How the Founding Fathers got their booze on
New York Post
By Danika Fears
October 4, 2016
Pidgeon Ey’d. Pungey. Priddy.
Benjamin Franklin knew more than 200 “round-about phrases” for drunk — and famously catalogued them for “sober” readers in his 1737 “Drinker’s Dictionary.”
But for someone who is thought to have proclaimed, “There cannot be good living where there is no good drinking,” Franklin wasn’t much of a boozehound — at least not by Founding Father standards.
George Washington appreciated porters. Thomas Jefferson favored French wines. John Adams savored cider.
They founded America — a country founded on booze — and they all enjoyed a tipple or two.
“If you were president, you drank much better stuff, not some swill some guy down the road made,” says Mark Will-Weber, author of “Mint Juleps with Teddy Roosevelt: The Complete History of Presidential Drinking.”
“Especially with people like Washington and Jefferson and Adams. These guys were fairly refined.”
Alcohol has been a fundamental aspect of American life since the very beginning, when pilgrims on the Mayflower switched up their plans, docking in New England instead of Virginia because they were running low on beer, which they deemed safer to drink than water.
Taverns became the bedrock of colonial social life — and some might even say that liquor fueled the revolution.
“Especially with those Boston area guys,” Will-Weber said. “A lot of these Sons of Liberty meetings were in taverns.”
A little liquid courage may have even led to one very notable act of rebellion — the Boston Tea Party.
“It’s possible they’d had a lot to drink and thought what the hell,” says Susan Cheever, author of “Drinking in America: Our Secret History.” “There was a lot of heroic drunken behavior.”
George Washington
Washington — who named three of his beloved foxhounds Tipsy, Tipler and Drunkard — made a killing selling whiskey at Mount Vernon, but his personal tastes veered more towards champagne, Madeira and beer.
“He made a fortune off distilling,” Cheever says. “Mount Vernon was the biggest distillery in the country.”
While Washington was mostly a man of moderation, he had a particular affinity for porters — especially one made by a Philadelphian named Robert Hare.
“He would mix it with molasses to give it a little thickness and sweetness,” Will-Weber explained.
And long before Washington had ever set his lips to a cup of Hare’s porter, he recorded an early recipe for “small beer,” a less alcoholic brew, in a notebook he kept while serving as a colonel in charge of the Virginia militia during the French and Indian War.
The 1757 notebook is still housed in the New York Public Library, which has made it and thousands of other manuscripts from early America available online thanks to a grant from the Polonsky Foundation.
NYPL research fellow Mark Boonshoft said this “small beer” was most likely drunk by soldiers under Washington’s command — not the future president himself.
It calls for a “sifter full of bran hops to your taste” that must then be boiled for three hours. Thirty gallons of that should then be put into a cooler with three gallons of molasses.
“Let this stand till it is little more than blood warm,” the recipe reads. “Then put in a quart of Yea[s]t if the Weather is very Cold cover it over with a Blank[et] & let it Work in the Cooler 24 hours then put it into the Cask.”
When Long Island’s Bluepoint Brewery was asked to pour a beer at the presidential debate at Hofstra University, one of the company’s brewers immediately thought of Washington’s recipe at the NYPL.
They fiddled with the Founding Father’s formula, mimicking it as best they could to make an authentic recreation of the original brew, which they’ve dubbed “Colonial Ale.”
“Our guys did a lot of work and research to try to connect the dots between what was written on the page and what we see now,” Bluepoint founder Mark Burford said.
“We did all the research to get Colonial Ale as close as possible using all those different ingredients.”
The result was a low-alcohol beer with a malty, nutty flavor.
“It’s a hearty beer for a small beer,” Buford said, adding, “Unless you’re told this is a beer from 1757, you probably wouldn’t know it.”
Washington may have enjoyed alcohol’s taste, but those around him benefited from its intoxicating effects, which allowed the sometimes stiff head of state to let loose like the rest of us.
“Alcohol actually improved him,” Will-Weber says.
“The knock against Washington was that he was cold, not very outgoing, but several testimonials said that after he has a couple of glasses of champagne he becomes quite gregarious and jokes around.”
Thomas Jefferson
Jefferson, who was deeply educated in the ways of European winemaking, took his drinking very seriously — and loved to lecture guests on his favorite varietals.
“He was basically the first wine bore,” Will-Weber explains with a laugh.
“Jefferson very much wanted to push this European way of drinking wine. He’s always talking about the bane of whiskey in America.”
When James Monroe took office in 1817, Jefferson sent him a letter congratulating him on his new post — and pontificating on which wines he should buy for the White House.
“He says, ‘I think you’ll make a great president,’ and the rest of the four-and-a-half pages is all about wine,” says Will-Weber.
“He says, ‘Let’s get these wines and here’s what I think we should order.’ It just shows how obsessed Jefferson was with wine.”
Jefferson was also a meticulous, some might say obsessive, notetaker. The NYPL holds one of the account books he kept in the late 18th, early 19th century, which includes a list of “wines provided at Washington.”
“It’s a day-to-day account of his life — things that are monumental moments appear as one line,” Boonshoft marvels.
In 1801, when the oenophile took office, he recorded having bought several pipes — a pipe is equivalent to 126 gallons — of Brazil Madeira and 360 bottles of Sauterne, a sweet French wine.
“I will ask that two pipes of Madeira of the Brazil best quality may be imported for me annually while here,” he wrote from the White House to merchant Thomas Newton.
His records show he also stocked up on bubbly, buying 100 bottles of champagne in December 1802. He purchased wines from Nice, Burgundy, Florence and Hungary as well.
Jefferson even took note of how long his Madeira supply lasted, writing that one pipe took 3.5 months to finish and another took 6 months.
His expensive tastes ultimately contributed to his fiscal downfall.
“Jefferson basically bankrupted himself because of his lavish entertainment,” Will-Weber says.
“He would serve this top-shelf wine that he could get from France or Italy.”
In fact, Jefferson’s wine legacy stretched into the 21st century, when several bottles of Bordeaux that supposedly belonged to him became entrenched in scandal.
In the mid-1980s, billionaire William Koch spent $500,000 on four bottles of the Bordeaux from 1784 and 1787 at an auction.
A German wine collector, Hardy Rodenstock, claimed he made the fortunate discovery in a bricked-up cellar in Paris. The bottles bore the initials “Th.J,” and Rodenstock went so far as to claim he had documents proving Jefferson had ordered them.
Koch spent another $1 million proving the bottles were faked — and even sued Christie’s auction house in 2010, claiming they ignored evidence the wines were frauds.
John Adams
Hangovers. The word didn’t exist in the 18th century, but Founding Fathers were grateful when they didn’t have them.
While in Philadelphia for the Continental Congress in 1774, John Adams stayed at the home of a wealthy lawyer, partaking in copious amounts of Madeira with his host and other gentlemen.
“Adams writes this letter home to his wife saying, ‘I was at Mister Chew’s mansion last night, and I drank Madeira at a great rate and felt no inconvenience the next morning,’ ” Will-Weber said.
“Having no inconvenience — it means he drank a lot and got away with it.”
There may be something to the old “apple a day” adage because Adams, who lived to the ripe old age of 91, began most days with a draft of hard cider — and treated it like medicine.
“In conformity to the fashion I drank this Morning and Yesterday Morning, about a Jill of Cyder,” he wrote on July 26, 1796.
“It seems to do me good, by diluting and dissolving the Phlegm or the Bile in the Stomach.”
The very next day he wrote, “I continue my practice of drinking a Jill of Cyder in the Morning and find no ill but some good Effect.”
But Adams was also well acquainted with the darker side of drink, having two sons who were alcoholics, Cheever explains.
“They knew that alcoholism was tearing their family apart but they didn’t know what to do about it,” she said of John and Abigail Adams.
Adams’ favorite son, Charlie, died at 30 of cirrhosis, gambling away his money and devastating his parents.
Thomas Boylston Adams also had problems with alcohol, and despite some success in business, he died in deep debt after developing a gambling habit.
“There never was harm in poor Tom except that he would drink,” John Quincy Adams’s grandson Brooks Adams said later. “He nearly drove John Adams and J.Q.A. into insanity with it.”
Samuel Adams
He’s the Founding Father most identified with alcohol thanks to the Boston Beer Company, which introduced their smash-hit lager named after the revolutionary over Patriot’s Day weekend in 1985.
Beer ran in the rebel’s family. His father, Deacon Samuel Adams, owned a malthouse, which became his son’s when he died in 1748.
But Samuel Adams never found much success in the beer business, and eventually his father’s estate was auctioned off.
Still, Samuel Adams — who was fined for drinking in public during his senior year at Harvard University — was a fan of brew, as were his fellow revolutionaries.
The NYPL has records from Boston Committee of Correspondence meetings, which include a request for members to fork over a dollar for their booze fund. The order was signed by Samuel Adams himself, and several other rebels, on Feb. 2, 1773.
“It was proposed & Voted, that a Dollar be advanced by each of the members of this committee, in order to purchase some Rhode Island Beer, for the use of the committee at their meetings, and said Advancement was accordingly made by the gentlemen present,” the request reads.
During the same meeting, they also voted “that the clerk be directed to bring in an account of the Expence already incurred for Liquors.”