All about the ballast

March 21, 2018 10:47 AM

How bomb debris from Bristol ended up in a road in Manhattan. How Sydney's Aboriginal people made tools from Thames flint. How Squirting Cucumbers came to grow on the banks of the Avon.
posted by Helga-woo (17 comments total)

How Indians (and eventually American hipsters) ended up drinking IPA. The East India Company worked out they could use barrels of beer as ballast on the tea ships going back to India if brewers could devise a beer that tasted no worse after the journey than it did in the first place.
posted by w0mbat at 11:23 AM on March 21, 2018 [14 favorites]

Thanks, w0mbat! Everyone was bored with "the hops thing kinda isn't my thing," so "no thanks, I don't like the taste of ballast" will liven those conversations up a little more.
posted by mph at 11:49 AM on March 21, 2018 [8 favorites]

Pretty amazing to think there may be million of tons of ballast on Newfoundland shores and that local people were making tools/arrowheads out of non-native flint.
posted by GuyZero at 12:00 PM on March 21, 2018 [2 favorites]

These links are outstanding, thanks for posting them!
posted by LobsterMitten at 12:02 PM on March 21, 2018 [2 favorites]

cathedral made of ballast brick in Belize
posted by ivan ivanych samovar at 12:10 PM on March 21, 2018 [1 favorite]

backup ballast brick cathedral, also of Belize
posted by ivan ivanych samovar at 12:11 PM on March 21, 2018 [1 favorite]

stones seem to have been a more common building material
posted by ivan ivanych samovar at 12:12 PM on March 21, 2018 [1 favorite]

Once they started using water as ballast, contaminated ballast water started introducing invasive species to the great lakes, like zebra mussels.
posted by devonia at 12:25 PM on March 21, 2018 [3 favorites]

Tanner Springs Park in Portland has a footpath paved with ballast stones offloaded from ships after they were filled with timber.
posted by paulcole at 12:52 PM on March 21, 2018 [2 favorites]

Also how red fire ants ended up becoming the masters of all they survey.
posted by Countess Elena at 12:57 PM on March 21, 2018 [1 favorite]

Upon this ballast I shall build my Church: Christ Church, Cambridge Mass.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 1:57 PM on March 21, 2018 [1 favorite]

There's some weird metaphor that the garbage put into the holds of trading ships was what they used to build churches in these far-of countries.
posted by GuyZero at 2:09 PM on March 21, 2018 [4 favorites]

well, and to be more prosaic, it may well just be that until the advent of cheap shipping and reliable concrete, that ballast stones and bricks were the cheapest, most durable material available in a lot of places. the tropics are unforgiving of wood.
posted by ivan ivanych samovar at 2:22 PM on March 21, 2018 [2 favorites]

It's also remarkable to think just in terms of the weight being exchanged from one place to another--if the weight of the ballast is roughly the same going each way, each ton of rock shipped from Europe in the fishing fleet represents a ton of *dried* fish (so even more living fish) taken from the Grand Banks in exchange.

Consider what it takes to move a sailing ship across the Atlantic. Consider the fact that, for this fleet, there was more gain in carrying dead weight to dump on the other side of the ocean to bring back tons and tons of fish.

I'm beginning to think that fishing should be considered almost a type of mining, in terms of pulling stuff up from under one part of the planet to scatter it about others.
posted by pykrete jungle at 3:20 PM on March 21, 2018 [6 favorites]

It's all very J G Ballast.
posted by Devonian at 3:53 PM on March 21, 2018 [4 favorites]

How Indians (and eventually American hipsters) ended up drinking IPA. The East India Company worked out they could use barrels of beer as ballast on the tea ships going back to India if brewers could devise a beer that tasted no worse after the journey than it did in the first place.

To bring that story full-circle, may I suggest an IPA from Ballast Point?
posted by Dip Flash at 7:36 PM on March 21, 2018 [3 favorites]

How Indians (and eventually American hipsters) ended up drinking IPA

Oh boy... India and IPA. I worked in Mumbai for many, many months a few years back and the beer situation was dire. To give you an idea, the hotel had an "Oktoberfest", which consisted of adding Castlemaine XXXX and Bud Light to the locally brewed Heineken and Kingfisher that they normally served. The one place I could not get IPA was India.

I was saved when I found a few bottles of Fullers (London Pride and Black Cab stout) and Shepherd Neame (Whitstable Bay pale ale) at the back of a chiller cabinet in the local supermarket. God knows how they got to Mumbai but, carefully rationed, they made for a good Friday night after work. I never found an IPA, though.

I gather the situation - at least in Mumbai - is better now, and there are some places serving decent beer. I sincerely hope, though, they have stopped serving "Indus Pride", which was a locally produced spiced lager, and truly one of the nastiest things I've ever tasted.
posted by 43rdAnd9th at 3:02 AM on March 22, 2018