Clay Newcomb Explains the Metaphor of "Bear Grease"

Tell me what you got there. Yeah, you know, talking about bear grease and trying to connect it to a podcast, I mean, at some point I'll have to explain the metaphor of bear grease. What's explaining now? Well, so bear grease at one time was this highly valued commodity. I mean, used as a unit of currency on the American frontier. And bear grease, bear oil would be the rendered fat of a bear that would turn into liquid. Like this right here. This is for you. Thank you. If you ever had, I mean, I know you've bear hunted, but have you had bear grease before? No, I've only, I've eaten bear. I've never rendered bear fat or cooked anything in bear fat. I've only just taken the meat and cooked it. Usually slow cooks. So what you would do with that is you would cook with it. You would fry with it. You could make pastries with it. You can use it to condition leather. You can use it to condition- It's supposed to be a mason for pastries, right? For like pie crust? Yep. And so there was a time when bear grease, bear lard was super valuable on the frontier before refrigeration because bear fat stayed, didn't go rancid as quickly as pork lard. So like on the, you would have pork and bear would be essentially the places where you would get it. This lasted longer. That a lot last on the shelf at your house, undefrigerated for over a year. Why does it last so much longer? Just whatever the constituency of bear lard is, it just stays good for that long. So going back to this metaphor of the name of bear grease, in our podcast, we're exploring things and even in the tagline of the podcast, we say that we're exploring things that are forgotten but relevant and we're searching for insight in unlikely places. And so like this bear grease, I brought you some stuff that you can do with bear grease. This is some bear fat lye soap. Have you ever used animal tallow soap? Just for bathing, washing hands. Man, that's incredible stuff. It really is. 100% all natural. It's an ancient process of using lye and animal tallow. What is lye exactly? Lye is, if you hadn't asked me, it's a chemical. It's a caustic chemical that you can buy just about anywhere. But shoot. How did they use it? It's like H2, something, something. They used to use ash. They got the lye from ash. It's a metal hydroxide traditionally obtained by leaching wood ashes or a strong alkali which is highly soluble in water producing caustic solutions. Sodium hydroxide. That's what it is. So they would get it from burning wood? Yeah. So the real primitive method for making soap from animal tallow, and you could make animal tallow soap out of anything. But bare fat lye soap is our specialty. But it's supposed to be real good for your skin. Did you sell this? No. You never sell it. Just give it away. No. No, no, no. It's not for sale. Did you make this? Yeah. Yeah. And so what's the ingredients? Just lye and... Four ingredients. Bare fat, sodium hydroxide lye, water, and then just essential oils. We just... For the smell? Yeah. It smells so good. What are the essential oils? We had a bunch of different kind of oils that we added in like peppermint, whatever. I don't know. Sometimes I'm amazed at how kind of like hygiene conscious us bear hunters are like making soap and stuff because the other thing I brought you, Joe, and I know you don't run a beard, but this is some bear grease beard oil that I made. And so that is a combination of three things. So it's cheating just a little bit, but it's one part bear oil, one part almond oil, one part jojoba oil, and then essential oils. And I mean, you can drip it out, put it on your hands, and... Ooh, that smells good. Yeah. Interesting. All right. And then the last one here, and then I'll start talking about my metaphor again if you want, but this is a bear grease hand salve. And so bear oil has all kind of folklore around it. And I'm in the process of like an anecdotal research, very serious project of exploring all these folk tales of bear grease and bear oil. So it's healing properties? Yeah. Yeah. They say, I mean, back in the day, bear oil would have been used to relieve arthritis pain. They say, and you can find this all over the internet, that bear oil cures baldness, which obviously is like a big piece of folklore. But it's still just fun. But going back to the idea that bear grease has all these uses is that this is a thing that at one time was a currency. And if you polled the United States, 330 million Americans, and you said, what is bear grease? I mean, like what percentage of people would even know what it was? Probably like 1% of 1%. Yeah. Yeah. So it's been forgotten. And so there was a time when, so there's an archaic unit of measure of a bear oil. They used to take the tanned neck height of a deer, which would have been a part of the buckskin that wasn't usable, the neck height, and they would have sewed it together, and they would have used it to have stored bear oil, and they called it an eel. So they would make a container out of it, like a wine flask almost. Eel of bear oil. And it's just a wonder. Spell it like eel? Well, it's been probably 10 years since I've actually seen it written. I think it's E-L-L-E, like an eel of bear oil, would have been a unit of measurement. So you could have gone to the store and you're like, well, I got two eels, bear oil, I'd like some flour, I'd like some whatever. Wow. It's a wonder that we don't call the US dollar an eel. Do you see what I'm saying? Because the buck is essentially connected to the value of a whitetail deer skin that was tanned out and ready for tanning. And that became equivalent to a buck. For $1. For $1. Wow. And again, this idea that there's some pretty amazing stuff that's forgotten. And then as hunters, we're very interested in using as much as we can from these animals that we're taking. Very interested in that. And so a bear offers a whole other market of commodity that really no other big game offers. And that, you know, of the big game that we hunt, like let's say an elk. I mean, like, you know, you're going to keep the meat, obviously. That's number one thing. You're going to keep his horns. But very few people would even keep the hide of that animal. And certainly they're not rendering down elk tallow. Whitetail deer would have the same sequence of usable commodities. Man a black bear. We have incredible meat. I would venture to say that 90%, maybe 80% of black bears that are killed in North America, their hides are tanned. They have, usually, especially in the fall, will have an incredible amount of fat, which can be rendered down into all these incredible, healthy, usable products. And so I mean, like, we have, my point is we use more of a bear than we do almost any other big game animal that we hunt.