The term dram is a staple of Scottish whisky drinking. Spend any time in a Scottish pub and you’ll hear calls for a ‘dram’, a ‘nip’, a ‘toot’, even ‘a wee one’. But dram is the favoured call, so much so that the Spirit of Speyside festival campaigned (unsuccessfully) to reinstate ‘dram’ as an official unit of measure for Scotch whisky.
In Australia, where Scotch has dominated the connoisseurs’ market for decades, you’ll often hear ‘dram’ rolled out when enthusiasts discuss whisky or order a glass.
But, unbeknown to most, Australia has, or had, its very own term for a pour of spirits – the nobbler! That’s right, if you were frequenting pubs and drinking dens in Australia 100 years ago you were asking for nobblers of whisky, rum or brandy.
So, where did ‘nobbler’ come from? And how did it become Australia’s dram?
The Argus, 1919
Ignoble origins
Nobbler, originally a regional English word, has several meanings stretching back to the mid-18th century. The OED tells us a nobbler is someone who strikes or hits, especially one striking inattentive members of a church congregation with a rod. A nobbler also meant a blow to the head, a person who tampers with a horse or greyhound before a race, or someone who uses underhanded methods, especially to bribe or intimidate a jury.
With those origins, the word was tailor-made for the convict-laden, grog-fuelled Australian colonies, and when nobbler arrived here, it took on a new meaning.
By the 1840s, nobbler was frequently recorded as referring to a glass of spirits – the serve itself, the vessel, or its contents. At the end of that decade, poets were reflecting on their lives in nobblers, ‘I always take things in their due moderation, and never exceed thirty noblers [sic] a day’ (‘The Lay of the Settler’). The term became so useful and potent that it quickly morphed into a verb.
To ‘nobblerise’, the Macquarie Dictionary confirms, was ‘to drink glasses of spirits, usually with companions’: ‘He was comfortably nobblerizing in the William Tell’ (1847); ‘She found him nobblerising at the bar of the hotel…’ (1848). By 1862, whole poems were even given over to celebrating ‘My Nobbler’. The term was also popular in New Zealand.
Exerpt from ‘My Nobbler’, Melbourne Punch, 1862
As the Australian spirits industry boomed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, advertisements spruiking local spirits by the nobbler filled newspaper columns. Australian or ‘local’ whisky was often slightly cheaper by the nobbler than imported, predominately Scottish whisky (a lot has changed there). But just how much whisky ended up in your nobbler depended on who was pouring.
Measuring the nobbler
It sounds crazy by today’s standards, but prior to a mandated unit of measure for a spirits serve, the hotelkeeper would hand over the bottle and the patron would simply pour their own. But after World War I, publicans were claiming that customers were sneakily pouring themselves up to a ‘half gill’ per nobbler rather than the generally agreed upon 1⁄4 gill (35.5 ml). Who’d blame them.
The push for an accepted industry standard won out, and soon most Australian states had moved to pouring whisky and spirits by a fixed measure using a glass or jigger.
Illawarra Mercury, 1927
Throughout this period, incredibly, the maximum price and size of a nobbler was set by the government’s Prices Commissioner in consultation with the trade.
Prices fluctuated depending on import duties and excise rates and the type and brand of spirit. But at the height of World War II in 1943, asking for a nobbler of whisky got you no less than 13/16ths oz., around 25 ml. You would’ve paid 9d. for a nobbler of Old Court (around 80 cents today), or 1s. 2d. for a nobbler of imported Scotch ($1.20).
Death of the nobbler
Depressingly, the nobbler fell out of common usage from the 1960s onwards. As with any word that slips into obsolescence, the reasons were probably many fold.
But one possible explanation is that bartenders could once pour whatever measure they liked unless the customer specifically asked for the quantity of spirit they were after (‘1oz.’ for instance).
Australia then went metric in the 1970s. Eventually, bartenders had to measure out the mandated 30 ml ‘nip’ or ‘shot’. The days of the old-fashioned, free-flowing nobbler were over, and the term went out of vogue.
But with local whisky firmly re-establishing itself again, could the nobbler make a comeback? Might it be rescued so we can nobblerise once more? See you at the bar to find out.
Thanks to Ryan Marshman, owner of Melbourne’s The Great Beyond, for bringing back the nobbler and inspiring this research.