. And it’s known as the discoverer narrative, and some people call it the colonizer. But there’s very little room for equity, learning, and the fleshing out of other narratives when the center is that. And a lot of people, if they don’t interrogate where they get this narrative, will perpetuate a lot of the same dynamics that were perpetuated by that dynamic. So in rum, I often say like they dropped the whip, but they picked up the dollar. A lot of quote, unquote, freed enslaved Africans. You had Mestizos, who own slaves. It was a really crazy ecosystem of slavery and slave owners in the Caribbean. What happened was, like, capitalist slavery took over, they knew a lot of these folks were uneducated, because they weren’t allowed to go to school. Similar to America, you know, in many ways the sugarcane plantation economy gave birth to other plantation economies in the United States. It was the first in the Western Hemisphere, and America took that blueprint and went off with it. So we see that in rum a lot, you know, we look at rum and you look at the companies that own the largest rum brands, and they’re all European owned, they’re all white owned, and nobody talks about what the sugarcane laborers are getting. Do they get health insurance, you know, in DR, we have something called a “batey.” And bateys are essentially like little villages where migrant workers, like migrant Haitians mostly, come and live and work so they don’t have to go home. And you should see what these places look like. Now, let me say this. There’s a lot of joy in bateys. There’s a lot of community in bateys. You know, one of my good friends Atagracia John Joseph, she’s a lawyer in Dominican Republic, and there’s a lot of civil rights and feminist work out there. She grew up in a batey. Although there are some horrors and the way that people are living out there, they should be protected. Batagracia John Joseph also expressed to me all of the love and community that also exists out of necessity. So I don’t want to paint bateys, because I’m not from there as like, we got to go in and save them. They’re fucking–they do them and they do well, but I do think that we could do better for these laborers. And that happens all around in rum, you know, we don’t talk about labor, we don’t talk about equity. If these European companies pulled out, do these islands and these laborers have self-determination?

EB: Yeah, I think this entire episode is like, so important to talk about of like–I know Kelvin’s like, you know, colonization, like colonizers are not necessarily evil, quote, unquote. However, there are some pretty intense impacts of that colonization that still exist now, right? Every single big rum brand owned by white European people, and the people who are creating and making the rum are not profiting from it.

LC: Which is often the case in so many different industries across so many different things. And it’s just I think, given that we’re like talking about rum so much on this podcast, it’s nice to shine a light on this specific thing. But like this is true of like–

EB: Pretty much most industries.

LC: Most industries, most industries.

EB: I also think it is important to note some rum brands that are owned by Black people. And that I just found a bunch. So Equiano Rum, 10 to 1 Rum, Legendaire Peach Tea Rum, and Kingston Bay Rum. So if you see any of those in your local liquor store, think twice about buying some of those bigger rums. I think that’s like, all we can do., right?

LC: Yeah. Or maybe ask for them in your local liquor store. I know people have a tendency to get the things that are going to be recognizable by name, and actually asking for things in a liquor store makes a big difference. Like if people are requesting it, they’ll bring it in. And yeah, I just think it’s more interesting too, to branch out and try new things.

EB: For sure. And I bet that they honestly taste pretty damn good. So, I’m gonna be doing that whenever I decide to drink rum. I’ll be drinking one of those brands.

LC: We’re gonna do it for our end of season live show.

EB: Yes. In the meantime, here’s a taste of what’s to come on Sweetbitter.

Matthew Knip: If you masturbate, you’re gonna damage yourself, you’re gonna damage the health of your family, right? And therefore, you’re going to spiral down into this well of sensuality, from which you can never recover, right? So Joe is afraid to masturbate by himself, because what he really doesn’t want or what he fears is the center of the crime, which is ejaculation, because that’s what harms you, right? But he has no problem doing it with other men. As long as he himself doesn’t ejaculate, doesn’t come.

EB: If you enjoyed the podcast, please subscribe, rate, and review us. It really helps, especially written reviews on Apple podcasts.

LC: You can also support us on Patreon at patreon.com/sweetbitter.

EB: Sweetbitter is an independent production by me, Ellie Brigida, Alyse Knorr, and Leesa Charlotte, in partnership with Three Springs Media. Our audio engineering is by Sarah Gabrielli. Our production assistant is Thea Smith and our artwork is by Istela Illustrated. You can read more about our guests and where to find them on our website.

LC: You can find us on Twitter and Instagram at @sweetbitterpod, or contact us on our website, sweetbitterpodcast.com.

EB: And this week’s sea shanty was written, performed, and produced by Joshua Nelson. I can’t wait for you to hear it.