Mizz-Ou La La! : How Missouri Saved French Wine

Episode 39: One Man's Dream.

Ragweed... You bitch!

Soooo... Allen is feeling the brunt of the ragweed invasion and we've decided to give you an encore presentation of "TAVERNS, SALOONS, & PUBS: 10 OF THE OLDEST BARS WEST OF THE MISSISSIPPI." If you haven't heard it you'll definitely want to give it a listen and if you have heard it, ahhh it's been a few months, you may want to give it another go.

Enjoy and talk to you soon, - BMAC

Episode 38: America's Beer: Only in America.

What’s the connection between a 15th Century Italian Explorer, a 19th Bavarian brew master, a Bohemian Czech community, and Lite Beer from Miller?  One last look at the “collisions of perfect storms” that made German style Lagers into America’s beer, plus Drunk Uncle Al’s Joke of the Week.

https://soundcloud.com/hishtory/americas-beer-only-in-america

Episode 37: America’s Beer: Beginnings of the Beer Barons

There’s been something burning Allen’s ass… and he let’s you know what.  He revisits an earlier episode and a truly piece of FAKE NEWS, and blows up a pile of bullshit about the history of beer that’s been floating around on the interwebs for the past 21 years. 

Also, a brief look a the climate surrounding immigration between 1840 and 1860, the German architects of the brewing industry in 19th Century America, and why American beer is “slightly” different than the German lager it’s modeled after.  Along with a few words of opinion and Drunk Uncle Al’s Joke of the Week.

Episode 36: “America’s Beer.”

How did a country that was established by rebellious Ale drinking British subjects become a German Light Lager loving country?  It’s an interesting story and goes back to mid 19th Century immigrants from Germany who brought their unique brewing practices to the United States.  But, what’s the difference between Ales and Lagers?  And why did the Germans, Bohemians, and Czechs brew lagers when all of the other cultures around them were brewing ales? 

This episode touches on all of these topics, plus a special offer for Hishtory’s Patreon Patrons on next year’s Grand Pub Crawl Tour of Ireland, and, of course, Drunk Uncle Al’s Joke of the Week.

Episode 34: "Brotherly Love- Monks and Beer in Medieval Europe.

This week Allen takes a look at the foundations between Catholic Monasticism and the brewing of beer, beginning with Saint Benedict’s call for monastic hospitality in the 6th Century CE, and following the course of the Benedictine monks, who then split and morphed into the Cistercians, who then split and morphed into the Trappists, who still carry on the tradition of Monastic Brewing today, along with a group of American Benedictines who have brewing Belgian style ales in Italy since 2012. 

IN ANNOUNCEMENTS: a call for more 5 star reviews on iTunes; invitation to a Salute to Santa Fe Brewing at the Pub; get your reservations in for The Grand Irish Pub Crawl (and some Hishtory) Tour in June 2018; and whoever hit Allen’s Chevy Volt at the HyVee is a fucking asshole.

Also, we received an email about depressing subjects in Hishtory.

And of course, Drunk Uncle Al’s Joke of the Week.

Episode 19: WEIRD, WHACKED, and WTF?!?!?

Ttsongsul: Korean Poop Wine

HISHTORIC HANGOVER HELPERS

Surströmming:  Swedish Fermented (Rotten Fish) from the Mad Chef.

Chicago and Prohibition

Chicago, the Second City, the City of Big Shoulders, Chi Town, the Midwest Metropolis.  It’s a great city, and what a fantastic wealth of history, especially the history of brewing in Chicago.  Chicago was established in 1833, the first large commercial brewery, J&W Crawford’s Brewing Company, opened in the burgeoning city just two years later.  Prior to that, the taverns of the frontier settlement had brewed their own beer, and with varying degrees of quality.  During the late 1830’s and 1840’s a number of breweries popped up, with most of them failing and shutting down, but in 1842 an Alsatian immigrant, Michael Diversey, bought a struggling brewery and turned in around.  “The Chicago Brewery,” as Diversey called it, produced ales and porters, and dominated the beer industry in Chicago until it was destroyed in the great Chicago fire of 1871.

 In the 1840’s, German and Irish immigrants began to arrive in Chicago, and with the Germans came the brewing of lager beer, the favored beer of Germany.  Lager beer differed from the more familiar American ales of the time; it was brewed using a slower acting bottom fermenting yeast rather than the top fermenting ale yeast.  For optimum quality and drinkability, lager needed to be stored in cool underground caverns or cellars of about 45 to 55 degrees while it fermented, taking about three months for lager beer to finish out, whereas ale yeast could be used to brew beer in much warmer temps 65 to 70 degrees, and ales would finish fermenting in as little as a week. 

 In 1847 two German immigrants, John Huck and John Schneider, opened the first lager brewery in Chicago, and thus began the transition from Chicago, and America for that matter, of being an Ale drinking culture to a lager drinking country.   However, the lager brewers at the time weren’t met with open arms by the old school American population.  Lager was seen as foreign and different, across the established communities of the day by the nativist element, and Chicago was no exception.  But it was not only the lager beer, but how beer was drank by these new immigrants and incorporated into their culture.

Cartoon depicting anti immigrant sentiment against Irish and Germans in the mid 1800’s

Sundays were family days for both the Germans and the Irish, but especially the Germans.  Groups of immigrants gathered at parks and open common areas with family members and drank lager beer while eating, singing, and playing of games.  Sunday was their day.   There was no such thing as the weekend in the 19th Century,  a concept that doesn’t come along until labor reforms began to emerge in the 1920’s and 30’s. Men, women, and some children of the poorer immigrant communities, worked 12 hour days, six days a week, Monday through Saturday- the 40 hour work week was decades away.  Thus, Sundays became their day to be with family and friends and enjoy a drink.  The German saloons began to build beer gardens, and the Irish taverns converted backyards into areas where the immigrant families would gather on Sunday afternoons.  By 1850 more than half of Chicago’s population of 28,269 were foreign born, with the Irish comprising 21% and the Germans 17% of Chicago’s total population.

The old stock American population of Chicago was for the most part fearful of the foreigners, especially the Catholic Germans and Irish.  The old school Protestant Christian population saw Sunday celebrations by Catholics as disrespectful and heretical to their values.  In 1855 the “No Nothings,”  a political party largely formed as an anti immigrant and anti Catholic movement, campaigned and elected Levi Boone, the great nephew of the legendary Daniel Boone, to a one year term as mayor of the city of Chicago, with Boone carrying a slim majority with 53% of the vote.  He was racist, pro slavery, anti Catholic, anti immigrant, and a temperance reformer.  To quell the rise of the German and Irish population and their merry making on the Sabbath, one of his first acts as mayor was to ramrod an ordinance through the city council which raised the saloon licensing fee from $50 dollars per annum to $300.  Secondly, he declared that the city was going to enforce the long overlooked Illinois State law that prohibited Sunday saloon and tavern openings and sale of alcohol.  At the time there were 675 drinking establishments in Chicago, of which only 55 were owned by old stock nativist Americans.  The Germans and the Irish perceived Boone’s stance as an open attack on their values and way of life, and most refused to abide by the law.  When the day came for the ordinance to go into effect, Mayor Levi Boone was ready.

Thirty three violators who had not paid the $500 for their saloon licenses were arbitrarily arrested, all of which were either German or Irish; not one nativist American was targeted, even though it was known that some of them had not paid the new license fee.   It was agreed by the prosecution and defense attorneys that only one of the defendants would be tried, and that trial would be used as a test case for the rest, and whatever the outcome of that one case, the same verdict would be applied to all.  On the court date, only a few of the immigrant saloon owners and their patrons showed up at the courthouse to see the outcome of the trial, but the judge presiding over the case had been delayed in getting to Chicago, and the trial was postponed to begin the following day.  This gave the saloon owners and their followers time to pull together a mob of protestors, numbering more than 600, and the next morning they marched upon the courthouse, clubs, guns, knives, and bricks in hand, and clashed with over 200 policemen and deputized citizens.  Shots rang out; a policeman was so severely wounded by a shotgun blast that he had to have his arm amputated.  One of the protestors was shot in the back, and died three days later.  Most of the fighting was hand to hand, repeating firearms were still a new thing at the time and were owned by very few persons.  The local militia arrived with cannons, which the bared down upon the rioters and warned of opening fire.   The leaders of the protest called their followers to back down and they returned to their neighborhoods.  So ended The 1855 Lager Beer Riot of Chicago.

Levi Boone, Mayor of Chicago 1855-1856

Eighteen rioters were arrested; sixteen Germans and two Irishmen.  Only the two Irishmen were brought to trial, the charges against the Germans were dropped.  Both of the Irishmen were found guilty of creating a public disturbance, but on their appeal, the charges were thrown out.  The city council, worried about another immigrant riot, rescinded Boone’s increase in license fees and agreed to return to the practice of overlooking the State of Illinois’ Sunday Saloon closing law.  Boone, seeing that he had no chance of winning reelection, did not run for mayor in 1856.  The riot did have one outcome; for the next150 years, the immigrant population of Chicago, along with their children and grandchildren, coalesced to form one of the most critical voting blocks in the city, whether it was Republican in the 1800’s and early 1900’s, or Democrats after the 1930’s.

For us looking back at Prohibition in 1920, from our vantage point of nearly one hundred years later, we can easily wonder what the public was thinking.    One only has to look at the Lager Beer Riot incident in 1855 to see what happens when you try to impose a law upon people who believe that it is unjust.  This wasn’t just an attack upon drinking; this was a law levied against a way of life.  And by 1920 when the 18th Amendment went into effect, it’s mind-boggling to believe that the proponents really thought they could stop drinking in America?  It was insane.  Society was primarily comprised of European cultures.  One simply has to look at the history of the Greeks, then Romans, French, Germans, the Scots, the Irish, the English, the Norse, the Slavic countries- these are all drinking cultures and the interwoven place of alcohol within these societies is without question, and for a few thousand do-gooders in the early 1900’s to think that they were going to be able to stop the drinking habits of 100 million people in America is ludicrous.  People are going to drink, and someone was going to make certain that they would be able to do such.  When we look at the drug cartels today, who are in the business of smuggling and selling contraband through a black market, with violence always as a tool of their trade, well it’s not surprising to us when we look back upon what happened. 

Advocates for the Temperance movement, late 1800’s.  My response to their slogan, “Good!”

The late 1800’s and the very early 1900’s saw was the rise of the Anti Saloon Leagues and the Temperance Societies in America.  Their goal was to curb, if not completely eliminate the consumption of alcohol in the United States.  And how they were able to politically make this happen is a convoluted and crazy chapter in American history.  It was believed by many of the reformers that all of the social ills in the United States- poverty, unemployment, spousal abuse, child abuse, chronic illness and disease, crime - were in part or wholly a result of the consumption of alcohol.  And while these things may be associated with alcohol abuse in certain individuals, alcohol itself was not the cause of abuse and degradation in society.

The first salvo in the dry versus wet war came in October of 1918, near the end of World War I, when Congress passed the Wartime Prohibition Act, which banned the sale of any alcoholic beverages that were more than 2.75% alcohol by volume.  The so called rational behind the law, was that it would save grain during the war, but it was actually an attempt at appeasement towards the Temperance and anti-saloon movements.  President Wilson didn’t sign the law into effect until November 11, 1918, which was the day that War actually ended and the law did not go into effect July 1st of 1919.  The result of this first attempt at prohibition was that breweries began making lower alcohol beers, and distillers around the country slowed down production until it was known how long the law would remain.

But, before the Wartime Prohibition Act could go into effect, our brilliant political leaders ratified perhaps one of the most short sighted changes ever to the US Constitution.  January 16, 1919, the 18th Amendment to the Constitution was passed by the required measure of 36 state legislatures. President Woodrow Wilson vetoed the bill when it came to his desk on October 27, but his action was overridden the very same day by that brilliant ship of fools known as the US House of Representatives, and the next day, the Volstead Act, named after the chairman of the Congressional Judiciary Committee, US Congressman Andrew Volstead of Minnesota was ratified into law, to go into effect on January 17th, 1920.  The long title of the act was: “An Act to prohibit intoxicating beverages, and to regulate the manufacture, production, use, and sale of high-proof spirits for other than beverage purposes, and to ensure an ample supply of alcohol and promote its use in scientific research and in the development of fuel, dye, and other lawful industries.”   The law superseded any and all state prohibition laws already in effect, and made it illegal to manufacture, transport, and sell intoxicating liquor.  What the law didn’t make illegal was the consumption of said liquor.

Six months before Prohibition went into effect, Chicago had 43 breweries in the city, but only 16 renewed their brewing licenses to make full strength beer for 1920.  These few breweries held out hope that the politicians would come to their senses and abolish the law and that they could get back to business.  Some of the brewers applied for near beer brewing licenses, what were being called “cereal beverages.”  Of the over 7,000 dram shops in the city, very few bothered to renew their liquor licenses for 1920.  On the Loop alone in downtown Chicago, there were 120 bars, of which only 16 renewed their licenses in hopes of a miracle.  And the saloons, bars and taverns at the time were more than just drinking establishments;  they neighborhood centers, where news was traded, or employers went looking for workers, and where at time when there was a distrust of banks, it was where the working class could get their paychecks cashed.  The business owners were slowing watching their livelihoods disappear, vanish, and they had no idea what they were going to do.  It wasn’t long before Chicago soon ran out of real beer, even before prohibition went into effect, and saloon keepers were forced to sell soda and cereal beverages.  The brewers and business owners of the city appealed to both Springfield and Washington DC, citing that besides the thousands of jobs that were going to be lost- brewers, maltsters, warehouse men, coopers, teamsters, truck drivers, salesmen, bartenders-  they estimated that the city was going to lose 8 millions dollars in tax revenue, and much more than that in real wages and .  To which the Dry proponents glibly responded, a minor increase in local taxes would easily cover the shortfall. 

The 18th Amendment went into effect at midnight on January 17th, 1920.  And the first documented violation of the law happened, according to police reports at 12:59 AM in, guess where, Chicago.  Six armed men broke into a two locked railroad cars and stole $100,000 worth of “medicinal” whiskey.  It was the first of thousands of organized crime activities in the Windy City over the next 12 years.

There were many who just sat back and waited, quietly observing what was going on, the grumblings, the worrying, the frustration and disappointment at what was about to happen.  These people realized that prohibition wasn’t going to fly with the people of Chicago, a population who was accustomed to serious libations.  And one of the observers was a local pimp and racketeer, Johnny Torrio.

Before Prohibition, organized crime in America… wasn’t.  Local gangs controlled the prostitution and gambling rackets, and there were turf wars, but nothing like what America was going to see over the next 80 years, and Prohibition was catalyst for the rise of organized in the United. 

 In Spring of 1919, seeing the writing on the wall, Johnny Torrio, along with brewer Joseph Stenson, started to buy up breweries in Chicago and the neighboring suburbs.  Later there were other investors/gangsters/bootleger; Dion O’Banion, Hymie Weiss, and Maxie Eisner, to name a few, but Torrio was the brains behind the move.  He arrived in Chicago from New York sometime around 1911, and he joined the Colisimo organization, controlled by Big Jim Colisimo, the boss, which ran the prostitutes and rackets on the south side of the city, under the political protection of First Ward Alderman Michael Kenna. It wasn’t long after Torrio’s arrival that Big Jim offered him the position as his right hand man. 

Johnny Torrio (center) and henchman, circa early 1920’s

Torrio was not the typical gangster of the era.  He was a quiet man, he seldom carried a gun, and he dressed like a mid level management businessman; nothing flashy or excessive, despite the fact that he had amassed a huge amount of illegally gained wealth.  And although he was a pimp and by that occupation he rose in the Colisimo organization, he never slept with any of the prostitutes, nor did he drink or smoke.  He was home every night by 6:00pm to be with his wife for dinner in their modest Michigan Avenue apartment.  But, he had a great deal of business savvy, superb organizational skills, and was an outstanding negotiator who could handle the art of compromise.  And these skills served him well as he and Stenson purchased, leased, of fronted the amassed Chicagoland breweries. 

Torrio’s plan was genius.  After gaining control of the breweries, they would put well-paid pawns in the position of brewery presidents and managers.  John Stenson, the brains behind the breweries day to day operations, hand picked the people for the job.  If and when the breweries were raided by law enforcement, the appointed brewery officers and managers would take the fall, be arrested, then would be bailed out by Torrio’s attorneys, and then the local bribed politicians would be paid off to make the charges go away.  The brewery officers and managers, if they did their job well and took the fall, were handsomely awarded, and would in a matter of days be back at work in the brewery.  And the way all of this was paid for was by a slush fund that Torrio held back on every barrel of beer.  The syndicate was selling a barrel at $50 to $55 each, of which $10 was held back on each one.  It is estimated that Torrio’s operation, by 1924, was generating between 28 and 51 million dollars a year in sales

When Prohibition became law in Chicago, Mayor William Thompson made sure that brewery raids were as uncommon as a snowball in hell, and local saloons openly operated, with thousands of licenses being issued for Soda Parlors, the most common front for bars, taverns, and saloons.  Virtually every cop and politician in the city knew what was going on and they turned a blind eye, with their pockets stuffed with cash.

Torrio continued to consolidate his power across the city, bringing gangs together with everyone reaping the benefits of bootlegging.  The north side, at Torrio’s direction, was run by Irish mobster, Dion O’Banion.  The west side was ran by two buys named Druggan and Lake, while Torrio maintained direct control of the Southside, but where there is money, there is going to be competition, and it came in the name of Spike O’Donnell.

The O’Donnell gang was a small operation, in comparison to the Colisimo organization, but they were brash and had hijacked several truckloads of Torrio’s beer and took it out of town to sell.  When Torrio failed to retaliate, out of fear that if violence erupted it would bring on the scrutiny of law enforcement, the O’Donnell’s continued to hijack trucks, and then had the balls to move into Torrio’s territory and through intimidation and violence, forced Torrio’s saloon accounts to buy the stolen beer.  Torrio continued to turn his cheek, held his enforcers at bay, and to regain the saloon accounts, lowered the price of a barrel of beer by $10.  But, eventually, somebody in the Torrio organization had had enough, and one of the O’Donnell’s beer runners name Jerry O’Connor was shot and killed.  Accuse in the shooting was one Dan McFall, a known Torrio ally.

In April of 1923, William Dever was elected mayor of Chicago, mainly because the people of the city saw Big Bill Thompson getting very rich off of the illicit criminal activities associated with bootlegging and illegal brewing.    And just as Johnny Torrio had feared, Dever used the O’Connor shooting as a catalyst to begin a crackdown on the scores of breweries that had been operating in Chicago with impunity.  Dever held a press conference and announced his intent to close down the breweries, with each one shut down then being put under police guard so they could not be reopened, and police patrols would be increased so beer from neighboring communities could not be brought in by truck.

Torrio and the others got creative.  The cops didn’t have enough manpower to guard every brewery in town, so at those facilities that they hadn’t yet shut down, trucks filled with near beer would drive out of the front doors, while sneaking out the back would be carefully disguised shipments of real beer.  Another strategy employed was buying cops at the precinct headquarters so they would tell the bootleggers when and where the raids were coming.  The cops kept shutting down saloons, however, and with that there became fewer and fewer places for the gangsters to sell their bootlegged beer.  So when competition begins to get fierce between the gangs who had before hand been working, people start eliminating their competition, and that means killing. 

Dever’s war on the gangsters backfired; instead reducing violence and murder, it escalated it.  But Dever swore he wouldn’t back down until every brewery, every saloon, every soda parlor, every grocery store that sold liquor or beer was shut down.  Besides that, Dever began a campaign of circulating “alternative facts” that the gangsters were poisoning their product, which makes no sense at all- why would you want to kill your customer base.  But, there were people getting poisoned, they were buying product from less scrupulous sources to get alcohol; homemade bath tub gin, for example, which was often made with wood alcohol or methanol, both of which are toxic.  Johnny Torrio may have been a gangster, but he wasn’t a crook; he never cheated his customers, his informants, his employees, or the cops and politicians he had on the books.  Everybody down the line was taken care of, it was just good business.

Through 1923 and 1924, Dever continued his crusade to end drinking in Chicago, while Johnny Torrio and his associates and competitors continued their work in brewing beer and helping saloon owners keep their doors open.  But Torrio had one major problem in his alliances; Dion O’Banion.

Dion (Dean) O’Banion

O’Banion was an Irish mobster on the city’s North Side, and besides being a bootlegger, he owned a florist’s shop.  Of all of Torrio’s coalitions, O’Banion’s was probably the most fragile.  O’Banion’s style was quite different Torrio’s; whereas Johnny would try to smooth over disagreements with competitors and try to come to a mutual agreement, Dion O’Banion was always ready to resort to violence.  An example of the difference between Torrio and O’Banion’s styles of negotiation happened when two crooked, but enterprising, police officers held up one of O’Banion and Torrio’s beer trucks.  As was customary, the drivers paid the cops $250, which was the going rate to let the bootleggers go on about their business, but the policemen demanded an additional $300.  Then drivers, who didn’t have the authority to give over the extra cash, went to find a phone, while the cops watched the truck.  They called O’Banion at his florist shop, where unbeknownst to the gangster, the police had the phone line tapped.  When the driver told O’Banion the story, he screamed over the phone “Three hundred to them bums? I can get them knocked off for half of that!”

The drivers, being a pretty astute guys and knowing they might be in over their heads, called Torrio who gave them instructions.  The drivers then called O’Banion back and relayed Torrio’s instructions; pay the cops, don’t let them have an excuse to cause trouble.  The cops leaked the news of the incident to the press, and the Chicago Daily News rightfully reported, “It was the difference in temper that made Torrio all powerful and O’Banion just a superior sort of plug.”

In another incident, a small time gang by the name of the Genna family was selling homemade, substandard hooch in O’Banion’s territory.  O’Banion demanded that Torrio send the Genna’s back into their own territory, but before Johnny’s associates could negotiate a deal with the Gennas, O’Banion sent his men to hijack a truckload of the Gennas cheaply made alcohol in retaliation, along with beating the driver to within an inch of his life.  Only through Torrio’s skills of compromise was he able to stop the Genna family from retaliating and starting an all out gangland war on the Northside.

O’Banion was chaffing at being under the Torrio’s command, and he began to hatch a plan to put Torrio away.  O’Banion announced that he was retiring from the bootlegging business and retiring to Colorado for the clean air.  He offered to sell his shares of one of their co-owned breweries for half a million dollars.  Torrio, along with one of his junior associates, Al Capone, who also had a stake in the brewery. Both men jumped at the deal, joyful to hear that the troublesome Irishman was leaving town.  The three were to meet at the brewery on the early morning of May 19, 1924, for the final transaction and completion of the sale.  What Torrio and Capone did not know is that O’Banion had been tipped off that a federal raid was going to come down on the brewery on that very morning.  Because Torrio had a prior conviction for violating Prohibition laws, O’Banion hoped that his plan would lead to Torrio being arrested, because the boss would face a possible minimum of three years in a federal penitentiary, which would allow O’Banion, (who surprisingly had not one conviction on his record- his underlings always took the fall for him), with Torrio being put away, to make his move, and take full control of all Chicago bootlegging operations from Torrio and Capone.

On the early morning of May 19, 1924, at the former Siebens Brewery on Larabee Street, the largest manufacturing facility of illegal beer in the Chicagoland area, Southside crime boss Johnny Torrio and Northside gang leader Dion O’Banion, along with a cadre of thugs and enforcers, met to facilitate the transfer of O’Banion’s shares in the brewery to Torrio and Al Capone.  As Torrio’s right hand man, Capone was going to be there for the deal, but the night before he and Torrio agreed that Capone didn’t really need to attend.  However, a Chicago police and US Treasury Department cooperative raiding party did show up, and besides Torrio and O’Banion they found five trucks loaded with 150 barrels of beer, full mash tuns of fermenting wort, and a racking room full of barrels.  O’Banion, in a feigned attempt to look like he was trying to flee, took a ledger book and not so subtly threw it under the loading dock so that the agents saw him do such.  When one of the agents looked into the book he found recent dates of deliveries and quantities of beer to saloons, groceries, and other shops, along with a record of which Chicago police offers, politicians, and prohibition agents had been paid off to leave the brewery’s operations alone.

Seibens Brewery Building, North Larabee St., circa mid 1960’s

O’Banion was glib during the entire event, which peaked Torrio’s suspicions.  Both men, along with thirty-one gang members, were arrested and taken to the Federal Building, where O’Banion almost managed to slip away, but he was caught before getting out of the building, to which he joked with the agents about being recaptured.  Torrio had thought they would be taken to the district police station, where he would make a generous payment to “Widows and Orphans” fund (i.e. a bribe) and they would be released, but instead when they were taken to the Federal Building and charged with violations of Federal law he immediately smelled a rat.  When it came time to make bail, Torrio peeled off $7,500 from a wad of bills, but dismissively left O’Banion to his own devices, who had to call a bail bondsman to front the five grand to secure the Irishman’s release.

The Sieben Brewery building, which Torrio, O’Banion, and Capone leased from the Sieben family, was operated by a patsy named George Frank, installed into the job by Torrio’s brewing partner, Joseph Stenson.  On paper, Frank had no connection to the crime syndicate.  Apparently, law enforcement had been watching the brewery for a long while, biding their time for the opportunity to catch the principals on the premises when they raided the brewery. 

It didn’t take Torrio long to see through O’Banion’s ruse to get him out of the picture.  He knew he would eventually get his revenge, but first he had bigger problems to take care of; with a federal indictment hanging over his head, he had to keep a low profile and turned the day-to-day operations over to the young 25 year old Al Capone.

Alphonse Gabriel Capone was born in Brooklyn New York in 1899, the son of Italian immigrants from Naples; his father was a barber and his mother a seamstress.  Al was one of nine children, and ironically, one brother Vincenzo, had a career that strangely paralleled Al’s- he changed his name to Richard Hart, went to work for the Treasury Department and became a Prohibition agent in Nebraska. Two other brothers, Frank and Ralph, remained close to Al and worked with him throughout his criminal career.  Al was initially a good student,  intelligent and gregarious, but he developed behavior problems in adolescence and was expelled from school at age 14 for hitting his teacher in the face.  As a teenager he worked at a bowling alley and ran errands for Johnny Torrio.  Torrio grew to know Alphonse very well, and learned that he could trust the young man with the most sensitive of errands.

Frankie Yale

Al jumped around from gang to gang, just small time stuff, until joining the very powerful Five Points Gang.  There he worked for and was mentored by racketeer and hitman, Frankie Yale, who tended bar in Coney Island at a saloon called the Harvard Inn.  It was there that Capone got into a fight with another gang member over Capone insulting a woman.  In the fight, Capone was nastily cut on the left side of his face, earning him the nickname of “Scarface,” which he hated.    In 1919, Capone was involved in a fight with a member of the notorious White Hand Gang, an Irish gang that worked the waterfronts of Manhattan and Brooklyn.  Capone nearly killed the Irishman, and the word on the street was that the White Hands had put out a contract on a “scarfaced dago.”   At the urging of Yale, Capone left New York for Chicago and began to work for Torrio.  Capone would eventually be involved in the extermination of the White Hand Gang.  Beginning 1925, with the cooperation and permission of the mafia in New York, Capone is suspected of putting out contracts on all of the lead figures of the White Hand Gang.  By 1928 the White Hands were gone and the Italians ran the docks of New York from that point on.

Upon his arrival in Chicago, Capone was immediately hired by Torrio as an enforcer at one of his brothels.  Capone, although married with a son, couldn’t keep from sampling the goods, and soon contracted syphilis from one of the prostitutes.  He probably would have had a successful recovery from the venereal disease had he gone to a doctor and taken Salvarsen treatments, but he didn’t want Torrio to know that he had been fucking the help, and as a result, syphilitic dementia would disable Capone over the last decade of his life. 

The year following Capone’s arrival in Chicago, Prohibition was enacted, and Torrio and his boss, Big Jim Colisimo, had a disagreement over business.  Torrio was ready to move into the bootlegging game, and had already purchased or leased a number of breweries, but Colisimo was worried that it would bring on heat from federal law enforcement that would interfere with the existing, and profitable, gambling and prostitution rackets.  Torrio saw Colisimo as an impediment to income growth, and invited Frankie Yale to Chicago to do a job for him.  On May 11, 1920, Colisimo was shot dead in the main foyer of the café he owned.  No one was ever brought up on charges, although rumors had it that Yale and Capone had carried out the hit.  Torrio stepped in and took over complete control of the Colisimo organization.

Assassination of Big Jim Colosimo

Between 1920 and 1924, Al Capone was not a publicly known name, but he quickly became Torrio’s most important henchmen; he stepped in and took over more and more of Torrio’s Southside and Cicero operations, allowing Torrio to concentrate on expanding the business, acquire more breweries, work on resolving disputes between the small gangs all across Chicago so that the flow of beer and whiskey could continue and bootlegging could be profitable for everyone.  But then Dion O’Banion thought he could do better without Torrio in the picture, which led to the raid on the Sieben Brewery.

The Sieben Brewery was Torrio’s largest producing facility, and the loss of it hit the syndicate hard.  Having seized the ledger with all of the syndicate’s warehouses, breweries, and customers listed, the Feds and the cops under Mayor Dever’s direction were able to tighten the noose on the bootlegging activities of Torrio’s operations, which had a crippling effect on income generation.  The whole enterprise relied on lots of cash; to pay off cops and politicians, to buy materials for production, to maintain equipment, to pay workers.  Nobody would work or sell materials on credit given the volatile circumstances at the time, nor was anyone going to write a check that could later be used in court as evidence, even though no one in the racket had a bank account in their name. 

With the shortage of production, beer prices rose from $55 dollars to $100 per barrel.   And the syndicate started losing market to a new innovation: Needle Beer.  So, here’s how needle beer worked-  There were five legally operating breweries in Chicago, all of them making near beer of less than .05% alcohol.  The saloons and soda parlors would by have barrels of legal near beer delivered to their establishments at $35 per barrel, with the legal Federal Governement Revenue Stamp upon them, then the shop owners would then take a needle and large syringe, insert the needle into the bunghole of the barrels and pull out a particular measure of near beer, then displace that amount with moonshine, grain alcohol, or whiskey.  Different bars used different methods, some even displaced the near beer with ginger ale and grain alcohol, giving the needle beer a much enjoyed sweeter profile.  The only income that the syndicate and gangs were seeing off of this practice was the purchase of whatever alcohol was being bought from them. 

Meanwhile, that summer, O’Banion and his wife did go to Colorado- as he told Torrio he was going to do, but he had no intention of retiring there.  His gang was still following his orders back on the North Side, with O’Banion returning to Chicago in the fall of 1924.  On the evening of November 9th, at his florists shop, O’Banion received a phone call placing a large order for a floral arrangement for a funeral that would be picked up the next morning.  Three men arrived at O’Banion’s shop that next morning, O’Banion greeted them cordially, one of the men, Frankie Yale, extended his hand and grasped O’Banion’s in a hand shake, which he gripped very tightly, while the other two men, members of Genna family, pulled pistols from beneath their jackets and fired four shots into O’Banion- two into his chest, two into his throat.  O’Banion fell to the floor, still conscience, and Yale then pulled out his pistol finished him off with a shot to the back of the his head.  There was one witness to the murder, an O’Banion shop employee who saw the whole thing, but when the police arrived he said he didn’t know who the men were, and couldn’t really describe them very well. 

A few weeks later, on January 25th, 1925, while still out on bail waiting for his trial of federal bootlegging charges, Johnny Torrio and his wife returned to their apartment after a day of shopping when two members of O’Banion’s gang, Hymie Weiss and Bugs Moran, pulled up in a car, shot Torrio’s chauffeur, then turned and fired at Torrio, hitting him in the chest and neck.  Moran then stood over Torrio and fired a shot into his groin and arm, then pressed the barrel of his revolver and pulled the trigger, but the chamber was empty.  Their guns empty, and a large crowd gathering, the two assassins panicked and fled, leaving Torrio severally wounded, but alive.  At Jackson Park Hospital, Al Capone slept on a cot in Torrio’s room, armed and ready in case of another assassination attempt, all the while his mentor was recovering.  Only two weeks earlier, Capone himself escaped an attempt on his life by Weiss and Moran; with the attempt on Torrio’s life, Capone knew that it was either us or them.

While convalescing in the hospital, Torrio realized that his coalition of pimps, racketeers, bootleggers, murderers, and extortionists had fallen apart.  A month after the shooting, only a few days after having been released from the hospital, Torrio appeared in court to face federal charges.  Still bandaged and weak from his wounds, he pled guilty, was sentenced to $5,000 fine and nine months in Lake County jail.  While in jail, Torrio called for Capone.  Johnny knew that he was probably still a marked man, and a third conviction on federal charges would mean he probably would never see the outside of a prison for the rest of his life.  He told Capone he was handing over the reigns of his organization to do with as he pleased.  After his jail sentence was over, Torrio and his wife moved to Italy in late 1925 and stayed there for 3 years before coming back to a life of retirement in New York.  He became involved in some legitimate businesses, including a legal liquor distributorship which he owned along with Dutch Schultz, but he ran afoul with the IRS and plead guilty to tax evasion in 1939 and spent another three years in jail.  Afterward, he lived peacefully, splitting his time between Brooklyn and St. Petersburg, Florida, until 1957, and while waiting for a haircut in a barber’s chair in Brooklyn, he suffered a massive heart attack, and died in hospital a few hours later.

When Capone took over the organization he already had plans and was ready to move.  First things he did was set up two networks for getting whiskey into Chicago- Canadian whiskey by boat from Ontario, and Scotch whisky by truck from Nucky Johnson, the political boss of Atlantic City.  The other thing he concentrated on was a way to get back into brewing beer.  With the Treasury departments attention fully upon all of the major shutdown breweries, there was no way that he was going to be able to get them up a going again, so he started a number of smaller clandestine brewing operations in warehouses in deserted and little used industrial areas throughout the city and suburbs, what some have referred to as “wildcat” breweries.  And he had help in this endeavor in the form of a very famous, but most unlikely, associate.

 Some of Capone’s men had been sent to St. Louis to steal barrel-tapping devices known as golden gates from the Anheuser Busch Brewery.  When August A. Busch learned of the theft and who had done it, he sent his son, Gussie –yes, the same Gussie Busch who bought the St. Louis Cardinals in the 1950’s and led the franchise to success over the following four decades- to Miami to talk to Capone, who was in Florida on extended vacation.  During the meeting, the two ultimately reached a deal that provided Capone’s wildcat breweries with over two hundred thousand of the tapping devices, but ALSO with yeast, sugar, and malt extract syrup for his wildcat brewing operations.  This made the brewing of batches of beer so much faster; by using malt extract syrup, Capone’s operations were able to bypass the lengthy and bulky method of mashing the malted barley and extracting the sugars needed for fermentation, a process that could take a day at least.  With the malt extract syrup, all that had to be done is boil water, add the syrup and hop pellets, mix, let it cool, add the yeast and within a week you had beer ready to be barreled and sent to the saloons. 

L to R: Adolphus Busch III, August A. Busch, and “Gussie” Busch, preparing to deliver the first legal beer to Washington DC after the repeal of Prohibition.

Gussie asked Capone to sign a contract on the deal, but the gangster laughed, told naïve Busch that a handshake would have to do.  Over the lean years of Prohibition, Capone made a small fortune for Anheuser Busch by buying equipment and supplies from them.  In his younger years, perhaps because he felt like it gave him a certain cachet, Gussie Busch would often tell friends of his meeting with Capone, but as he grew older and wiser he avoided the subject. I doubt they talk about that on the official tour in St. Louis. 

While this new arrangement and the wildcat breweries had taken some of the pressure off of Capone and his organization in 1926, he still had to deal with troublesome North Side remnants of O’Banion’s gang.  Capone offered peace if Hymie Weiss and Bugs Moran would come into business with him, a successful technique he hand learned from Torrio.  Capone offered Weiss all of the beer concessions north of Madison Street if he allowed the rest to Capone.  Weiss refused unless Capone handed over O’Banion’s assassins, including Capone’s friend Frankie Yale.  Capone told Weiss that was just something he could not do, and knowing that Weiss would again try to come after him, Capone put a contract out on Weiss, and that contract was fulfilled when Weiss and two of his men where mowed down by machine guns in October of 1926.  By the way, many people when you hear the name Hymie Weiss immediately think that he was Jewish, but he wasn’t- he was Polish Catholic, his birth name was Henry Earl Wojciechowski, and was buried Chicago’s Mount Carmel Cemetery, where his mentor, Dion O’Banion was also buried.

Hymie Weiss

With Weiss out of the way, Capone called for a citywide peace conference with the remaining rival gang leaders.  At the summit Capone called for unity, offering to share the lucrative beer market with his former adversaries.  “There’s plenty of beer business for everybody,” he said, “why kill each other over it?”  A pact was reached; Capone kept all of the business in South Chicago and in the West including Cicero.  The rest of the city and suburbs were divided among the others, and any and all disputes thereafter would be subject to arbitration through Capone himself. So, with there no longer needing to be any violence between the gangs, the bootleggers turned to securing more beer accounts.

The beer drummers, that is the salesmen, approach to marketing the product was simple; buy our beer or else.  Intimidation and physical violence proved to be effective motivators.  The days of needle beer were over.  If motivating the saloon keeper to buy the product proved unfruitful, then a well placed pipe bomb overnight would usually close the deal.  Arriving the next morning to their shop, one of Capone’s sales agents would show up, “Geez, if you had been selling Ace Beer, I bet that wouldn’t have happened.”  With a shop owner having the front of his saloon blown open, and having no way to fix it, Capone and his associated gangs would agree to fix the mess as long as the saloon keeper agreed to sell their beer and no other.  And the saloon keeper had to do what Capone’s men told him to do, or the next bomb wouldn’t blow up in the middle of the night when no one was there.

In 1927, there was another great development for the bootleggers; William “Big Bill” Thompson, who had been mayor when Prohibition started, was back in office having won the mayoral election over Prohibition crusading William Dever.  Capone backed Thompson’s campaign heavily, and he won the vote with 515,716 votes to Dever’s 432,678.    Dever had lost the support of his own Democratic party, many of the leaders of which had seen that his heavy handedness in dealing with the bootleggers had brought on more violence, not less.  Capone went to work with alacrity; he muscled in on and took over the territories of smaller gangs, like the Saltis and O’Donnell’s, giving them a chance to go along but if not…

In 1928, with a staff of 300 plus agents, the Chicago unit of the Prohibition Bureau was joined by a young ambitious agent named Eliot Ness.  Ordered by the US Attorney to start in the Chicago Heights suburb, Ness had success in busting a number of gambling and bootlegging operations, and on that strength he was assigned to start working on Cicero and the Southside of Chicago.  To find out where the beer was being brewed, Ness assigned agents to watch saloons and restaurants and wait for trucks to pick up empty beer barrels.  But, Capone and his associates had a strategy; barrels would not be taken to the breweries but to warehouses where they would be cleaned.  They continued the strategy but were unable to determine where the beer was being brewed.  And this is not surprising, as Capone would mover these portable wildcat breweries quite frequently, breaking down equipment and moving under cover of darkness to a new location. 

Eliot Ness

Eventually Ness and his men were able to track down some empty barrels to a warehouse on South Lumber Street that they were certain was a brewery and the rushed in busting down the front doors of the building, only to find a set of steel doors, which took them a number of minutes to open and by the time they did, everyone inside was gone.  Inside they found nineteen 1,500 gallon vats, two new trucks, and 140 barrels of real beer. While they were unable to arrest anyone, they felt like they had a small victory, and a strategy to get a Capone’s operations.

Ness had a ten ton truck outfitted with a heavy steel bumper in case they came upon another set of steel doors they would be able to bust them down.  Another wildcat brewery was identified on South Cicero Avenue.  This time, using the truck as a battering ram, they busted through the front doors, and then a false wall, several fermentation vats and five men working, including Steve Svoboda, a master brewer for Capone’s organization.

It was during this time that the issues between Bugs Moran and Capone came back to life.  Moran wasn’t living up to his end of the bargain that had been worked out at the peace summit in 1926.  Moran and Capone had never really buried the hatchet, and in late 1928 and early 1929, Moran had cut some deals to have hijackers grab Capone’s whisky shipments coming in from Canada. Capone learned through an associate of Moran’s what was going on.

Al Capone and Bugs Moran

On February 13, 1929, Moran received a phone call from a hijacker saying that he had just brought in a truckload of Canadian whisky from Detroit and Moran could have it for a really good price.  Moran didn’t ask questions, greedy to get a good deal on the hooch right under Capone’s nose.  It was agreed that the whisky would be deliveredthe next morning at 10:30am to the garage of SMC Cartage Company, a warehouse that Moran used to move product.

At 10:30am on February 14th, St. Valentines Day, four men arrived at SMC Cartage Company garage, two of the men in police uniforms and two in plain clothes, where they found seven men, whom they lined up along the wall, and then the men in plain clothes with long top coats, pulled out Thompson Submachine guns and opened fire.

When the real police arrived they found all but one of the seven men dead, and he refused to say who had done the shooting, and he died three hours later.  Among the dead was Moran’s second in command of the gang, a bookkeeper, an associate member who ran a number of laundries shops for Moran, two of the gang’s enforcers, another associate who handled Moran’s gambling operation, and the garage’s mechanic. 

Carnage of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre

But, they missed Moran.  He decided to sleep in, letting his number two handle the whiskey transaction, which turned out, of course, to be a ruse to get as many of the gang’s members together in one place as possible.  Eyewitnesses didn’t call the authorities right away, because when the looked toward the garage after the shooting they saw two police officers, guns in their hands, leading to men in topcoats and hats, hands in the air, to a car, which they entered and then drove away.

It was later learned that Capone had rented a house across the street from the location, and it was occupied by lookouts on the day of the massacre.  Bugs Moran, furious and scared, immediately told the police and the feds that the St Valentine’s Day Massacre had to have been the work of Capone.   A summons to appear before a grand jury on the incident was issued to Capone, but he feigned illness as an excuse not to appear.  On March 27, when he appeared in court to testify on his own behalf in an unrelated prohibition case, FBI agents arrested Capone for contempt of court in connection with not appearing before the grand jury.  He posted bail, and went on his way.  In time, all charges against Capone related to the Massacre were dismissed.

In the meanwhile, Ness continued to bust brewery after brewery, using the same tactics; follow the empty barrels and eventually they’ll take you to the beer.  Equipment was seized, workmen arrested, including Svoboda a second time and another Capone brewer, Bert Delaney.  Ness had wire taps on the phones of all possible associates to Capone and the illicit breweries, and they were soon able to identify the locations of many operations and bust them; wildcat breweries were found at the Old Reliable Trucking Company on South Wabash, an abandoned warehouse on North Kilbourn Street, and another location on South Wabash, which they had learned of through tapping a phone conversation between Capone’s brother Ralph and an associate- it would turn out to be the biggest raid of all.  On June 12, 1930, Ness’s brother in law, Alexander Jamie raided the South Wabash location and seized 50,000 gallons of beer, one hundred and fifty thousand gallons of fermenting mash, two brand new trucks, and six men arrested.   In his book The Untouchables, published in 1957, Ness took all of the credit for the Wabash Raid, as it came to be known, although he was never there, and he never mentions Alexander Jamie anywhere in the narrative.

This wasn’t Nesses only time to be braggadocios about his exploits, or lack there of;  he claimed in his book that he had raided 25 breweries and seized 45 delivery trucks, however US Attorney’s records from the time state otherwise, documenting only six breweries raided, along with five large beer distributing warehouses, with only 25 trucks and two cars were seized. 

Also in his book, Ness describes a parade he organized to infuriate Capone.  Supposedly, Ness assembled a number of vehicles that had been seized from Capone’s breweries, including pickups, ten ton freight trucks, and glass lined tank trucks, and he had his agents drive them down Michigan Avenue where they stopped in front of the Lexington Hotel, Capone’s headquarters.  A phone call was placed telling Capone to look out his window at exactly 11:00am.  According to Ness, who heard from an informant, Capone was infuriated, saying “I’ll Kill ‘im, Ill Kill ‘im with my own bare hands!”  However, no other source can verify the event, which leads many to believe that Ness made up the entire incident.

The culmination of all of Ness’ and his men’s investigations finally came to fruition on June 5, 1931 when Al Capone was indicted by the US Attorney on charges of Tax Evasion.  A week later another indictment was filed against Capone for violations of the Volstead Act.  Capone was charged with more than 5,000 offenses against the United States in regards to Prohibition, but the US Attorney was convinced he had a better case with the tax charges, and proceeded.  Presenting as evidence his lavish lifestyle, and the connection could be made between many purchases made by Capone, it was estimated that the gangster owed the United States at least $215,000 dollars in taxes.  He was convicted in November of 1931 of Tax Evasion, and sentenced to eleven years in federal prison.

After being held in Cook County Jail he was transported to the Federal Penitentiary in Atlanta.  In 1936, suffering from the effects of long term syphilis and gonorrhea, Capone was transferred to the newly opened Alcatraz penitentiary, where he spent most of his term in the prison infirmary.  A shell of a human being at this point, he paroled in 1939, and referred to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore to receive treatment for late stage syphilis, but Johns Hopkins refused to accept him, but Union Memorial Hospital did.  Grateful for the care he received, Capone donated to Japanese Cherry Trees to Union Memorial.  In March of 1940, Capone left Baltimore for his mansion at Palm Island, Florida. 

It is said at the end he had the mental acuity of a 12 year old.  On January 22, 1947, Capone suffered a stroke, three days later he died, surrounded by his family and Mae, his loyal wife of 29 years.  He was buried in Mount Carmel Cemetery, the same resting place as Dion O’Banion and Hymie Weiss.

A few months after the Capone conviction in 1931, in the mayoral election of 1932, William Big Bill Thompson, without the backing of Capone’s dollars, was defeated by Anton Cermak.  Cermak, a known advocate of repeal, ran on the platform, as did many politicians nationally, including presidential candidate Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932.  Coming to office on March 4, 1933, on March 22 FDR signed Cullen Harrison Act, legalizing beer manufacturing of beer of 3.2% alcohol and wine of the same alcohol content.  On December 5, 1933, the Twenty First Amendment of the United States Constitution was ratified, repealing the 18th Amendment, and so the failed experiment of Prohibition ended nationally in the United States.

Eighteen individual states, however, still had Prohibition laws in place, which kept moonshiners and bootleggers in business for many years to come.  The last state to repeal prohibition was Mississippi in 1966, although there are still many counties and municipalities in the South where even today you can’t buy a drink, a bottle, or six pack.

After Prohibition, Eliot Ness was assigned to Ohio, where he went chasing down moonshiners in southern Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee.  In 1935 he left the Treasury department and went to work for the city of Cleveland as Safety Director.  He vowed to root out corruption in the police and fire departments of that city.  He divorced in 1938, and that same year he went after the mafia in Cleveland, but his career gradually withered.  In 1942, he and his second wife moved to Washington DC where he went to work for the Federal government trying to clean up prostitution around military bases, where venereal disease was a major problem.  In 1944 he went to work for a security safe company in Ohio.  He ran unsuccessfully for mayor of Cleveland, was fired from his security safe job in 1951.  Divorced a second time, and married a third, he bummed from this job to that, heavy drinking seemed to be the reason he couldn’t hold on to employment- the irony being that the biggest crusader against bootlegging in Chicago during Prohibition turned out to be an alcoholic.  He fell in with a writer who helped him compose his book, The Untouchables in 1957, just before he died, a broken and forgotten man.  The Chicago newspapers carried no obituary notices, and it wasn’t until his book was adapted into a television series in 1959 that Ness gained national attention.

Ness claimed that Capone offered him $1,000 a week if he would have just looked the other way during his investigations, but Ness said he refused.  Of course, there’s no evidence that Capone ever made that offer other than Ness’s word.  Some historians don’t believe that Capone ever met Ness, and that the gangster wouldn’t have known him from the proverbial Adam if they passed on the street.  All Ness was to Capone was another G-Man trying to take him down.

Some last thoughts about Al Capone.  One biographer talked about how much he was beloved in the Italian American neighborhoods of Chicago.  When the great depression hit in 1929, Capone gave men jobs, he’d rent garages and basements and spare rooms from people for $25 to $75 a month, and never used the properties.  He’d have groceries delivered to widows, and started a program to make sure that all of the school children in Chicago had milk everyday.  Now this may have been self-serving, as the Capone organization had bought several dairies in the Chicago area, which they were using to launder money.  He also instigated a system of expiration dates being put on the caps of milk jugs because a child of a family he knew had died from drinking bad milk.  He lobbied to have it made a law that all milk in Chicago had to be dated.  Of course he had the machines to put the expiration dates on the milk caps.  Again, it may have all been self-serving.  But his death was grieved by and his funeral was widely attended by the Italian Americans of Chicago, and to this day, flowers are still regularly placed upon his grave.

Works Cited:

“Al Capone.”  FBI: History. https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/al-capone

Bergreen, Lawrence.  Capone: The Man and the Era. Simon & Schuster, New York.  1994

Encyclopedia of Chicago History Online.  2005.  http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/

Perry, Douglas.  Eliot Ness: The Rise and Fall of an American Hero.  Penguin, New York.  2014.

“Sieben’s History.” Sieben’s Brewing.  2006. http://www.siebensbrewing.com/history.htm

Skilnik, Bob.  Beer: A History of Brewing in Chicago.  Barricade Books, Fort Lee, NJ.  2006

The Lifeblood of a Small Nation

In the far northeast end of Ireland, from County Antrim, if you look out just 12 miles across the North Channel of the Irish Sea, you will see the Scottish headland known as the Mull of Kintyre.  On a clear day the misty craggy cliffs of the Mull can be seen rising, almost beckoning one to cross the water.  I know.  I’ve been there.  I’ve looked out across the channel and wanted cross over to Scotland, but, I have yet to go there.

I’m not the first to long for that crossing.  Even before the channel was covered in water, there was a land bridge; archaeologists tell us that the first human beings, hunter-gatherers to arrive in Ireland crossed over on foot near the end of the last ice age, around 10,000 BCE.  When the Celts arrived in Ireland in the 6th Century BCE, they called the original inhabitants the Fir Bolg, sometimes called the ‘Dark Men.’  It is believed that the Fir Bolg assimilated with the Celts, probably not of their own volition but through violence and subjugation, and their legends and culture were adopted and morphed into the Celtic mythology.  According to legend, the Túatha Dé Danann, translated to ‘the people of the gods,’ came from the North, presumably crossing over from Scotland, and gave the Fir Bolg a home in Ireland.  The connection between Ireland and Scotland from the beginning of history has, literally, been legendary. 

In the 5th Century CE, an Irish tribe of Celts called the Dál Riata, crossed the North Channel from Antrim and expanded their territory into the Mull of Kintyre and the Argyll regions of Scotland.  Before the Dál Riata arrived in Caledonia (what the Romans called the land that would one day be called Scotland), according to Roman historians in Britannia, the only people living there were the Picts, another group of Celtic tribes that had migrated into Scotland from England.  The Picts were so troublesome for the Romans that they built two walls, Hadrian’s Wall in the 120’s CE and the Antonine Wall in the 140’s CE in an attempt to keep the Picts out.  But the Roman army left Britannia in the 400’s, leaving a power vacuum; the Picts expanded into northern England, the Angles and Saxons invaded Essex and East Anglia, and the Dál Riata expanded into western Scotland.  Within 100 years the Dál Riata held three times more territory in the west of Scotland as they did in the north of Ireland. 

The exchange of culture and trade across the North Channel between Ireland and Scotland was solidified for the next Millennia, interrupted only briefly by the Viking invasions of the 8th and 9th Centuries.  Clans like the MacFergus (i.e. Ferguson), MacDonald, McConnell, McKay, Campbell, Kerr, MacGovern, MacAdoo, Murdock, MacAlpin, MacAngus, MacConnahey, Costigan, among others, intermarried, fought together and against each other, some had land holdings in both Ireland and Scotland.  They shared the same early Christian beliefs, most of which had been spread through the establishment of monasteries by Irish St. Columba of Donegal. They traded goods and ideas. One of which was whiskey.

Lands held by Dál Riata circa 5th - 6th Century CE

It was Christianity that brought whisky to Europe.  Irish monks in the mid First Millennia AD, about the same time as the Dál Riata were expanding into Scotland, these monks brought the art of distillation to Ireland from the Near East.  Alembic stills were brought to the monasteries of Ireland and Scotland and used for distilling medicinal and aromatic therapies. At some point in time, some of the monks had the brilliant idea of distilling ale, which separated the alcohol in the ale from water, that is the ‘Spirit’ of the drink.  The monks called these earliest distilled spirits Aqua Vitae, Latin for “The Water of Life,” but in the local vernacular, the Gaelic language, ‘Water of Life’ translated to Uisce Beatha, which over time was shortened to Uisce, and later was Anglicized by the English speakers to “Whisky.”

Now whisky, whether it is from Ireland and spelled Whiskey, or from Scotland and spelled Whisky, was in the Medieval period regardless of where it was made, basically the same thing; water, malted barley, yeast to make the mash, and then it would be distilled.  This art of distilling seems to have spread through both Ireland and Scotland around the same period, which would make sense, since the monks of various monasteries across the region would have shared recipes and techniques regarding whisky production.  The two earliest written references we have of whisky being made are both from the 15th Century, and one is from Ireland and the other was from Scotland.  In Ireland, in The Annals of Clonmacnoise, it was described how a head of one of the clans died at the monastery after drinking an excessive amount of aqua vitae. In Scotland, King James IV granted a large amount of malt to one Friar John Cor specifically for the making of aqua vitae for the Scottish court.  And while this is the first written word regarding whisky production in Scotland, undoubtedly the spirit had been being distilled for many decades, if not centuries, prior to the written documentation, since we know that the monks had knowledge of distillation going back a thousand years earlier.  My guess is that they had been distilling ale for a long time, they just hadn’t let the word out to the rest of the world.  Maybe they wanted to keep it all to themselves.

In the medieval period there were no laws in Scotland regarding exactly how spirits had to be produced to be called whisky.  But, today, according to the Scottish Whisky Regulations of 2009, whisky in Scotland must meet certain requirements to be called Scotch.  It has to be produced from a licensed distillery in Scotland, and that includes mashed, washed, fermented, and distilled on the grounds of the named distillery.  The spirit must be twice distilled.   It must be fully matured in a licensed warehouse in Scotland in Oak casks of no larger than 700 litres volume (that is 185 US Gallons) for a minimum of 3 years and 1 day.  It may contain no other ingredients except water and plain unflavored caramel coloring (though only the cheapest of blended whiskies would ever add coloring), and it cannot be less than 40% Alcohol by volume (that is, 80 proof).

There are really only two types of Scotch whiskies, but these two types are used to make four varieties.   The most well known type is Single Malt Scotch.  Single malt must be produced from a single distillery using only water and malted barley by batch distillation in single pot copper stills.  The other type of whisky is Single Grain Scotch, which is also produced at a single distillery, but along with water and malted barley, it may include grain whisky made from another type of unmalted grain (that is corn, or rye, or wheat) or perhaps malt from one of these grains.  The word single in either of these types denotes that came it came from a single distillery, not a single type of grain.  Now, from Single Malt and Single Grain whiskies, the four varieties of whisky are made:  Of course, Single Malt Scotch.  Then it gets confusing to the layman, so follow me here.

There is Blended Malt Scotch Whisky, which is a blend of two of more Single Malt whiskies from two or more different distilleries.  Then there is Blended Grain Scotch Whisky, which is a blend of two of more single grain whiskies from two or more different distilleries.  And then there is Blended Scotch Whisky which is a blend of one or more single malt Scotch whiskies with one or more single grain Scotch whiskies.  Blended Scotch accounts for 90% of the whisky produced in Scotland; all the well known brands, Dewer’s, Johnny Walker, J&B, Cutty Sark, Famous Grouse, Chivas Regal, Bells, Ballentine’s, Grant’s, Teacher’s, and so forth.

Now besides types and varieties of Scotch, there are five regional areas of Scotch distilling. 

Lowland Scotch comes from southern Scotland, basically the area south of a line drawn from Glasgow to Edinburgh to the English border. There are currently only five distilleries in the Lowland region.

The Speyside has the most distilleries, 103 is the most recent account.  Speyside gets its name from the River Spey that flows through the region west of Inverness and the area is centered around the town of Elgin.  It is said that the water from the Spey is exceptionally well suited to Scotch distilling, and some of Scotland’s most famous Single Malts hail from this region, including Balvenie, Cardhu, Glenfiddich, The Glenlivet, and The Macallan.

The Highlands are the largest region by far, and include the sub region that includes the islands of Skye, the Hebrides, and Orkneys.  Famous Highland Distilleries include Dalmore, Glendronach, Oban, Glenmorangie, Highland Park, and Taliskar. 

Campbelltown is the smallest region, which is centered around the community of the same name on the Mull of Kintyre.  At one time there were 34 distilleries in the area, now there are only three; Glen Scotia, Glengyle, and Spring Bank.

The last area, Islay, an island just west of the Mull of Kintyre and north of Ireland, is probably best known for the smokiness of the malt whiskies they produce.  My favorites from this region are Caol Ila, Lagavulin, and Laphroaig. 

Whisky Distilling Regions of Scotland

All of the regions produce somewhat different styles of Scotch; Lowland whiskies tend to be soft and light, with grassy notes with subtle tastes and delicate aromas.  Speyside whiskies are known for sweet fruity character.  Highland whiskies go from very dry to sweet; lots of variations, just like the landscape of the Highlands itself.  Islay whiskies are dry, salty, and very smoky.

Since all whiskies, wherever they are made, are basically the same ingredients; malted and unmalted grain, water and yeast, what makes Scotch… Scotch?  Three things make Scotch unique, or which Scotch shares 2 with most other whiskies; First, there is Copper pot stills, which are built in such a manner that as the vapors rise those that are not as light condense at the top of the still and drop back into the wash to be distilled again.  Secondly, cooperage and the aging of the whisky in Oak barrels, most of which have been previously used in the aging of American Bourbon, Sherry, Port, Madiera, or Bordeaux and then recharred to bring out the hidden flavors in the wood.  Irish whiskey distillers use previously used barrels, however most American whiskey and bourbon distillers use new charred barrels.

Copper Pot Stills at The Glenmorangie Distillery, Ross-shire, The Highlands

But the thing that makes Scotch unique is how the malt is dried over an open peat fire.  Peat is partially decayed vegetation or organic matter that is unique to natural areas called bogs, which are found all over Scotland.  Peat is harvested by cutting it from the ground and then allowed to dry after which it can be burned.  It was an important fuel source for many populations for thousands of years, including the Scots and Irish back during the formative years of whisky development.  Malted barley is barley that has been steeped in warm water, begins to germinate, which converts the starch in the grains into sugar, then the germination is stopped by drying the barley with heat.  Malt for Scotch is dried, in varying degrees depending upon the distillery, over an open peat fire, with the peat imparting smoky flavoring to the malt, again in varying degrees.  The malts of other whiskies are generally dried in a closed kiln so the smoke from whatever the fuel may be does not reach the grain.  The flavor of peat smoke is the one thing more than anything else that gives Scotch its unique taste and character.

Peat being harvested from a blanket bog on the Isle of Skye, Scotland

From the 1400’s onward, whisky was the favored drink in Scotland, and was an intrinsic part of Scottish life, particularly among the Lairds and Landowners, who had their associated monasteries, which they sponsored, make whisky for them.  But during the Scottish Reformation of the mid 16th Century, a tumultuous period when the Catholic Church and the Protestant Calvinists vied for control over the Scottish Throne, Catholic monasteries, where whisky was made, began to lose many monks, priests, and friars, who in fear of repercussions if the Calvinist proved victorious, left Scotland for the continent.  By 1570, during the regency of James VI, who was controlled by the Calvinists, Catholic monasteries across the kingdom, ceased to exist. 

The friars and monks, who had previously distilled whisky for the church, then began to work for the wealthy lords and landowners, many acting as personal clergyman in hiding, within the realms, taking whisky making to the public.  The tenants and workers on these estates learned the art of distillation from the monks and then began practicing it themselves.  In 1644 the Scottish Parliament imposed a tax on all distilled spirits.  The Scots distillers took their profession into hiding, practicing the craft far up into the mountains, and often did their work at night.  This illegal spirit that they concocted began to be called by a couple of now quite famous nicknames; mountain dew and moonshine.

To send the craft of whisky distillation further underground, in 1707 when the Act of Union united the English and Scottish crown, Parliament in London imposed an additional tax on malt purchased by the distillers.  The lords of Scotland who had operations took them into remote areas, and assembled their own private guards and armies to protect their distilleries from the royal excise tax collectors, and a wide spread black market for whisky developed. 

In 1823, under the leadership of the 4th Duke of Gordon, the Excise Tax of 1823 was passed, which allowed for distillers to produce their product legally under a license. The producers would also have to pay a small percentage of tax based upon gallons sold, and the malt tax would be done away with. Gordon encouraged a tenant of his, George Smith, who was well known in the area for producing some of the finest single malt whisky, to come out of hiding and begin producing his whisky legally.  Gordon even offered to help Smith with the licensing fee.  Gordon was prompted into this action, according to legend, when his estate was visited by King George IV. Gordon proudly offered his royal guest a dram of the locally produced whisky.  The king loved it.  He wanted to meet the distiller and to purchase a large quantity for himself to take back to London.  Of course, Gordon knew this was impossible, since George Smith as a moonshiner, but he was able to put his majesty off, he made an excuse, nobody is sure what exactly, but he promised his highness that he would procure some of the elixir for him soon and deliver it personally to the royal court.  The name of that whisky; The Glenlivet, still one of the most popular Single Malt whiskies in the world. 

The Glenlivet Distillery, Speyside, near the village of Ballindalloch

In 1824 George Smith became the first distiller in Speyside to apply for a license under the king and produce whisky.  Smith was threatened with violence by other illicit distillers who wanted the Excise Tax to be repealed and they knew as long as some distillers accepted it, it would continue to be inforced.  Gordon gave Smith his full backing and protection, and symbolically gave him a brace of pistols for his own protection and the protection of the distillery.  The Glenlivet grew, with the help of high society in London, and by 1849 a second distillery was built.  It too was soon running at capacity, and a third distillery was built in 1858.  Unfortunately the second distillery was lost to a fire while the third was under construction.  But, by leading by example, George Smith, and The Duke of Gordon, and The Glenlivet, brought Scotch whisky out of the mountains and back into the legal light of day.

The next big thing to happen to Scotch was the invention of the continuous still by Aeneas Coffey and the production of Grain whisky, beginning in 1831.  Grain whisky was lighter than the more robust, intense malt whiskies, and with the melding of the two whiskies into Blended Scotch, and thus a spirit was produced that appealed to a much larger market segment.

Coffey’s Continuous Still Diagram, used in the making of Grain whiskey

Traditional Copper Pot Still Diagram

In 1880 another fortuitous event accidently helped promote Scotch in the eyes of the world.   The preferred cocktail among elite society and the emerging middle class in both Europe and America was brandy and the recently invented carbonated soda.  At the time most brandy was made in France, but along came the Phyloexera beetle, that attacked grape vines and within a few short years the vineyards of France were devastated to the point that wine and brandy virtually disappeared from the market.  In it’s place consumers turned to whiskies, both Scotch and Irish, to mix with their soda. By the early 20th Century, whisky and soda, or Scotch and soda, was the most popular cocktail in the world.

Scotch continued to have some additional good luck, much of it at the expense of the Irish whiskey producers.  At the beginning of World War I, Jameson Irish Whiskey is thought to have been the most popular whiskey in the British Empire.  But, in 1916 the first salvo of the Anglo Irish War between the Irish Republican movement that lasted until peace was obtained in 1922 with the formation of the Irish Free State.  During the war in Ireland, barley production was severely short, and whiskey production in Ireland fell dramatically. 

Then in 1920, American Prohibition was enacted.  According to legend, American Gangster named Jack “Legs” Diamond first approached Old Bushmills distillery and then the Jameson Distillery in Ireland.  He wanted to make a deal, but for whatever reason, a deal couldn’t be worked out with the Irish distillers.  Diamond then went to London and walked into Berry Brothers & Rudd on St. James Street, the largest wholesaler of spirits and wine in Britain, and ordered several hundred cases of their best Scotch.  The spirit purveyors did not bat an eye.

Years later it was discovered that Berry Brothers & Rudd conspired with several American organized crime figures and had a transport network set up where they could get Scotch whisky into the states, and they never broke the law themselves.  Berry Brothers & Rudd would legally ship Cutty Sark Blended Scotch Whisky, one of their newest brands, to the Bahamas, where it would be placed in British colonial governments warehouses.  There a middle man, a Scots American Floridian named Bill McCoy would load the whisky onto his schooner and would sail off to coast just off of New Jersey’s Atlantic City.  There, under the direction of political boss Nucky Johnson (who was fictionalized as Nucky Thompson in HBO’s Boardwalk Empire), the Scotch would be transported by speed boats to the shore, loaded onto trucks and then onto warehouses in New Jersey and New York.  From there shipments would be arranged to the likes of Lucky Luciano, Myer Lansky, Bugsy Seigal, and Al Capone.  According to historian George Rosie, the American market couldn’t get enough of the product.  The arrangement lasted through the entirety of Prohibition but ended with the repeal of the Volstead Act in 1933.  The relationship laid the ground for Cutty Sark to become the most popular Scotch in America. Bill McCoy, who grew to be a very wealthy man, also earned a reputation for selling the finest Scotch- unadulterated, undiluted, pure.  And according to tradition, the Scotch whisky he delivered, his business associates would say was “The Real McCoy.”

Politics helped Scotch once more.  Just as Prohibition was ending in America, a trade war broke out between Great Britain and the Irish Free State in 1932.  This is really odd, because technically Ireland was still a dominion within the United Kingdom, but that’s another long and complicated story.  The result of this dispute, was that the exportation of Irish Whiskey to the British markets within the Empire was suspended, and the Irish whiskey industry nearly collapsed with the loss of their base market, and by the time the trade war was resolved in 1938, Irish whiskey had no presence in any world markets.  When World War II broke out, and after America’s entry following Pearl Harbor, when the US Soldiers and Sailors were in port in Britain, what did they drink in the pubs?  Scotch.  And when they came home, they brought Scotch drinking with them, and through the 1950’s, ‘60’s, and 70’s, Scotch was the preferred drink of businessmen in the United States.

Over time, by the 1980’s, Scotch was thought of as an old man’s drink, and it had lost market share in both Britain and the United States.  There had been too much whisky made and not enough Scotch drinkers.  At this time, almost all of the whisky leaving Scotland was blended whisky; there really wasn’t a market for single malts, and most single malt whisky was only drank locally.  The distillers had to get creative.  They started marketing their single malts, they began to open visitors’ centers for tourists, for a number of years they gave away free samples, but today these attractions are a part of their revenue making operations.  There are over 50 Scotch whisky visitors’ centres associated with distilleries and even more specialty Scotch whisky shops across the country.  Compare that to only 6 whiskey visitors’ centres in Ireland.   Scotch whisky is interwoven into the culture, the history, and legacy of Scotland- the two cannot be separated. As author and film director John McClean put it, is the lifeblood of one small nation.

Today Johnny Walker Red Label Blended Scotch is the number one selling Scotch whisky in the world.  Scotch exportation accounts for 5 billions Pounds Sterling in the British economy, or which 1 billion pounds is tax revenue.  Single Malt and Blended Scotch can be found in nearly every bar, pub, saloon, and tavern in the world, some have a better selection than others. 

Often I hear people say, I don’t like Scotch, it’s too something- either harsh or smoky, something.  And I tell them, I know what you mean; I used to say the same things about Scotch, but then I learned how to drink it, I tried different Scotches, and a first I found one or two that I liked, then another and another, until today, there are just not too many that I find that I don’t like, single malts and blended.  The Scots have a saying, “When they reach the age of wisdom, they will discover whisky.”

One more thing; I started with the story about the Dál Riata, the Celtic tribe from Ireland that crossed the North channel of the Irish Sea and settled and conquered a good portion of the islands and western highlands of Scotland.  The Romans had another name for that particular Celtic tribe;  Scoti- that is, the Scots.  That’s why today, what the Romans called Caledonia, we call Scotland. You see the Scots were Irish, and it was the Irish monks who taught the Scots how to make their beloved Uisca Beatha.

Hishtory Episode 10
Allen Tatman: Writer and Producer
Brian McGeorge: Technical Director
Hishtory is a Wylde Irish Production, all rights reserved.

Works Cited: 

Barnes, Dr. Ian.  The Historical Atlas of the Celtic World.  New York, Chartwell, 2009.

“Capone Helped Whisky Barons Beat Prohibition.” The Scotsman. 28 June, 2004

http://www.scotsman.com/news/capone-helped-whisky-barons-beat-prohibition-1-536957

Ellis, Peter Berresford.  The Chronicles of the Celts.  New York, Carroll & Graf, 1999

“History of Scotch Whisky,”  Scotch Whisky Association.  31 May, 2012.

http://www.scotch-whisky.org.uk/understanding-scotch/history-of-scotch-whisky/

Johnson, Ben.  “Uisge Beatha.” Historic UK: The History and Heritage Accommodation Guide. 2000-2009

http://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofScotland/Uisge-Beatha/

Lockheart, Sir Robert Bruce.  Scotch: The Whisky of Scotland in Fact and Story.  Glasgow, Neil Wilson Publishing, ,1st Edition, 1951.  8th Edition, 2011.

McCullough, David Willis.  Wars of the Irish Kings. New York, Three Rivers Press, 2002.

Snow, Dean R.  “Scotland’s Irish Origins.”  Archaeology: A publication of the Archaeological Institute of America. 4 July, 2001

http://archive.archaeology.org/0107/abstracts/scotland.html

Standage, Tom.  A History of Civilization in Six Glasses.  New York, Walker & Company, 2005

The Divine Drink

Jesus turning the water into wine at the marriage in Cana, Eastern Orthodox Iconography, date unknown.

In 870 BCE, one of the greatest celebrations ever held in the ancient world was thrown by King Ashurnasirpal II of the Assyrian Empire.  If you had been invited and didn’t attend, look out.  You’d soon be getting a visit from Ashurnasirpall’s army, one of the greatest military forces ever assembled.  At this party, there was something served to the thousands who attended that had never been served in Mesopotamia on such a large scale before.  It was what the Assyrians and Babylonians called “The Excellent Beer of the Mountains,” and the “Drink of the Gods.”  

It was wine.

Ashurnasirpal II was one of them most powerful men to ever live.  During his 25 year reign (884 – 859 BCE) over the Neo Assyrian Empire he commanded all of the lands of Babylonia from the Persian Gulf, north to the headwaters of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, east into the Tarsus Mountains of Turkey, across modern Syria, down the eastern shore of the Mediterranean including the modern countries of Jordan, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, and even the Lower Egyptian Empire of the Nile Valley as far south as Thebes. 

 Ashurnasirpal did not conquer all of these lands himself; most were conquered by his father, but when Ashurnasirpal came to power in 884 BCE, rebellions erupted in some of his holdings.  He marched with his army upon the rebelling cities of Sura and Tela, which both he destroyed, and according to his chronicles, he flayed all of the rebel chieftains, skinning them alive and hanging their hides on a pillar at the city gate.  Others he impaled on stakes.  He cut the hands and feet off of the rebel officers, leaving them alive to bleed to death.  Of the soldiers who rebelled, he cut off their noses, lips, ears, and put out their eyes.  He allowed his soldiers to have their way with all of the maidens and young boys before he burned the alive.  He made a pyramid of the heads of those he executed.  He exiled some of the citizens to the desert, naked without water or food.  And the luckiest citizens of the rebel cities were sold into slavery.

After the destruction of these two cities and the extermination of their populations, it is not surprising that every other city and province within the empire readily fell into line and pledged their loyalty to Ashurnasirpal; there was never another rebellion attempted during his reign.  Taxes of gold and other wealth poured in from all over the empire.  Rulers from neighboring kingdoms sent tribute, and acknowledged him as the King of Kings, in hopes that if Ashurnasirpal saw them as friendly, and subservient, he wouldn’t attack them.  He visited all of the neighboring lands, and at the threat of violence, he commanded their subjection to his rule.  Everyone complied.

Having secured his kingdom, he set about building a new city for himself with a palace to out shine anything ever built.  He moved from the traditional capitol of Ashur on the Tigris River to his new city, the new capitol of Kalhu, also historically called Calah and/or Nimrud, just a few miles north on the same river, near the modern city of Mosul in Iraq. It was the greatest metropolis the ancient world had seen to that date.  The palace at the center sat on a raised platform, higher than the rest of the city, surrounded by canals and waterfalls, and irrigated gardens with delicious vegetables and fruits being raised for the King and his court.  The magnificent halls were adorned with polished wood and bronze doors, and roofed with cedar, cypress, and juniper wood. On the walls of the palace he had artisans carve great sculpted relief tableaus depicting all of his conquests and triumphs, including the cities he destroyed and the thousands of people that he had put to death.   Then he announced of the celebration to inaugurate the new capitol and invited all of the leaders from all of the cities and provinces within his empire, as well as dignitaries and leaders from neighboring kingdoms to come to and bend a knee before the King of Kings.  No one returned the RSVP with regrets. And he made them all go look at the artwork depicting his glory.

The celebration was magnificent, lasting an entirety of ten days.   The official record claims that exactly 69,574 people attended; over 47,000 of those attending were citizens from all across the empire; 16,000 were newly relocated inhabitants of the new capitol city; another 5,000 or so were foreign dignitaries, and 1,500 member of Ashurnasirpal’s royal court.  According to the rolls and records, over the 10 days the attendees dined endlessly, and were served 1,000 fattened cows, 1,000 calves, 10,000 sheep, 15,000 lambs, 500 gazelles, 1,000 ducks, 1,000 geese, 20,000 doves, 12,000 other small birds, 10,000 fish, 10,000 jerboa (a small domesticated rodent, similar to a gerbil), and 10,000 eggs.  There were very few vegetables, only 1,000 crates.  It was a feast of historic proportion.  The king boasted in his chronicles that he did them due honor and sent them back, healthy, and happy, to their homes.

But, even with the aforementioned extravagance in foods, the one most impressive thing served at the celebration were the 10,000 skins of wine that had been imported from the mountains of Persia to the northwest.  There were also 10,000 jars of beer, the everyday drink of the Assyrians and Babylonians, but wine was a delicacy, only available to Mesopotamians in small quantities.  It had to be imported; the nearest wine growing region was in what is today the mountains of Iran, more than 500 miles away.  Cost alone of transporting wine from Persia made it cost at least 10 times what beer would cost.  It was so rare that wine was typically only used in religious ceremonies; even the elites could not afford to drink it on a regular basis. It was, for all intent and purposes, out of reach of only the wealthiest and most powerful of men; exactly the message that Ashurnasirpal II wanted to convey to each and everyone who attended his celebration.  If I can afford this much wine, if I can afford to give it to you, I can do whatever I want. 

On many of the reliefs Ashurnasirpal is depicted drinking wine from a shallow bowl, probably made of gold, held high in one hand as a salute to the gods.  In Mesopotamia at the time beer was drank from jars and jugs, using a straws to suck up the beer so the drinker would not swallow the chaff that floated on the top or the yeast gunk that settled on the bottom.  These images of Ashurnasirpal II and his court drinking wine are the first depictions of such in the Babylonian and Assyrian world, although beer had been drank by the Mesopotamians for many millennia, and had been depicted in art in the region 4,000 years earlier.  Under the Assyrians in the 1st Millennia BCE, wine was the drink of only the greatest rulers, conquerors, and human gods who walked the earth.   The introduction of wine to Mesopotamia by Ashurnasirpal II and the subsequent promotion of wine drinking by his son, Shalmaneser, proved to be a turning point for wine consumption in the Near East.

Sculpted Alabaster Relief of Ashurnasirpal II, with wine bowl, ca. 870BCE,  formerly of the palace at Kalhu (aka Calah and Nimrud), now at the British Museum

The Assyrians were not the first to drink the wine of grapes; that distinction belongs to the Neolithic inhabitants of the Zagros Mountains, a region that is found in Armenia and northern Iran, beginning sometime after 9,000 years BCE, but it was probably around 6,000 BCE when wine making blossomed in the region with the invention of pottery, a necessary tool for the making, storing and serving of wine. 

Wine is the fermented juice of crushed grapes.  On the skins of the grapes there are naturally occurring wild yeast strains that convert the sugars in the juice into alcohol.  Trying to store grape juice for any length of time would eventually, and naturally, result in the making of wine.  The earliest evidence ever found of wine was a reddish residue inside a pottery jar from an archaeological dig dating to 5400 BCE, found in the area where biblical story of Noah claims he planted the first vineyard on the slopes of nearby Mount Ararat after the flood. 

The cultivation of grapes (viticulture) spread from this area westward into Anatolia, then the Hellenistic World of Greece and western Turkey, and then south along the Mediterranean coast into the land known as Levant; what is today Syria, Lebanon, and Israel.  Egypt’s kings, dating from 3,500 years BCE, developed a taste for wine, importing it with great expense from the vineyards of Levant.   The pharaohs eventually started vineyards of their own in the Nile Delta region with limited success.  Just as it would be in 2,600 years later in Mesopotamia, wine was very expensive, very rare, and only available to the wealthiest and most powerful; as I said before, for consumption by human gods who walked the earth.

By 2,500 BCE wine was being cultivated on the island of Cypress and the Greek mainland, and at that early time it was also the drink of only the wealthy in both the Mycenaen and Minoan cultures, as wine was not listed on the ration tablets of slaves, workers, and lower level religious officials.  According to Greek mythology wine was introduced by the gods as a gift to the humans; the Gods did not consume wine in Greek myths, they drank nectar, which is mead (fermented honey water.) 

At the time of Ashurnasirpal II reign in Mesopotamia, wine was still a luxury item throughout most of civilization, primarily because of trade and transportation restrictions. It was hard to get wine from grape growing areas to places that didn’t have grapes.    Within 200 years though, wine had become such a commonly traded commodity that it was even given to servants in the royal households.   Herodotus, the Greek historian, also known as the father of history, visited Mesopotamia in 430 BCE and described the shipping of wine from regions of Anatolia and Syria, by boat on the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.  These boats, made of wood and reeds, would be filled with wine jugs bound for Babylon.  Once the wine was sold in Babylonia, the boats would be virtually worthless and sold for next to nothing and the wine merchants would return to their homes by land.

Even with the opening up of this trade network, wine still very expensive.  In Babylonia in the 5th Century BCE, an imported jar of wine containing about 18 liters cost a shekel of silver, which at the time was considered the minimum wage for a month’s work by a common laborer.  While wine was no longer exclusively the drink of the ultra rich and powerful- the merchant and craftsman classes were now able to afford wine- it still was out of reach for the lower classes, who continued to drink Mesopotamian beer, and another local beverage, date palm wine, made from water and the fermented syrup of locally grown dates.

During the Classical Greece period, wine became the drink of not only the wealthy, but also of the thinking class- the poets, the philosophers, the scientist and scholars.  At gatherings known as symposia, which were nothing more than formal drinking parties, wine would be drunk and the attendees would try to outdo each other in matters of the arts, elocution, and rhetoric.   The Greeks saw themselves as superior to the “barbarians” of Persia and Mesopotamia, who drank beer, or if they drank wine, they did it in a most barbarous manner, not within the polite parameters of wine consumption done by the Greeks.  One Greek historian even wrote in the 5th Century BCE that only because of wine and olives- the cultivation of grapes and olive trees- was the Eastern Mediterranean world able to emerge from barbarism and supersede their eastern neighbors.

Depiction of a Greek Symposium Ca. 10th-5th Centuries BCE.   Note that the only females attending were servants and entertainers.

One Greek myth clearly illustrates the Hellenistic mindset.  According to the legend, Dionysus, the Greek God of Wine, fled to Greece to get away from the beer loving barbarians in Mesopotamia.  The myth goes on that it was in Greece that Dionysus made wine available to everyone, not just the elites.  Euripides penned in his play The Bacchae: “to rich and poor alike hath he granted the delight of wine, that makes all pain to cease.”

Dionysus and the Satyr, Athenian Wine Drinking Vessel, ca. 7th Century BCE

In Greece, beginning in the 7th Century BCE, viticulture thrived; it was the ideal environment for grape production, and within just a couple of centuries grapes became such a widely grown commodity that wine was easily affordable by people in all walks of life.  The Greeks perfected grape cultivation, being the first to develop vineyards that resembled those today, with grapes being grown in rows on trellises rather than growing them on the trunks of trees, as the Persians did.  They perfected the pressing of the grapes to get the most juice.  Grape cultivation took over.  A farmer could make 20 times more money producing grapes than grain, and the acres of vineyards you owned equated to societal status. 

Wine was classical Greece’s main export, being shipped all over the Mediterranean world, and overland to Mesopotamia.  By the 5th Century BCE, Greek wine was being drunk in southern France to the west, Egypt to the south, the Crimean Peninsula to the East, and along the banks of the Danube River to the north.  The Greeks introduced viticulture to Sicily at their colony of Syracuse, as well as the Italian peninsula, and Southern France.  The Phoenicians, a rival to the Greeks in wine exportation, introduced viticulture to Spain and Portugal on the Iberian Peninsula.  And a Celtic grave mound found in central France, dating form the 6th Century BCE, held the body of a young noblewoman, and among the valuables in her tomb were found imported Greek wine drinking vessels. 

Greek and Phoenician Expansion in Mediterranean World, 6th Century BCE

The Romans emerged as the expanding power in the Mediterranean world by the middle of the 2nd Century BCE, and within a century and a half displaced the Greeks, the Phoenicians, Egyptians, and Carthaginians as the rulers of their own lands.  Romans, wanting to show their sophistication, adopted many of the traits and beliefs and customs of the Greeks; from architecture, to government, to religion, and of course, wine.  The Romans planted vast vineyards across their holdings, and one mark of prestige of a Roman politician or statesman was the quality of the wine produced by his vineyard.  I could do an entire podcast about the Romans and wine, and I will at sometime in the future, just as I will probably go back and look further into depth about wine and the Greeks.  But, for today, let’s just say that the Romans took what they had learned about wine from the Greeks and ran with it.

Vineyard in Tuscany, Italy, dating from the Roman Empire period, ca. 1st Century BCE

As the Roman Republic and then the Empire expanded, they took grape cultivation with them; to France, Spain, Portugal, even the Rhine Valley of Germany.  In Rome, everyone drank wine, from the Emperor to the lowliest of plebs.  It was the Roman drink.  And regardless of whether they could grow it in the territories they claimed, they took wine with them across the empire.

Roman Empire at its greatest extent.

When the Western Roman Empire fell in the 5th Century CE to the various invasions of beer drinking barbarians, according to long held Roman and Greek prejudices, that should have been the end of wine drinking in the world.  But, despite many aspects of the Roman world being swept away by the invaders, including lifestyle and norms, trade and transportation, two things did not diminish: wine and religion.  The barbarian tribes did not hate wine, on the contrary, they grew to love it.  Viticulture was simply foreign to them, but they readily adopted the practice where it already flourished and grew into wine growers and drinkers.  The Visigoths even had a law code making it a crime, punishable by execution, if a vineyard was destroyed.  You could burn the house and the outbuildings, sure, just make certain you get the wine out first, but don’t you dare damage those vines. 

And of course, the connection between wine consumption and Christianity cannot be overlooked; wine is pretty central to one of the religion’s key rituals, Communion.  As Christianity spread through the Roman Empire, before its fall, and then subsequently among the pagan invaders, wine went with it.  Jesus drank wine.  Everybody in the pre modern world drank alcohol of some kind, as water was generally pretty dodgy to be consume.

So yes, if you believe that Jesus was a historical figure, then Jesus drank wine, real wine, not grape juice.  He turned the wine into water at the marriage at Cana, and during the last supper he passed a cup of real wine among his followers, saying, “Take this cup, for it is my blood. Drink this in remembrance of me.”

Now, beer was available in Palestine at the turn of the Last Millennia BCE and the 1st Millennia CE, and was actually probably a more common drink than wine among most of the population.  Beer had been in the region for much longer than wine, probably 6,000 years before viticulture reached the eastern shore of the Mediterranean.  You know why there is no mention of beer in the Bible?  Because the Romans and the Greek citizens of the Rome wrote the New Testament and translated the Old Testament, and the Romans and the Greeks looked down upon beer as being a vulgar drink.  Historically we know, beer was probably more commonly drunk in the biblical world by the lower classes than the more expensive wine.

So, what if viticulture hadn’t reached Palestine?  What if Jesus hadn’t had wine at the last supper and had only beer to give to his disciples?  Well, for one thing, Catholic Mass would sure be a hell of a lot different.  I’ll let you ponder on that one yourself.

Hishtory: The Story of Alcohol
a Wylde Irish Production, All rights Reserved.

Allen Tatman: Writer-Producer
Brian McGeorge: Technical Director

Works Cited: 

“All About Greek Wine: History.”  Thalassi Companies, Inc. 2003-2010. http://www.allaboutgreekwine.com/history.htm

Mark, Joshua.  “Ashurnasirpal II.”  Ancient History Encyclopedia.  July 9, 2014.  http://www.ancient.eu/Ashurnasirpal_II/

Norris, Shawn T.  “Wine- The Water of Rome.”  Rome Across Europe.  June 28, 2015.  http://www.romeacrosseurope.com/?p=1986#sthash.5bssn2hP.dpbs

Parry, Wynne.  “In Vino Veritas: Wine Cups Tell History of Athenian Life.” Live Science, Jan. 12, 2011 http://www.livescience.com/9264-vino-veritas-wine-cups-history-athenian-life.html 

Standage, Tom.  A History of Civilization in Six Glasses.  New York, Walker & Company, 2005

Hops 101

I have to make a confession.  I don’t like REAL hoppy beers.  This doesn’t mean I don’t like hops; I do.  What I mean by that is that I don’t like beers where the IBU (International Bitterness Units) are above 80 IBUs when there isn’t enough malt to balance it out. 

Malt adds sweetness and alcohol content to beer and hops add bitterness.  The average American Light Lager, which is the majority of the mass produced beers in the US- Budweiser, Bud Light, Mich Ultra, Miller High Life, Stag, Miller Lite, Coors Lite and Coors Banquet, etc.- the beers of this style are internationally known as American Light Lagers.  They will have an IBU of 8 to 12, and they are low in alcohol (less than 5% alcohol by volume.) They are nicely balanced, easy drinking because they are low in alcohol and lightly hopped, so it all balances out.

India Pale Ales (IPAs) will be at least 60 IBUs and some as high as 80 IBUs or more.  To balance this out, more malt will be needed in the brew than that of an average pale ale; malt adds sweetness to counterbalance the abundance of bitterness of the hops.  Malt also adds more sugar, which the yeast converts into higher alcohol content.  Consequently, a well balanced IPA is going to have to be nearly 7% Alcohol By Volume (ABV) and maybe as high as 9% or a bit more.  But what has happened in the American Craft Beer Brewing Industry, is that brewers have started to put a bunch hops in low alcohol pale ales, calling them Session IPAs, that have only 4 to 5% alcohol and these beers will besomewhere between 50 and 70 IBUs.  That’s just too bitter for me.  If you like those, that’s great.  I just don’t.  I like IPAs, but they have to be high enough in malt and alcohol to balance out the bitterness of the hops.

Hops completely changed beer from what it was originally to what it is now. But hops have not been used in brewing that long.  According to archaeologists, humans must have “discovered” beer sometime shortly after 9,000 BCE, when hunter gatherers in the Middle East began to exploit the dense stands of wild grains growing in the region.  Archaeological evidence points to this time period as the beginning of the change of humans being primarily hunters with a meat based diet to primarily gatherers and a grain based diet.   Grains provided a reliable food source.  Grains were crushed, soaked in water, they would soften and could be consumed as a gruel or porridge.  Eventually these hunter-gatherers began to heat the gruel, which created an even more digestible nutritious porridge.  

Location of first agricultural development and brewing of beer, ca.  9,000-8,000 BCE.

When heat is applied to a solution of starchy grains and water, more starches are released and they convert to sugars.  At some point in time, once this gruel had cooled, wild strains of yeast found their way into the mix and in a few days- most wild yeasts are finished with the conversion of sugar to alcohol within three days-  the gruel became slightly fizzy and foamy, and pleasantly intoxicating, and you have, on the most basic level beer.  Archaeologists have concluded that beer was being made by the hunter-gatherers long before bread was even thought of.  However, bread and beer are sisters, both originally made from gruel; beer is just a thin gruel allowed to ferment, bread is just a thick gruel that would be heated on a stone into flatbread.

These early homo-sapiens also discovered that grain could be kept for long periods of time if stored in cool dry places, which lead to the development of encampments where grain could be processed, stored, and brewed into beer. In the 1960’s an experimental archaeologist proved why it would have been very enticing for these hunter-gatherers to give up their nomadic existence.  Using a flint-bladed sickle, he was able to harvest 2 lbs of wild grain in one hour.  He concluded that it would take a family who worked an 8 hour day three weeks to harvest enough grain to provide each member with a pound of grain a day for an entire year.  Having gathered that much grain, they wouldn’t have wanted to leave it unguarded for others to find, hence the establishment of villages, towns, and eventually cities.  In other words, we have- in part- beer to thank for the beginning of civilization.

Now this type of beer was just the basic fundamental building block for all the varieties of beers, ales, and lagers to follow.  You probably wouldn’t even recognize this as beer if it were served to you today- it would be very cloudy, a dullish color, full of bits of chaff that would float on the top, there would be yeasty gunk in the bottom, and it would taste very cereal like and not very sweet. Eventually malting was discovered, which produced even more sugars and made the beer sweeter.  And then someone at some time learned how to roast the malted barley, which created various colors in ale from golden to amber to brown to dark, imparting a wide variety of toasted flavors to the brews.  This is basically what ale was for the next 10,000 years.  Fruit, berries, spices, herbs, and other flavorings were added by different cultures at different times.  For example, the Iron Age people of Northern Europe- the Celts, Germanic tribes, and Scandinavians- used bog myrtle, which had preservative qualities and imparted a somewhat astringent and resinous flavor to the beer. 

For some historical context as to the age of beer and how long man has been drinking it,  here are some dates to consider:  sometime after 9,000 BCE and probably before 8,000 BCE, (10 to 11 thousand years ago), beer was discovered.  The Roman Civilization began 2,800 years ago. Greek Civilization had its genesis 3,200 years ago. Oral tradition says the Torah was given to Moses 3,300 years ago.  The Amorite Dynasty of Babylonia began 3,800 years ago.  The Egyptian Old Kingdom began 4,600 years ago, about the same time as the beginning of the Assyrian Empire.  Stonehenge in England was constructed between 4 and 5 thousand years ago, and the portal tomb of Newgrange at the Brú na Boine Neolithic complex in Ireland is over 5,000 years old.    And beer is at least another 5,000 years older than that.

But hops were first used in brewing only just 1,200 years ago; ergo, hops have only been used in brewing for 1/10th to 1/8th of beer’s existence.

The first connection of hops and brewing appears in 822; Abbot Adalhard of the Benedictine monastery of Corbie, in the province of Picardy, in Northern France wrote a series of statutes on how the monastery should be run.  One of these statutes required that 1/10th of all of the malt, and 1/10th of all of the hops gathered should be given to the porter of the monastery for the making of beer.  This is the first recordation of hops and beer being associated.

What are hops?  Hops are a perennial plant of the Cannabaceae family that also includes the genus Cannabis- same family as marijuanna. In beer, hops do four things:

1. Provide bitterness to balance the sweetness of malt sugars.  

2. Add flavors and aromas 

3. Resins in hops increase head retention

4. Act as an antiseptic to retard spoilage.  

Often referred to as a “vine”, hops are actually a “bine”, which is a type of plant that uses a strong stem and stiff hairs to climb rather than tendrils and suckers to attach.  It is the flower of the hop plant that is used in brewing. Hop flowers or cones resemble pinecones, but are composed of thin, green, papery, leaf-like bracts. At the base of these bracts are waxy, yellow lupulin glands that contain alpha acids responsible for bitterness and essential oils that give beer the bitter flavor and aroma that counterbalances the sweetness of the malt in the brew.  Aside from their use in beer, hops have also historically had medicinal applications.  Hop filled pillows were once a common remedy for insomnia, and a tea made of hops are stilldrunk in some countries as an analgesic.

Anatomy of a hop cone.

Before hops became a common additive in brewing other botanicals, like bog myrtle, were commonly used to flavor and enhance aroma in ales.  These botanicals were generically referred to as ‘gruit’ and at time in history included sweet gale, mugwort, yarrow, ground ivy, horehound, heather, spruce needles, among others.  Gruit might have been made from one of these or a mixture there of.  As noted earlier, the French first to use hops in brewing and the Germans followed suit 300 years later in the 1100’s.

But England was late to the practice of hopping beer.  Legend has it that King Henry VI of England made the use of hops in brewing illegal, but hops were never prohibited all together, although there was some reticence in allowing their use in brewing in late Medieval England. Going back to the 1400’s, a number of petitions from many peers of the court presented to Parliament to stop the cultivation of hops in England.   In 15th and 16th Century England “ale” and “beer” had two legal definitions.  To be an ‘ale’ the drink had to have been brewed from malted cereals, including barley, wheat, and rye, and could only be flavored with gruit.  “Beer” on the other hand, could be a drink brewed from any grain, not necessarily malted grain, and any other added ingredients except gruit, including hops.  The use of hops was never outlawed, however many localities and municipalities attempted to distinguish the difference between traditional ales and newer beers by prohibiting the use of hops in old style ales.

Henry VI, while he did not make hops illegal, he did instruct sheriffs to make certain that ‘ale’ could only be called ‘ale’ if it was made with gruit and did not include hops, however he also ordered the sheriffs to protect and allow the brewers of ‘beer’ to use hops in their brews.  But within a century and a half, England would move almost entirely away from gruit and begin to use hops in the brewing of both beer and ale. 

There were a number of influences that helped this trend.  Gruit production and marketing in Medieval Europe was controlled by the Catholic Church and carried out at various monasteries, especially in England.  With Martin Luther’s Protestant movement beginning in the German states, many followers of Luther began to exclusively use hops in their brewing as a protest against the Catholic controlled gruit market.  Henry VIII before leaving the Church of Rome, had both ales with gruit and beer with hops, brewed for his court.  Upon his split with the Catholic Church in 1534 and Henry VIII declaring himself head of the Church of England, he dissolved the Catholic monasteries and seized the property for the English Crown, and upon doing such, basically eliminated the large scale manufacturing of gruit in England.

Still, a large number of English were slow to embrace hops in their ales.  When Henry’s troops invaded France in 1544 they ran out of their gruited ale. The commander of the English army wrote back to London from the province of Picardy complaining that they were forced to drink the locally brewed hopped beer for 10 entire days.

Hops got their biggest push on the continent just a few years earlier. In 1516, in the Bavarian city of Ingolstadt, a decree was written up and pronounced to be law by Duke Wilhelm IV of Bavaria.  We know it today as Reinheitsgebot, the Bavarian Purity Law of Brewing.  Reinheitsgebot, declared that “bier” (the German word for both beer and ale as they did not distinguish a difference between the two) could only be brewed with 3 ingredients: Barley, Water, and Hops. Yeast was understood yet, nobody really knew what it was then, as work in microbial sciences was still in the dark ages.  Reinheitsgebot, stated that no beer could be sold in Bavaria that had anything other than those 3 ingredients, and was in due course adopted by the rest of the German states. Now, in accordance with European Union trade laws, beers produced in other countries that do not follow Reinheitsgebot maybe sold in Germany today, however all breweries in Germany are still required to follow Reinheitsgebot if they call their product “Bier.”

Duke Wilhelm IV of Bavaria

Now, you might think that Duke Wilhelm, being a contemporary of Martin Luther, declared that only hops could be used in brewing because he was a supporter of Luther.  But, no.  He was a devout Catholic and remained so his entire life.  The reason that Hops were included as one of the three only ingredients and gruit was not, was because the largest hop growing area at the time, and still is so today, is in Bavaria, specifically near the city of Hallertau, where hops were first cultivated in the late 9th Century.  Wilhelm was simply passing a law to protect the local hop farmers and, some would say, protect the consumer.

In 1710 during the reign Queen Anne in Great Britain, Parliament passed a law banning the use of bittering agents that were not hops in all beers and ales brewed in Great Britain and Ireland.  This was done in part to protect the hop farming in England, but also done to prevent brewers from evading the pence per pound tax on hops that was paid to the Crown.  This all but ended the use of gruit in brewing in Great Britain.

During the 1700’s there were really two styles of beer being brewed in Great Britain; Porter and Pale Ale.  Porter, a dark ale, is made from darkly roasted malt. Pale Ale, is as it sounds, is paler colored beer made from pale malts.  The pale ale at that time was not quite like the pale ales of today; these beers were lightly hopped and meant to be drank quite fresh.  Following the Seven Year’s War in the latter half of the 18th Century, the sun never sat on the British Empire, which held territories around the globe, including India.  The British East India Company, a trading company that was part of the British Mercantile system, was entrenched in the Indian subcontinent, and to protect its holdings so was the British Army.  One of the problems that British had in these tropical colonies was they couldn’t brew beer, mainly because the weather was too warm.  The typical pale ales that were brewed in England at the time, if shipped to India or other tropical possessions (including islands in the Caribbean and Australia) by the end of the voyage, the beer would have gone bad. 

British Empire during the formative years of India Pale Ale brewing.

A London Brewer name George Hodgson, contracted with the East India Company to provide them with ale.  He knew there were two ways to make a beer last longer.  For years Hodgson had been brewing what he called an October Ale, which had nearly twice as much alcohol and twice as much hops, and it was meant to be stored and aged before being drank.  The first way to help preserve ale was to use more malt in the wort, more malt meant more sugars, giving the yeast an opportunity to make the beer higher in alcohol content.  The second thing was that hops were a natural preservative, and by doubling the hops added to the brew, along with the higher alcohol content, it would preserve the pale ale until it reached India.  Hodgson had the contract for many years, until he asked for more money, then the East India Company moved on and contracted with noted brewer Samuel Allsop, whose brewery was at Burton-on-the Trent in the English Midlands.  The ales from the valley of the Trent River were exceptional in comparison to the ales brewed in London, because the water in the Midlands was much better; with a higher mineral content, it produced what ale drinkers at the time called “a brighter” pale ale.  Allsop’s export ale was a far superior product to Hodgson’s, and by the early 1800’s people were calling his export pale ales India Pale Ale, what we call today, IPA. 

British IPAs were popular all around the globe, even here in America.  In the last half of the 19th and the earliest part of the 20th Century, IPAs were drank in some of the finer taverns and saloons in America, especially along the east coast of the United States.   But with Prohibition, India Pale Ale, and British Pale Ales in general, became a forgotten beer style in the US.  Not until the Craft Brew revolution of the 1970’s and 1980’s did these styles of beers emerge again, and today IPAs are one of the most popular styles of craft beer in the American market.

The Calling IPA from Boulevard Brewing-  One of the best* Craft brewed IPAs in the tradition of British Export Ales (*author’s opinion).

Hishtory Episode 8
Allen Tatman: Writer - Producer
Brian McGeorge: Technical Director
Hishtory is a Wylde Irish Production LLC, all rights reserved.

Works Cited:

Darby, Peter.  “The History of Hop Breeding and Development.”  Brewery History: The Journal of the Brewery History Society Online.  2005.  http://www.breweryhistory.com/journal/archive/121/bh-121-094.htm

“History of Hops.” British Hop Association Online. http://www.britishhops.org.uk/history-of-hops/

“India Pale Ale.”  All About Beer Magazine Online.  http://allaboutbeer.com/beer_style/india-pale-ale/

Standage, Tom.  A History of Civilization in Six Glasses.  New York, Walker & Company, 2005

“The Reinheitsgebot as a Guarantee of Quality.”    Unser Reinheitsgebot http://reinheitsgebot.de/en/home/the-reinheitsgebot/

Yo Ho Ho! And a Bottle of Rum! The First Global Spirit

Sugar, it seems, is in almost all of our foods.  And not just sugar, but sweeteners in general, are added to so many of our processed foods.  As an additive it enhances flavor and aroma, and it helps products retain moisture.  And in this day and age sugar is relatively inexpensive.  But many are surprised to learn that sugar and sweeteners as an everyday food additive are a relatively recent innovation, and prior to the European invasions of the Western Hemisphere, sugar was a very costly luxury item. 

As Europeans established sugar plantations throughout their Caribbean and Latin America territories, sugar became more readily available for European markets. As the demand and consumption of cane sugar grew in the second half of the Second Millennia CE, the sugar processors were left with the byproduct molasses, and what can be made from molasses? Rum, and it would become the first distilled spirit to be sold around the globe.

It would be easy to think that sugar cane was indigenous to the New World, since that is where most of the world’s sugar is grown in the Caribbean islands and Latin America, but it isn’t.  It first came from Southeast Asia, and then spread into India, and eventually into the Arab world.  In India and China, a fermented sugar wine was made as early as the late first millennia BCE.  Marco Polo during his travels through Asia in the 14th Century CE noted of a “very good wine of sugar” which he was served in Persia.  Because of the rarity of sugar in Europe, Marco Polo would have been quite surprised by this sugar wine. 

Pre- Columbian Old World Sugar Production

In Medieval Europe, sugar was considered by Europeans to be ‘white gold.’  There are very few places in Europe where sugar cane can be grown.  Sugar cane requires a tropical climate and a large amount of water.  The ancient Greeks and Romans knew of sugar, but even to them it was an exotic commodity that was only used for medicinal purposes; it was thought to aid in digestion and relieve urinary tract issues.  In the 1st Century CE, Roman philosopher and naturalist, Pliny the Elder noted of two types of sugar; Arabic and Indian, of which he said, that from India was far superior.  

With the expansion of the Muslim world in the late First Millennia CE, sugar cane production was established in isolated pockets of the Middle East, primarily because of the superior Arab technology with irrigation.  As stated previously, sugar cane cultivation requires abundant water, so the areas with the most sugar production included the Tigris and Euphrates valleys, the Nile Valley, and the southern shore of the Caspian Sea, but there were also pockets of sugar cultivation found in what is now Tunisia, Morocco, Sicily, Cyprus, Malta, and the Sierra Nevada and Mercia regions of Moorish Spain.  Besides the need for tropical or subtropical conditions and lots of water, the production of sugar was also heavily labor intensive, and the Arabs relied on slave labor and this was supported by an extensive network of slave trading throughout Africa; in the Medieval world, slavery, and serfdom, where endemic in all societies. 

Europe was really introduced to sugar when it began to be brought home by returning crusaders in the early 2nd Millennia CE; but it was only the nobility of Europe was introduced to sugar at this time.  Honey was the only other sweetener available in Europe, and honey was also an expensive commodity.  The lower strata of European society didn’t have much in the way of sweet foods.  Sweet fruit was really the only food available to the poor, as that, too, was expensive and considered a treat.  So the majority of people didn’t have much sugar in their diet.  And they didn’t crave it in the same manner that we do today, simply because they hadn’t yet been conditioned and developed a sweet tooth.

Europeans tried their hand at sugar production.  In the 14th and 15th Centuries, the Venetians and the Spanish both developed sugar plantations, in Lebanon and the Atlantic islands of Madeira, the Azores, and the Canaries, respectively.  These ventures never produced enough sugar to meet even the demand coming from the aristocratic societies of Europe.  At the end of the 15th Century, Madeira was the largest exporter of sugar in the world, and it still wasn’t enough to satisfy a growing market.

And then in 1492, Columbus sailed the Ocean blue.

Three things converged at once at the end of the 15th and beginning of the 16th Centuries that changed the dietary habits of the world’s population for centuries to come- Firstly, the Europeans discovery and invasion of tropical lands in the New World.  Secondly, the development of the African Slave Trade.  And finally, the burgeoning European market for sugar.

On Columbus’s second voyage to the New World in 1493 he brought sugar cane from the Canary Islands with him.  In the matter of a decade, sugar cane was being grown on all of the Caribbean possessions of Spain, and on the South American mainland of Brazil by the Portuguese.  At first the Spanish and the Portuguese tried to enslave the indigenous people to work the sugar plantations, but the natives either succumbed to Old World diseases to which they had no immunity, while others committed suicide rather than be enslaved.  So, to get workers, they imported slaves from Africa.

Over the next four centuries, approximately eleven million slaves were transported from Africa to the New World, and as many as half of all slaves captured in African interior died on their way to the slave trading coast, and then 10 to 15 percent of all captured slaves died on the voyage across the Atlantic.  The cost in human life for the expansion of agriculture in the New World is horribly astonishing.  With the conquering of tropical lands with abundant water supplies, and the availability of labor from human bondage, by 1540 there were approximately 3,000 sugar mills processing ‘white gold’ for export to Europe.  The price on sugar dropped dramatically, and by the 17th Century, sugar was no longer a luxury item; it was a staple among the Middle classes of Europe.

Another thing was going on in Europe at this same time; the expanding science of distillation of spirits, but surprisingly enough, it was another hundred years after the establishment of sugar in the New World before someone had the bright idea of distilling the byproduct of sugar production, molasses.  When sugar cane is harvested it is chopped and the sugar juice is pressed from it.  The juice is then boiled to evaporate the moisture from it, leaving a concentrated sucrose liquid, called the first boiling, which has the highest sugar content. 

Diagram of Sugar Works from the Caribbean, circa 18th Century

During this boiling impurities rise to the top of the vat where they are skimmed off, leaving cane syrup which is processed into granulated sugar.  The impurities that were skimmed off still had some sugar content (and today using modern methods, more sugar can be extracted from theses leavings, but this wasn’t available in 17th Century), and the skimmed off impurities would be boiled down into molasses.  This is not a sweet sorghum molasses used a sweetener in cookies and candies, this is blackstrap molasses; dark, very viscous, and bitter.  This product is then mixed with water, yeast is added, it is allowed to ferment before it is distilled into rum.

Video: How Authentic Caribbean Rum is Made

Where the first rum was made is a matter of debate.  Some sources cite that the Portuguese in Brazil were producing a drink they called cane brandy as early as the 1620’s, but the first documented evidence of rum production was on the island of Barbados by the English in 1647.  Richard Ligon was on the run from his creditors in England, after the loss of his fortune during the English Civil War, in which he backed Charles I who was captured executed by Parliament. Ligon sailed to Barbados, where he purchased a half stake in a sugar plantation.  Sugar had just been introduced to Barbados from Brazil in 1640, so it could be likely that they learned of the distillation of sugar byproducts from the Portuguese.  Regardless, it was here that Ligon found the sugar makers distilling molasses into a drink they called “Kill-Devil.” 

According to Ligon the drink was “infinitely strong, but not very pleasant to the taste… The people drink much of it, indeed too much; for it often layes them asleep on the ground.”   He also noted that it was traded to the local planters who didn’t have sugar processing on their plantations, and it was sold to ships that would transport the liquor to other ports as well as drink it along the way.

In 1651, the first use of the name we call the liquor today appears in the English language as “Rumbullion.” Rumbullion is a slang word from the south of England meaning “a brawl or violent commotion,” which one can see how that name came about, when one contemporary described the liquor, “(as) made of sugar canes distilled, and a hot, hellish and terrible liquor.”  Rumbullion soon shortened to rum, and began spread throughout the Caribbean and beyond. 

Slaves Cutting Sugar Cane in Antiqua, circa early 19th Century

All across the Caribbean Islands where sugar cane was grown, rum was given to the slaves when they arrived as part of the “seasoning process,” it was thought that it would weed out the weak and subdue and weaken the unruly.  Slaves became dependent on regular rations of rum; the planters literally made them into alcoholics.  They just needed their backs, not their wits.  It was also used as an inducement; the slaves would be rewarded with extra rum for catching rats and doing hardship work voluntarily.  Depending on the plantation, slaves were given anywhere from two or threes gallons of rum a year or as much as thirteen gallons.  The slaves would often use the rum to barter for extra food.  Rum became an important tool of social control in the slave labor based economy of sugar production.

This connection between slavery, sugar, and rum contributed to what historians now call the Triangular Trade.  The African slavers, that is the Africans on the west coast of the continent who captured slaves from the interior, developed a taste for Caribbean rum; it became one of the chief bartering items in their dealing with the Europeans.  While the sugar from the New World was primarily going to Europe, by the late 1600’s, rum production had also emerged in the British colonies in New England, where most of the molasses were being shipped to Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut and New Hampshire. Rum soon became the most popular distilled spirit in British North America.  But the greater portion of this rum was shipped to the west coast of Africa where it would be traded for more slaves.  It replaced brandy as the favorite spirit among the slave lords.

Diagram of Triangular Trade During the British Colonial Period, circa late 16th and early 17th Century

Rum became the first global drink.  Tom Standage said it best in his book, A History of the World in Six Glasses.

“Unlike beer, which is usually produced and consumed locally, and wine that is usually made and traded within a specific region,  rum was the result of the convergence of materials, people and technologies from around the world, and the product of several interesting historical forces.” 

Sugar from Asia reaches the Arabs, who introduce it to Europe, the Europeans took sugar production to the New World, and only with the labor of a captive work force were they able to succeed in the enterprise.  The rise of distilled spirits and the technology allowed waste products from sugar to be made into rum. And the buccaneering spirit of the Age of Exploration and Conquest spread rum around the world.

Ships and sailors carried rum all over world.  From 1655 onward, rum replaced beer as the daily ration of alcohol on Royal Navy ships in the Caribbean.  And it was the British Navy who invented the very first cocktail ever made.  Admiral Edward Vernon issued an order that rum served to the sailors should be mixed with two pints of water, along with lime juice and sugar.  The drink was immediately referred to by the Admirals nickname, “Old Grogram” because he wore a waterproof cloak made from grogram, which was a type of waxed cloth.  Later on the sailors just shortened the name to Grog.

British Sailors receiving their daily Grog rations, circa late 19th Century

The Royal Navy’s pursers had a slight problem with the rum they acquired for the grog; there was no accurate way to determine the alcohol content of liquors before the invention of the hydrometer in the 1800’s.   A method was devised at the Royal Arsenal to measure the strength of the rum.  They would mix a little of the rum with a little bit of water, and a few grains of black powder.  By using a magnifying glass and concentrated beam of sunlight focused on the mixture, they could then determine what concentration of alcohol the rum had.  If the powder didn’t ignite, that meant the rum was weak and less water would be added to make the grog.  If it exploded, then it was too strong and more water would be added.  But if it just sizzled a little and the powder barely ignited it was deemed to be the correct strength, about 48 percent alcohol. This was known as ‘proofing’ the rum, and it is where we get our term “proof” in regards to measuring the amount of alcohol in a particular distillate.

Rum, and grog in particular, by replacing beer in the British Navy’s rations, contributed to the dramatic reduction of scurvy among the British sailors, as compared to other navies, who were still using beer or wine as the daily ration of alcohol.  Scurvy is caused by a lack of Vitamin C, which is found in the juice of limes and lemons, a minor component in grog.  Beer contains no Vitamin C, and wine only has trace amounts.  So, as the British resistance to scurvy increased, the others’ resistance to the disease was nominal to nonexistent.  And some historians regard this as one of the major advantages that allowed the British to command naval superiority around the globe during the 18th and 19th Centuries.  And it’s also the reason we call the British sailors “limeys.”

Often we think of rum and pirates, and yes, while there is an association between the two, it really was no more than any other seafarers, or anybody else, during the golden age of piracy in the late 17th and early 18th Centuries; everybody in the British Empire and in European North and South America was drinking rum at the time.  What really cemented the association of the pirates with rum was Robert Louis Stevenson’s 19th Century classic, Treasure Island, published in 1883

In British Colonial America, rum was the favorite spirit.  It was cheaper than brandy, since it was made from leftover molasses instead of expensive wine; England didn’t have any vineyards, and early colonial attempts at grape production weren’t very successful.  The poor could afford rum, and generally drank it straight, as Boston minister, Increase Mather, decried in 1686, “They that are poor, and wicked too, can for a penny or two pence make themselves drunk.”  The craftsman class and the well to do of the colonies used rum to make very elaborate punches, with the addition of fruit juices, spices and sugar.

Rum production became one of the leading industries in New England, even though it was noted by those at the time who were familiar with West Indian rum, that the New England version of the spirit, while it was much cheaper to purchase, was not very good in comparison to the spirit from Barbados and other British colonies in the Caribbean.  The production of New England rum grew so quickly that by the early 1720’s the British sugar producers couldn’t supply the rum distillers with enough molasses to meet demand.  At the same time, the French had prohibited the manufacture of rum in their colonies in order to protect the domestic brandy industry.   The French sugar producers in Haiti and the Lesser Antilles were more than happy to sell their left over molasses to the Yankee distillers, at cheaper prices than the British, too.  And at this same time, the British were losing out to the French in the European sugar market.  The English in attempt to balance the competition with the rival empire, passed the Molasses Act in 1733.  The act called for a prohibitive duty of sixpence per gallon on any foreign molasses imported into British North America.  So rather than comply, the distillers smuggled the molasses in from the French islands.  Local officials who were in charge of enforcing the law were bribed to turn a blind eye.  Within a few years of the passing of the law, it is estimated that 80% of the rum produced in New England was being made with French molasses.

Rum production in New England soared.  In 1738 there were only eight distilleries in Boston; by 1750 there were 63.  Rum from New England was being sold and transported to points all across the globe.  And its popularity among the American colonists was unbounded.  When George Washington ran for election to the Virginia House of Burgesses (the colonial assembly) in 1758, his campaign handed out to potential voters 28 gallons of rum, 50 gallons of rum punch, along with another 82 gallons of wine, beer, and cider- in a county of only 391 voters.

After the end of the French and Indian War, the British realized that they weren’t getting any revenue off of the Molasses Act, and they subsequently passed the Sugar Act in 1764, and they gave it some teeth.  First they dropped the duty on imported molasses in half to three pence on the gallon, but it was to be enforced.  Local collectors were given incentives to collect the duty.  Colonial governors were required to enforce the law strictly and arrest smugglers, or lose their governorships.  The Royal Navy was given the power to stop ships at sea and collect the duty on molasses in transport.  Now as you can imagine, this didn’t set well with the New Englanders; they had been getting away with not paying any duty for 31 years, and a tax of any kind was abhorrent to them.  The Sugar Act was just another blunder in the series of blunders that the British Parliament made between the end of the French and Indian War and the opening of the American Revolution.  (See blog Vol. 1, No. 3 on the Whiskey Rebellion.)

Rum was even a part of one of the most famous rides in American history; the Ride of Paul Revere.  On the eve of the battle at Lexington Concord, went on his route to warn Samuel Adams and John Hancock and others of the approaching British Army.  He stopped at key spots where it was prearranged that a particular person there would get the word out to the others in the area who needed to know.  One of those places where he stopped was a tavern in Medford, belonging to Isaac Hall, the captain of the local militia.  It was there that Revere had a Rum Toddy, made from sugar, rum, and hot water, heated by plunging a red hot poker into the tankard.

Today rum is produced in over 50 countries world wide, with the Bacardi company of Puerto Rico being the number one producer in the world.  Number two is Tanduay Rum of the Phillipines, and followed by McDowell’s of India at number three.  Regional variations of rum also abound.  Rums from English speaking islands tend to be darker, such as Myer’s Dark and Mount Gay, with a very strong molasses flavor. 

The French speaking islands make their rums from pure sugar cane juice rather than molasses, a variety they call Rhum Agricole, translated means Agricultural Rum. They are much lighter and sweeter than the English style of rum.

Spanish speaking islands traditionally make a style of rum called añejo, meaning old style. These are the rums that most Americans are familiar with, like as Bacardi.  These are the styles of rum you will find in Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic.  These rums have a smooth taste and are best when used in the mixing of cocktails.

The newest trend in rum is spiced rums, and the most famous of which is Captain Morgan, the world’s fastest growing name brand of rum.  Spiced rums can have cinnamon, vanilla, rosemary, pepper, all spice, nutmeg- really anything, and they usually have caramel flavoring and color added as well.

One more story related to rum in the United States;  even after the American Revolution was over, despite the fact that the United States lost a large percentage of its molasses importation from the British West Indies, rum production in New England continued, even into the 20th Century.  On January 15th, 1919, in the North End of Boston, at the Purity Distilling Company, at about 12:30 in the afternoon, a storage tank holding over 2.3 million gallons of molasses waiting to be distilled into rum, collapsed.  Witness said that the popping of the rivets from the tank sounded like a machine gun going off as it split open, and a 25 foot high wave of molasses cascaded through the streets of Boston at a top speed of 35 miles per hour, it covered nearly a square kilometer of the city. 

The mass of the thick sticky molasses damaged girders of the elevated rail line, knocked buildings off of their foundations, with 150 injured, and 21 killed along with several horses, most of which were crushed by the weight or drowned in the morass of the molasses tsunami.  The cleanup took weeks to accomplish, with over 87,000 man hours of labor required.  Saltwater from the bay was pumped up to wash away the molasses.  Boston Harbor was brown from the molasses until the summer, and it is said that every bit of ground and surviving building oozed with the stickiness of the molasses for years, and to this day it is said that you can still smell the aroma of molasses in the basements of many of the buildings that survived.   Some say it smells like Myers Dark Rum.

Allen Tatman: Producer, Writer, Narrator
Brian McGeorge: Technical Director
Hishtory Podcast recorded at Rivers Edge Studios and Paddy Malone’s Irish Pub
A Wylde Irish Production, LLC All Rights Reserved

Works Cited: 

Abbott, Elizabeth.  Sugar: A Bittersweet History.  Duckworth, London, 2008.

Foss, Richard. Rum: A Global History. Reaktion Books, London, 2012

Hopkins, Amy.  “Top 10 Moments in Rum History.”  The Spirits Business. November 19, 2014.
http://www.thespiritsbusiness.com/2014/11/top-10-moments-in-rum-history-2/ 

Horton, Mark. “A History of Sugar: The Food Nobody Needs But Everyone Craves.”  Ancient Origins. November 1, 2015.  http://www.ancient-origins.net/history/history-sugar-food-nobody-needs-everyone-craves-004406?nopaging=1

“How Sugar is Refined: The Basic Story.”  Sugar Knowledge InternationalOnline. 
http://www.sucrose.com/lref.html

Jabr, Ferris.  “The Science of the Great Molasses Flood.” Scientific American.  August 1, 2013
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/molasses-flood-physics-science/ 

Lieberman, Daniel E. “Evolution’s Sweet Tooth.” New York Times. June 5th, 2012

Paskin, Becky.  “The World’s 10 Largest Rum Brands.”  The Spirits Business. June 24th, 2013
http://www.thespiritsbusiness.com/2013/06/the-worlds-10-largest-rum-brands/8/

Standage, Tom.  A History of Civilization in Six Glasses.  New York, Walker & Company, 2005

Tasting the Stars: The Story of Champagne

Another year has come and gone, and whether it was a good one or a bad one for you, New Year’s Eve always brings forth the promise of better times ahead.  And on Saturday night, many of us will be ushering in 2017 with that most iconic of sparkling wines, Champagne.  But, did you ever wonder what makes Champagne, Champagne?  And why do we associate it with celebrations?  Weddings, launching of ships, the winning of the World Series, (so, now even you Cubs fans know what Champagne tastes like),  anytime there is cause for jubilation, Champagne is the go to beverage. 

Besides Champagne there are lots of different kinds of sparkling wines; France also has Cremant.  Spain has Cava, Italy has Asti and Prosecco and Moscato. Portugal, Germany, Australia, South Africa, even Russia all have sparkling wines.  But, usually when we think of such, we first think of Champagne.  And there’s a reason for that! 

From the very beginnings of Champagne as we know it, was a product of intense marketing, and born out of a rivalry with other wine varieties.  You see, Once upon a time, in late medieval France, there were some monks who were trying to make a better wine out of what everyone thought was a really shitty wine… 

Lying in Northeastern France is the region of Champagne  (proun: sham-PON-ya).  It’s on the very edge of the wine growing regions of Europe.  The mean annual temperature in Champagne is only 50 degrees Fahrenheit, so grapes have a difficult time fully maturing on the vine.

Another problem that wine makers have historically had in Champagne is that because of the colder winters in the region, wine doesn’t always finish its fermentation cycle, with the yeast going into hibernation once the temperature dropped to a certain point, and the wine doesn’t finish fermenting in the bottle until the spring when it warms up.  This used to be a big problem, but as is often the case, what once was a problem eventually became an asset.

The Romans first arrived in the Champagne region shortly after the defeat of the Gauls by Julius Caesar at the Battle of Alesia in 52 BC.   The name Champagne comes from the name Campania, a province and rolling hillside country just south of Rome.  The area in France reminded the Roman settlers of the area in Italy, but its climate was a bit cooler. 

Champagne Region of France.  Note that this is not the political region known as Champagne-Ardenne, but the region of France where grapes for Champagne are produced.

During the Roman period, vineyards were attempted in the region, but always with just marginal success because of the cool summers.  But beginning in the mid to late First Millennia CE, Northern Europe experienced a warming climate.  Just a few degrees, but it lengthened growing periods and shortened winters enough that viticulture expanded greatly in Champagne in this period.  The Holy Roman Emperor and King of the Franks Charlemagne, and the Carolingian kings that followed him, encouraged the expansion of vineyards in all of Northern France beginning in the 8th Century CE. 

This warming period is known as the Medieval Climatic Anomaly, and carbon dating analysis from the period puts the temperature almost 2 degrees warmer over the period than it was before or after it ended in the early Second Millennia CE, when it was followed by another anomaly called the Little Ice Age which lasted until the 19th Century. 

A two degree increase in average temperature doesn’t sound like a lot, but it saw the expansion of agricultural activity all across Europe during the period, and because many groups had gained strength and prosperity through increased agricultural output, it triggered migratory movement all through world, by groupsthe Vikings, Huns, and Mongols, who expanded from their native lands into new territories.  Another result of the climatic anomaly.

In 987 Hugh Capet was crowned King of France at the Cathedral of Reims in Champagne, and for the next 8 centuries, it was the location of the Kings of France coronation ceremony.  The area began to be regarded as the spiritual center of France, and with these great ceremonies being held there, the local wines received quite a bit of attention and were considered to be the vintage of the French royalty. 

The rolling hills of the Champagne Region

But, as the climate cooled beginning in the middle of the Second Millennia CE, the wines of Champagne were not as rich as they had once been before.  Their red wines were lighter in color and body, and the white wines made from red grapes were kind of grayish or a very pale pink in color.  The wines of the region produced from white grapes were found to have a dull flavor, did not fully ferment and spoiled quickly, and this was all due to just a very slight decrease in the growing season.  At this same time the region of Burgundy to the south was producing rich, robust red wines that had become the favored wines of all European nobility.  Flemish traders traveled over routes through Champagne to get to Burgundy where they would buy the deep red wines, and would return with their wagons full, and not even give the wines of the Champagne a second thought. It was a dark time for the Champenois wine growers.

But then from a small local village in the province, along came the son of a clerk whose family owned a number of vineyards in the region.  His name was Pierre, and was the youngest of seven children, so his hopes of inheriting any property were nonexistent, and at the age of 17 he took up the vows of the Benedictine order.  In 1668, at the age of 30, he was assigned to the Abbey Saint Pierre d’Hautevillers in Champagne, where he served as the wine cellarer until his death in 1715.  Under his care, the abbey and its vineyards flourished, all of the while he worked tirelessly to improve the wines of the Champagne region. 

You already know Pierre, you know who he is, you just know him by another name.  Dom Pérignon. 

Now there’s some legend surrounding Dom Perignon, we have to get these out of the way first.  He didn’t invent the sparkling wine we call Champagne.  Nobody invented it, the carbonation occurred naturally as a by product of stunted fermentation.  The temperature would drop in the autumn, the yeast in the wine would go into hibernation, the wine would be bottled, and then some time in the spring as temperatures rose, the yeast would then again become active, naturally carbonating the wine in the bottle, a process known as refermentation,-  and it was an enormous problem for winemakers at the time.  It was an undesirable condition; sparkling wine was considered to be an inferior product, and it was also dangerous.  The carbonation caused pressure within the bottle, which would at the least cause the cork to pop, and at the worst cause the bottle to explode, and the flying glass would cause a chain reaction by striking bottles next to them that were also under pressure and they too would explode.  So if you were a worker in the cellar or racking house in the spring, and bottles started exploding, your life could be in danger.

Another thing, Dom Perignon is credited with saying “I am tasting the stars,” upon his discovery of Champagne.  Well, again he considered sparkling wine a flawed wine, so Perignon wouldn’t have said that, and the first appearance of that quote being credited to Perignon was in the 19th Century and wasn’t really popularized until the 20th Century by the Moët et Chandon House, who began to sell a top shelf brand of Champagne under the name Dom Perignon in 1936, and theyhave used the quote as part of various advertising campaigns ever since.

What Dom Pérignon did do was learn how to get the most out of the vineyards of the Champagne region.  He believed in only using Pinot Noir grapes for both red and white wines.  He believed that the Pinot Noir grapes specifically, and red grapes in general, were less “volatile” as he described them and less likely to cause bubbles from appearing in the wine, which he believed, as stated before, was an undesirable trait.  So again, he would have never said, “I am tasting the stars.”  He might have said, “ah I am tasting swill, this wine is shit.” Or something like that.

Other innovations that were triumphed by Dom Perignon included aggressive pruning, keeping the vines to less than three feet in height, producing smaller yields and a better quality grape.  He also championed harvesting in the morning when it was cool, so the heat of the day would not take any moisture out of the grape.  Another practice he advocated was pressing the grapes quickly and efficiently and keeping the grape skins from leaching into the juice and imparting of off flavors and dark colors.  These measures helped Perignon produce exceptionally good white wine from red wine grapes.

Abbey Saint Pierre d’Hautevillers where Dom Pierre Perignon perfected the art of wine making in the 17th & early 18th Century.

As Dom Perignon was perfecting the wines of the Champagne region, they began to gain a popularity in a most unexpected place; London.  Not being able to grow grapes in England, the English depended upon importation of wine from the continent.  Because of the influence of an exiled nobleman of the French court, Charles de Sainte Evremond, who preferred and promoted the wines of Champagne among the nobility of the English, these wines became very popular with King Charles II and his court beginning in the 1660’s.

At that time the wine from France would be shipped in barrels, and it would then be bottled in England.  The English had a superior process in the manufacturing of glass bottles that made them stronger than their French counterparts.  The English also perfected the process of corking the bottles, which is basically the same manner in which traditional sparkling wines are sealed today.  Consequently, when the refermentation process occurred in England, the corks wouldn’t prematurely pop, nor would the bottles explode from the pressure of the build up of carbon dioxide.  And lo and behold, the English developed a taste for the bubbly wine from Champagne.  Other European courts, seeing the popularity of Champagne among the English Royalty soon followed suit, and by 1715 even the Duke of Orleans, the Regent of France, had grown into a huge fan of the bubbly.

This created a fashion trend in Paris- like that’s never happened before or since- as the elite restaurants and high society were eager to follow the Duke’s lead and wanted to serve and drink sparkling wines.  The Champanois winemakers, including the disciples of Dom Perignon, began to switch production methods to produce sparkling wines rather than the still wines to meet the demand of the Parisian market.  The marketing and sales of the wines changed dramatically at this time; rather than the vineyards selling their wines, Champagne Houses began to emerge, including some that are still very famous today, including Moet et Chandon and Taittinger.  These Champagne houses bought select grapes from various vineyards, and blended them to make their select sparkling wines.  Each house had sales agents who went to all of the royal courts of Europe, with samples of their vintages, and it basically became a champagne arms race between these competitors.

It did not take long before the Champagne houses overtook the monasteries and secular owned vineyards in production of sparkling wine in the Champagne region, as the established wine makers were reluctant to abandon the production of still wines that they had been making for many years.  As the bubbly became more and more popular among the aristocrats of Europe, the monastic and secular vineyards tried to move into the sparkling wine market, however the Champagne houses were already well ahead of them, and rather than beating their heads against a wall to compete, the vineyards reluctantly sold their grapes to the established and experienced marketers of the champagne houses.

By the time of the Napoleonic era, Champagne was being drank by all of the royalty of Europe, from Spain to Russia, Norway and Denmark to the Ottoman Empire, Champagne was the of the toast of the realms, thanks to the work of sales agents and marketing men of the Champagne houses of France.  Through the 1800’s, year after year, the production of champagne increased, and by the end of the Century, two of the largest markets for France’s unique sparkling wine, were the industrial juggernaut of the United States and the Tsarists controlled Russian Empire.

This was great for Champagne - until the early 20th Century… and then there were problems.  In 1917, the Romanov Regime of Russia was overthrown by the Bolsheviks, who immediately prohibited the importation of Champagne, declaring it to be decadent and bourgeois, in direct repudiation of the Marxist philosophy of Communism.  Follow that up with the passing of Prohibition in the USA in 1920, with the loss of many tycoon and industrialists fortunes, two of the largest markets for champagne were gone. 

Internally the French were also dealing with some issues; during World War I, which found the Champagne region on the western battlefront, wartime devastation, along with crop failures, seriously disrupted grape production, causing local prices to soar in the Champagne region. The production houses looked to other regions to purchase cheaper produce.  The grape growers of Champagne were outraged; how can you call a wine Champagne if it is not from Champagne?  The French government stepped in, defining specific boundaries where grapes had come from to be used in the production of the wine before it could be called Champagne.

During World War II, under Nazi occupation, Champagne production, for the most part, was uninterrupted, primarily because of the German officers corps affinity for the bubbly wine.  Only towards the end of the war in late 1944, as the Allies marched across France and with fighting moving through the Champagne region, did the viticulture experience any disruption.  The European theatre of the war actually ended in Champagne, in Reims, on May 7, 1945, when Supreme Commander of the Allied forces, Dwight D Eisenhower accepted the unconditional surrender of the German Commander, Alfred Jodl.  The event was celebrated by the Allies with the toasting and drinking of six cases of 1934 vintage Pommery Champagne.

Since the end of the war, for the past 70 years, Champagne production and sales from France have continued to grow exponentially.  There are nearly 20,000 independent growers of grapes in the Champagne region, and over 300 houses that purchase their harvests, producing more than 200 million bottles of French Champagne annually. 

But, most of the Champagne that is drunk in the United States is not really Champagne.  It’s American champagne, with a little ‘C’.  So how do the American vineyards and producers of sparkling wine get away with calling their product Champagne?

Going back to the 1860’s, before the name Champagne was recognized internationally as being only those wines produced in the region of Champagne, California winemakers were producing sparkling wines that they called Champagne.  Consequently, by the early 20th Century, all sparkling wines in the United States were called Champagne, regardless of where they were made or the production method used to make them. 

See, in France, for a sparkling wine to be called Champagne, it must come from Champagne, and it must have its second fermentation done in the bottle.  This method of fermentation is called Method Traditionelle.  But, other countries do not necessarily follow this method.  Most American “Champagnes” are made by a process known as Method Charmat, which does the second fermentation in large vats and then the wine is bottled, OR a still white wine is infused with CO2, Carbon Dioxide, after the fermentation is finished and then it is bottled. 

Both Method Charmat and CO2 infusion are considered by wine connoisseursto be inferior methods of sparkling wine production.  Whether it is or not is a matter of personal taste.  I can tell you this…  I have drank much more American substandard sparkling wine, and Italian sparkling wine, than I have the good stuff, but on the occasions when I have been so lucky to be able to imbibe of a quality French Champagne, oo la la, vive la difference.  It is worlds apart in the quality.

So back to-  Why can American wine producers call their sparkling wines champagnes when they are not?  Well, according to American law some can and some can’t, and this is still a major bone in the craw of French champagne producers for many years.  The American producers claimed that they had been calling these types of sparkling wines champagne since the beginning of American wine production, and American consumers were completely fine with that.  But the American producers wanted to sell their product internationally.  In agreement with the EU and other countries, they could sell their product to the European and other international markets, as long as they agreed to call and label their product as ‘California Champagne’ or ‘American Champagne,’ however some American producers did not go along with the deal, and still continued to call their product simply Champagne, and are completely content to only sell to the domestic US market.  And, then as of 2006, the US government declared that only those companies that were calling their product ‘Champagne’ prior to 2006 could continue to do such, and they must also post the place of origin.

Allen Tatman: Producer, Writer, Narrator
Brian McGeorge: Technical Director
Hishtory Podcast recorded at Rivers Edge Studios and Paddy Malone’s Irish Pub
A Wylde Irish Production, LLC All Rights Reserved

Works cited:

Into Wine.  “Champagne: France, History of Champagne, Dom Perignon.” http://www.intowine.com/champagne.html

Gallante, Meredith.  “Happy New Year: Here’s Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Champagne.”  Business Insider.  December 31, 2011. http://www.businessinsider.com/history-of-champagne-2011-12

Johnson, Hugh.  Vintage: The Story of Wine.  New York, Simon & Schuester, 1989.

Robinson, Jancis, ed.  The Oxford Companion to Wine, 3rd Edition (2006).  Oxford, 1994.

A Cup of Christmas Cheer. (or two or three).

Here we come a-caroling among the leaves so green,

Here we come a-wandering so fair to be seen

Love and Joy come to you, and a Merry Christmas too

And God Bless You and send you a Happy New Year

God send you a Happy New Year.

            Everyone is familiar with the Caroling Song.  I had to learn it in music class when I was in elementary school, along with some additional verses, nearly forty years ago, and I still remember the song to this very day.  The second verse goes;

We are not your daily beggars who go from door to door,

We are your neighbors children whom you have seen before.

And the third verse;

Good Master and Good Mistress while you’re sitting by the fire

Pray think of us poor children who are wandering in the mire.

But did you know that the song was originally an English song about children begging for an alcoholic beverage as they went from door to door singing Christmas carols?  Yeah, of course our teachers left out the verses about drinking.  And the verses we did learn had been changed dramatically from the original.

Christmas and alcohol have been together since the earliest days of the holiday, even before Christmas was Christmas, that is a celebration of the birth of Christ.  It has origins in pagan celebrations of the Winter Solstice, and we all know what the pagans liked to do; drink.  So this week we are going to take a look at the relationship between alcohol and winter celebrations, including some of the more famous drinks associated with the holiday. 

The first time I ever had a drink with the family, not counting the times my Uncle Bill would let me have a sip of his beer, was at Christmas.  A little sip of wine on Christmas Eve, maybe two, or three… Now I know why they’d let us do it now, so we’d go to sleep and wouldn’t stay up all night waiting for Santa Claus, at least we’d sleep for a little while, long enough for Santa to get the presents from the hiding spots and under the tree.  We always had alcohol at Christmas, especially on my mom’s side of the family.  And I don’t know for sure how many generations back the tradition of drinking at Christmas started, but I would bet it was probably ancient, before there was even Christmas, you know, given our Celtic, Scandinavian, Anglo Saxon, and Teutonic lineage, and all of those people drank in celebration of the Winter Solstice.

The Solstice was important to ancient man because it ushered in the coming of Spring. While the hours of daylight have been growing shorter and shorter since mid-Summer, beginning on or around December 21st, the days begin to grow longer again.  It was a time to rejoice.  While we call it the first day of Winter, ancient man saw it as the first day toward Spring, a promise of the return of warmer days, a promise of new life, a promise of rebirth, if you will, and a cause for bounteous celebration.

Newgrange: Neolithic Portal Tomb, Co. Meath, Ireland, built circa 3,000BCE.  To illustrate the importance of the Winter Solstice to prehistoric and primitive man, this tomb was built so that at sunrise on the Winter solstice a beam of sunlight would come through a portal, engulfing the burial chamber in light.  The particulars of the religion behind this are unknown.

The pre Christian Romans celebrated Saturnalia, to honor their god Saturn.  The holiday lasted a week, beginning around December 17th, with businesses and government proceedings being suspended, and was marked by feasting and drinking, exchanging of small gifts, and fertility rites.  Boughs of greenery were brought in to deck the halls.  The special drink of the Romans at Saturnalia was Mulsum, a honeyed wine.  Not to be confused with mead, which is fermented honey water, Mulsum is made by adding warm honey to a medium dry wine, mixing the two ingredients well, then allowed to cool before being drank.

The pre-Christian Romans celebrated Saturnalia with a week of feasting, drinking, and gift giving beginning on December 17th

The Scandinavians and Germanic peoples celebrated the Feast of Juul (Yule), which is the Old Norse word for “wheel.”  These people believed that the sun was on a wheel-or was a wheel- circling the earth.  Feasting, dancing, drinking were all a part of the celebration, as was the bringing of evergreen boughs into the great hall.  A large log, the Yule log, would be brought into the great hall where it burned for 12 days.  The ashes would be collected after the celebration and then spread over agricultural fields with prayers to the gods.  One of those deities was Aegir, the brewer of the gods.  In Norse and Teutonic mythology, Aegir held a great drinking party every year at the winter solstice for the Norse gods, and the Feast of Yule was an homage to Aegir’s hospitality.  Drinks preferred at these celebrations included mead, but more popular with the holiday were strong sweet ales made from malt.  The Anglo Saxons brought these traditions when they invaded England in the Mid 1st Millennia CE, and the traditions were reinforced by the Norsemen, who also brought them with, when they invaded England towards the end of the same Millennia.

The Winter Solstice was not one of the major holidays for the pre Christian Celts of Britain, Scotland, Ireland, and Brittany.  The holidays of Samhain and Imbolc celebrated on the halfway points between the equinoxes and solstices- Samhain in the Autumn, and Imbolc in the Spring- were the big Celtic holidays.  The recent New Age Druid and Celtic movement celebrates Alban Arthan, or The Light of Arthur, in reference to King Arthur, on the Winter Solstice but this seems to be a recently made up holiday, as there is no historical mention or oral tradition of its celebration before the pre Christian era.  However, Romans and early Christian missionaries who were contact with the pagan Celts often noted that the Celts would burn great bonfires on the Winter Solstice.  These bonfires would be accompanied by feasting and drinking of ales made from malted barley, and/or wheat, and flavored with either honey or bog myrtle.  Sometimes hot milk was added to the ales, to make a drink known as Posset.

The ancient Celts burned bonfires on the Winter Solstice to light the longest night of the year.

The pre Roman Christians didn’t celebrate the birth of Christ.  Their big feast was Easter, the resurrection.  And the gospels say nothing about the date of Jesus’s birth, other than a reference in the Book of Luke to the shepherds being in the fields with their flocks, which would indicate it was probably at the time when the lambs were being born, which would mean early spring, late February or early March.

When Roman Emperor Constantine signed the Edict of Milan, ensuring religious tolerance for Christians in 313, it was not long after that he converted to Christianity.  There is a whole bunch of reasons for his doing this, mostly because of the concept of one god and one emperor, but I won’t go into all the details here.  But needless to say, after he converts what is he going to do about this pagan holiday celebrating the Roman God Saturn?  Viola!  In the year 336 Constantine decreed that December 25 was Jesus’s Birthday, and from then on Saturnalia became Christ’s Mass, or Christmas.  

This was a brilliant move by Constantine, whether he knew it or not, he gave the Christian missionaries a gift, as it made the conversion of the other pagan groups easier by allowing them to incorporate the activities of their Winter Solstice festivals into the celebration of the birth of baby Jesus.  So, that’s why we bring evergreen trees into our houses, we burn the Yule log, both traditions from the Teutonic and Scandinavian cultures.  We give gifts, a tradition brought to England by the Romans; it was not as an homage to the gifts brought to the Christ child by the wise man, as many were taught as children.

There was war on Christmas back in the 1600’s, but it’s not what you think.  During the 16th and 17th Centuries in England, Christmas was one of the most important festivals of the year, and it was celebrated for 12 days (hence the song).  Churches and buildings were decorated with evergreens and holly, there was gift giving and dancing and feasting and drinking of Christmas ales, and… a lot of debauchery that comes along with great celebrations, including gambling, promiscuity, and other forms of sin.  A segment of the followers of the Church of England known as the Puritans believed that reforms were needed.  One of them wrote,

“That more mischief is that time committed than in all the year besides, what masking and mumming, whereby robbery whoredom, murder, and what not is committed? What dicing and carding, what eating and drinking, what banqueting and feasting is then used, more than in all the year besides, to the great dishonor of God and impoverishing of the realm.”

During the 1640’s, these Puritans, under the leadership of Oliver Cromwell, came to power in Parliament, overthrowing King Charles I, eventually beheading him, abandoning the monarchy, and establishing the Commonwealth of England.  The Puritans then argued that Christmas was nothing more than a pagan celebration attached to Christ’s birth by the Romans, a vestige of Roman Catholicism, and in the 1650’s they made it a crime to celebrate Christmas at all, regardless of whether it was secular or religious!

Notice from 17th Century New England forbidding the observance of Christmas.

Cromwell died, Parliament couldn’t figure out how to find a successor that the people would follow, so in 1660 they invited the son of Charles I, Charles II, back to England, restored the monarchy, and the English were able to celebrate Christmas once more, unless they didn’t want to, and some didn’t, but most of the people were very happy that Christmas was back.   And this particular historical incident was well known to the founders of the United States, and was part of the justification for the rights of religious liberty and freedom of worship, so all faiths would be able to celebrate Christmas as they chose.

With the Restoration of the Monarchy in England 1660 Christmas was once again observed.  A depiction of bringing in the Yule Log, late 17th Century

Today, many of the traditions from Europe are a part of the typical American Christmas; the Christmas tree, evergreen wreaths, and boughs of holly… With the feasting and drinking many foods and drinks associated with Christmas came along with the Europeans who came to North America.  Winter ales have become quite popular with craft brew aficionados, and these are really just variants of the strong Christmas ales from the English, German, and Scandinavian traditions.  But, there are some drinks that we specifically associate with Christmas, and let’s look at four of them: Hot Toddy, Mulled Wine, Wassail, and Eggnog.

There are other drinks that are associated with Christmas, or Winter, including Hot Chocolate, Hot Cider, and the uniquely American drink, Tom & Jerry (which I will talk about in a future blog about American cocktails), but historically, from the English and German traditions, these four drinks are most associated with Christmas.

Hot Toddy
ot Toddy is really nothing more than ANY distilled spirit that is mixed with boiling water, sugar and spices.  The name probably comes from the British Colonial period, where in India a liquor known as tārī made from the fermented sap of the Toddy Palm tree was drank by British soldiers; ‘Toddy” simply meant ‘a drink.’

The drink that we know today has its roots in Scotland and Ireland.  Made with Scotch or Irish Whiskey, boiling water from the kettle, sugar or honey, and addition of spices such as cloves, nutmeg, and/or cinnamon, and is still touted today as a cure for the common cold.  But people also claimed the drink had preventative powers as well, so it was, and is, drank throughout the Winter in both countries.  A bit of a legend arose in Edinburgh, Scotland in the 18th Century, where it is said that the water that was best for use in the toddy should come from Tod’s Well, but the story seems apocryphal rather than factual.

When the hot toddy was brought to British Colonial North America, the most common spirit at the time was rum, which is still the most popular liquor used for the drink in New England.  A variation on the drink is Hot Buttered Rum, where a dollop of softened butter is added to the mix.  Other variants often seen in America have the drink made with brandy or applejack (freeze distilled cider).   The go to Hot Toddy at Paddy Malone’s is made with Irish whiskey, raw sugar, lemon and cloves. 

Mulled Wine
Mulled wine is an old drink, going back to the ancient Greeks, who would add spices and aromatics to less-than-great wine.  The Romans did the same thing, however as mentioned earlier, they also added honey, would bring the mixture to a simmer, and other additions included pepper, saffron, bay leaves, and dates.

But mulled wine really took off in the Middle Ages in Northern Europe, where the drink first earned its current name.  The word ‘mull’ developed at this time, meaning to heat, sweeten, and spice.  The reason mulling became popular was because there was a lot of bad wine that could be bought more cheaply than the better vintages, and so to mask a less than desirable flavor, additives were needed.

Victorian Era Christmas.  Painting by Viggo Johansen

But it was during Victorian period in England that mulled wine became associated with Christmas, particularly after Charles Dickens wrote about the drink in his timeless story A Christmas Carol, where he wrote of a version of warm mulled wine called ‘Smoking Bishop,’ thereafter solidifying the drink’s attachment to the Christmas Holiday.  It was during this time that orange peel, cinnamon, nutmeg, along with a touch of port or sweet brandy were added to dry red wine, which is very similar to the versions that are served today.

Wassail
Previously I mentioned the English Christmas caroling tradition of children going door to door and asking for a drink.  Well, that drink was Wassail, and the act of caroling and begging for a Christmas drink was called Wassailing.

Wassail is basically a Christmas punch, and the name has an old lineage.  The word was originally a greeting and comes from the Old Norse ‘ves heil’ and the Old English ‘was hál’, which meant ‘be in good health’ or ‘be fortunate.’  For the Danish and Anglo Saxons in Britain during the first Millennia CE it was the standard greeting.  We know this because the word appears in the 8th Century CE epic poem Beowulf :

The rider sleepeth

The hero, far-hidden; no harp resounds,

In the courts no wassail, as once was heard.

 Within 400 years the word had changed in the lexicon from just a standard greeting to a toast, as is illustrated in this poem written by an anonymous Anglo Saxon poet:

Rejoice and Wassail

Pass the bottle and drink healthy

Drink backwards and drink to me

Drink half and drink empty

The greeting was ubiquitous in England, so much so that when the Normans arrived in 1066 they regarded the salute as the uniquely English toast. 

In the late Middle Ages the, around the 13th Century, the term came to also denote the drink as well as the toast.  Initially Wassail was made from wine and imported spices and citrus, so only the wealthy could afford it, but the commoners began to make a similar punch from ales and ciders, adding what spices they could afford along with pieces of apple and pears, the locally grown fruits of the common folk.

It was along this same time that the use of the Wassail bowl came into play.  Families would have craftsmen make these bowls for them, some very elaborate, made of pewter or fine hardwoods.  The very wealthy would even have them made from precious metals or carved from decorative stone such as marble.  These bowels would be passed from generation to generation.  The vessels would be filled with Wassail, in which the guests would dip cakes and fine breads, and bits of crispy bread might be floated upon the surface, giving rise to the term ‘Toast” as a salutation when drinking. Very often people would drink from the bowl using the same cup.  The leader would take the cup of Wassail, make a toast, drink, then refill it and give the next person a kiss, hand them the cup, they would make a toast and drink, and the ritual went on.

Around 1600, people began to take the Wassail bowl to the streets going door to door.  Wassailers would go to the houses of the well-to-do, offering a warm cup of the punch in exchange for payment.  One commentator wrote:  “Wenches… by the wassels at New Year’s tide… present you with a cup, and you must drink the slabby stuff; but the meaning is you must give them moneys.”

Depiction of Wassailing in England, circa Mid 2nd Millennia CE

It wasn’t long before this practice morphed into caroling.  At Christmastide it was expected that the wealthy would be generous with the poor, even opening their homes to groups of wassailers, and feasting them of fine food and drink would ensue.  As payment, the gatherers would sing songs for the hosts.  This practice also gave birth to the expression, ‘to sing for your supper.’

Under Puritan rule in the mid 1600’s, in both England and the New England colonies, in some locales, wassailing was forbidden and violators could be punished with public humiliation; i.e. the stocks or pillory.  Besides the religious implications there were other reasons for this.  Sometimes the revelers would get a bit out of hand, refuse to leave homes unless they were given more drink, or other gifts, including money.  There are many recorded instances, especially in the American colonies, of wassailers gone wild around the holidays in the 17th and 18th Centuries.

During the 19th Century Victorian era, many authors, from Washington Irving to Charles Dickens, wrote stories that planted an idealized form of the traditional English Christmas in the minds of the readers, complete with wassailing in a civilized manner.  This was the time of that the song, “Here we come a Wassaling” gained popularity, with caroling and wassail coming together in the mid 1800’s- and survives pretty much in the same form of celebration to this day, except for the drink. 

Because of the emerging temperance movement in the late 1800’s, the wassail was usually, but not always, non-alcoholic punch, if given out to the carolers, at all. And with Prohibition in the 1920’s and its aftermath, the practice of giving drink to carolers was all but abandoned.  It was at this time, that the song became “Here we come a-Caroling.”  The verses to the original, “Here We Come a-Wassailing” are as follows:

 Here we come a-wassailing, Among the leaves so green;
Here we come a-wand'ring, So fair to be seen.

REFRAIN:

Love and joy come to you,
And to you your wassail too;
And God bless you and send you a Happy New Year
And God send you a Happy New Year.

Our wassail cup is made Of the rosemary tree,
And so is your beer Of the best barley.

 REFRAIN:

We are not daily beggars That beg from door to door;
But we are neighbours' children, Whom you have seen before.

REFRAIN:

Call up the butler of this house, Put on his golden ring.
Let him bring us up a glass of beer, And better we shall sing.

REFRAIN:

We have got a little purse Of stretching leather skin;
We want a little of your money To line it well within.

REFRAIN:

Bring us out a table And spread it with a cloth;
Bring us out a mouldy cheese, And some of your Christmas loaf.

REFRAIN:

God bless the master of this house Likewise the mistress too,
And all the little children That round the table go.

REFRAIN:

Good master and good mistress, While you're sitting by the fire,
Pray think of us poor children Who are wandering in the mire.

Love and Joy come to you,

and to you your wassail, too

And may God Bless you and send you a Happy New Year

And God send you a Happy New Year.

Today in America wassail is a throwback, and is generally served as a novelty at parties around Christmas.  I’ve been to more than one Holiday party in my life where hostess had to explain to the guests the significance of wassail.  And I’ve also been to parties where they didn’t put any alcohol in the wassail.  Good thing I usually carry a flask.

Eggnog
Of all the drinks associated with the winter holidays in America, perhaps the most recognized is Eggnog.  And I am not talking about that fecking pasteurized non alcoholic shit in the dairy section of the grocery store.  See that stuff is like half and half and high fructose corn syrup and as little as 1% egg yolk flavoring and coloring added to it and some nutmeg.  It sucks, and if you’ve ever had real eggnog, you know how much it sucks. 

Now at the pub, every Christmas eve, we serve freshly made Eggnog, and it has become very popular.  And when people have it they say, “Wow!  I can’t believe how delicious this is?”  And it is-  fresh cream, fresh eggs, sugar, nutmeg, and whiskey. Mmmmm…

But where did this tradition of drinking eggnog at Christmas come from? Well eggnog is the child of an earlier drink, Posset, which was a drink made from fresh milk which was boiled, then ale or wine and spices were added to it, which would cause the milk to curdle, so you probably kind of sucked it down like a custard, maybe.  It was a celebratory drink of the Celtic stock of the British Isles, especially the Highland Scots and the Irish. By the 13th Century, eggs and figs were being added to the recipe, and it wasn’t long before the recipe morphed into Eggnog.   

The word Nog, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is an old English word first appearing in the written language in the 17th Century, meaning strong ale or beer, and of course egg is self explanatory, so Eggnog originally meant, ‘Egg Beer.’ Some places on the internet will say that the suffix ‘nog’ is a contraction of the word ‘noggin’ which is a wooden drinking vessel.  But, since Eggnog was also drunk from containers not made of wood, this definition would seem to be apocryphal at best.

The Pub’s copy of the Oxford English Dictionary and the entry of the definition and origin of the word “Nog.”

By the 18th Century the poorer people were still making their eggnog with beer, but the wealthier segments of English society made theirs with expensive wines and liquors, like sherry, port, and brandy.   It seems that when the drink crossed the Atlantic to the colonies is when it came into the version we are most familiar with today; lots of farms around, so plenty of eggs and milk and cream, but, the heavily taxed liquors of sherry, port, and brandy were soon replaced with rum from the Caribbean, which was cheap and abundant during the colonial period. Once England and American split, the liquor of choice for eggnog became whiskey.  George Washington even had an eggnog recipe.

And why is this drink connected with the holidays here in America?  Well, I can’t find any historical references to why.  I can’t find a hard connection between Eggnog and Christmas.  And I’ve been looking.  My guess is it’s because of climate; the holidays are during the cooler period of the year, and in the days before refrigeration, it probably wasn’t a good idea to be making a drink out fresh eggs and milk when the weather was warm, so eggnog was made during the winter, and became associated with the winter holidays.  And of course the dairy industry filling the dairy section at the supermarket every winter with that crap they call eggnog and putting it in festive cartons and pushing it off as a tradition may have had something to do with it.  But, crass commercialism has never had anything do with Christmas, has it?

Why do I drink Eggnog at Christmas?  Because I started drinking it years ago, and I love it.  It’s delicious. For me, it wouldn’t be Christmas Eve without it.  Here’s my recipe.  Cheers!

Paddy Malone’s Eggnog*

INGREDIENTS:

·       12 large eggs, separated and at room temperature

·       1 quart of very cold heavy whipping cream

·       12 tablespoons of Sugar in the Raw or light brown sugar

·       1 ½ or2 cups of Jameson or Powers Irish Whiskey (I like 2 cups)

·       Ground Nutmeg

 In a large mixing bowl, beat the egg whites until they form soft peaks.  In another large bowl beat the cream until it is quite thick and frothy, then fold the cream in with the egg whites and store in the refrigerator.  Using two large bowls with one fitting inside the other, put ice in the bottom bowl and place the other bowl on top.  Pour the egg yolks in the top bowl and beat.  While beating gradually add the sugar a tablespoon at a time until the yolks and sugar are very well mixed.  Add the whiskey and continue beating.  Gently fold the cream & whites mix into the yolks & whiskey mix and keep chilled.  When ready to serve sprinkle nutmeg on the top. 

 *Eating raw eggs can pose a health risk to some.  Just a warning.  I’ve been drinking this for many years and have never been sick from it.  I also eat raw oysters and sushi, so I don’t worry about eating raw food.  I think the alcohol kills any bacteria in the eggs.  I guess because I drink alcohol when I eat oysters, and sake when I eat sushi, that also kills the bacteria, but what do I know?  I’m a half ass historian, not a doctor. 

Sources:

Avey, Tory. “Eating and Drinking with Charles Dickens.”  The History Kitchen.  Dec. 20, 2012
http://www.pbs.org/food/the-history-kitchen/eating-and-drinking-with-charles-dickens/ 

Banecker, Greg. “10 Holiday Drinks with History Chasers.”  The Matador Network.  Dec. 24, 2015.
http://matadornetwork.com/nights/10-holiday-drinks-with-history-chasers/?single=1

Dias, Elizabeth.  “A Brief History of Eggnog.”  Time. Dec. 21, 2011
http://time.com/3957265/history-of-eggnog/ 

Doares, Robert.  “Wassailing through History.”  Colonial Williamsburg Quarterly Magazine Online.  Holiday Issue, 2006.
http://www.history.org/Foundation/journal/Holiday06/wassail.cfm 

Durston, Chris.  “The Puritan War on Christmas.”  History Today: The Archive. Dec. 12, 1985
http://www.historytoday.com/chris-durston/puritan-war-christmas

Guerber, H.A. Myths of the Norsemen from the Eddas and Sagas.  London, Harrap & Company, 1908. 

Malloy, Chris. “Why Do We Drink Eggnog at Christmas?”  The Kitchn (sic).  Dec. 12, 2016
http://www.thekitchn.com/why-we-drink-eggnog-at-christmas-226791 

Pappas, Stephanie.  “Pagan Roots? 5 Surprising Facts About Christmas.”  LiveScience.  Dec. 22, 2012.
http://www.livescience.com/25779-christmas-traditions-history-paganism.html 

Perabo, Lyonel.  “Drinking Customs of the Vikings.”  Bivrost. Date Unknown
http://www.bivrost.com/drinking-customs-of-the-vikings/

Rood, Joshua, MA.  “Drinking with Ódinn: Alcohol and Religion in Heathen Scandinavia.”  Unpublished Academic Paper.  University of Iceland; Folkloristics/Ethnology and Museum Studies.  Háskóli Íslands.  April 14, 2014.

 “The Lost Gospel of Judas.”  National Geographic Online.  May 2009.
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/lostgospel/timeline_10.html

Taverns, Saloons, & Pubs: 10 of the Oldest Bars West of the Mississippi.

When I bought an old bar in Jefferson City 16 years ago, the rumor had been propagated for many years, by previous owners and others, that it was the oldest bar west of the Mississippi River. At the time, I was working for the State Historic Preservation Office, and I knew that the bar wasn’t even considered to be the oldest in our state. Folks who live here will come to the bar, usually with friends from out of town, and they’ll say, “Tell them, tell them- isn’t this the oldest bar west of the Mississippi?” It takes a little diplomacy to tell them that it isn’t true without embarrassing them in front of their friends. I usually say something like, “Well, we used to think that it was, but some research has shown that it isn’t,” or “yeah, it’s easy to make that mistake, but it’s just the oldest bar here in town.” They always look disappointed. Sometimes even miffed, I guess because I shattered their cherished beliefs, something they had boasted to others; “Our pub is the oldest bar west of the Mississippi!” I’m sorry, folks, but its just not true. Don’t be upset with me; I can’t in good conscience perpetuate the myth. But people want to believe, they want to have a connection, a physical connection, an emotional connection, to their history and their past. When I take tour groups to Ireland, the old pubs are some of the biggest attractions. They want to have a drink in the bar where Michael Collins took his last pint before he was assassinated, or where JFK hung out when he worked in Dublin in the late 1940’s, or where Brendan Behan and Patrick Kavanagh used to have it out. There is something about these places; these old bars, these dens of imbibing from a time of antiquity. For those of us who like to bend an elbow, there is something neat about having a drink in one of these touchstones to the past. Back to the question; what is the oldest bar west of the Mississippi River? Well, I wanted to know that myself, and now you probably do, as well. Over the years I have done some digging. The list that I’ve pulled together, is not exactly the ten oldest bars west of the Mississippi, but it is the oldest bar in each of 10 different states west of Mississippi- The complete list of the oldest bar in each of the 24 states west of the Mississippi River can be found at the bottom of the blog So by process of elimination, the oldest bar on this list is going to be the oldest bar west of the big river. Another thing, these are just a list of the oldest verifiable bar in each state that I could find. All of these establishments have been historically documented to have either been built or had the business started on the year given, in as much as I could authenticate the dates. I double-checked as much as the internet and the National Register of Historic Places would allow, and there is not a lot of scholarly research done on this subject; so, for all of you aspiring History PhD candidates out there, especially those in Historic Preservation, you’re welcome, here’s the start of your thesis subject. And regarding Prohibition from 1920 to 1933; everybody gets a pass. Some areas of the country the Volstead Act was not enforced at all, while in other states, violators were staunchly cracked down upon. Also, some of these listed, after doing the research, I found were not continuously open. But, unless I found another property that had a stronger claim, I went with these...

When I bought an old bar in Jefferson City 16 years ago, the rumor had been propagated for many years, by previous owners and others, that it was the oldest bar west of the Mississippi River.  At the time, I was working for the State Historic Preservation Office, and I knew that the bar wasn’t even considered to be the oldest in our state. 

Folks who live here will come to the bar, usually with friends from out of town, and they’ll say, “Tell them, tell them- isn’t this the oldest bar west of the Mississippi?” 

It takes a little diplomacy to tell them that it isn’t true without embarrassing them in front of their friends.  I usually say something like, “Well, we used to think that it was, but some research has shown that it isn’t,” or “yeah, it’s easy to make that mistake, but it’s just the oldest bar here in town.” 

They always look disappointed. Sometimes even miffed, I guess because I shattered their cherished beliefs, something they had boasted to others; “Our pub is the oldest bar west of the Mississippi!” I’m sorry, folks, but its just not true.  Don’t be upset with me; I can’t in good conscience perpetuate the myth. 

But people want to believe, they want to have a connection, a physical connection, an emotional connection, to their history and their past.

When I take tour groups to Ireland, the old pubs are some of the biggest attractions.  They want to have a drink in the bar where Michael Collins took his last pint before he was assassinated, or where JFK hung out when he worked in Dublin in the late 1940’s, or where Brendan Behan and Patrick Kavanagh used to have it out. 

There is something about these places; these old bars, these dens of imbibing from a time of antiquity.  For those of us who like to bend an elbow, there is something neat about having a drink in one of these touchstones to the past.

  Back to the question; what is the oldest bar west of the Mississippi River?  Well, I wanted to know that myself, and now you probably do, as well.   Over the years I have done some digging. The list that I’ve pulled together, is not exactly the ten oldest bars west of the Mississippi, but it is the oldest bar in each of 10 different states west of Mississippi- The complete list of the oldest bar in each of the 24 states west of the Mississippi River can be found at the bottom of the blog

So by process of elimination, the oldest bar on this list is going to be the oldest bar west of the big river.  Another thing, these are just a list of the oldest verifiable bar in each state that I could find. All of these establishments have been historically documented to have either been built or had the business started on the year given, in as much as I could authenticate the dates.   I double-checked as much as the internet and the National Register of Historic Places would allow, and there is not a lot of scholarly research done on this subject; so, for all of you aspiring History PhD candidates out there, especially those in Historic Preservation, you’re welcome, here’s the start of your thesis subject.

And regarding Prohibition from 1920 to 1933; everybody gets a pass.  Some areas of the country the Volstead Act was not enforced at all, while in other states, violators were staunchly cracked down upon.   Also, some of these listed, after doing the research, I found were not continuously open.  But, unless I found another property that had a stronger claim, I went with these. 

Scholz Bier Garten, Austin TX

Number 10, est 1866:

Scholz Bier Garten, Austin Texas.

August Scholz, a German immigrant and Confederate veteran, opened his bar and cafe in the Texas Capital the year following the end of the Civil War.  Over the years the business expanded from a small one room establishment to a thriving restaurant and bar, and the biergarten came later.  In the beginning the business was primarily patronized by the Germans living in the Austin area, but as time went on, the rest of the community began to discover the hospitality of August Scholz.  Scholz operated his bar until his death in 1891.  Two years later, in 1893, Lemp Brewing of St. Louis, brewers of Falstaff Beer, purchased the bar - the same year that the Texas Longhorn football team had its first undefeated season, and the players celebrated at Scholz Beer Garten. 

Located just steps from both the State Capitol building and the University of Texas, Scholz is a cherished tradition and welcoming hostelry in the midst of Texas’s vibrant capital city.

Number 9, est 1863:

Bale of Hay Saloon, Virginia City, Montana.

Whenever gold is discovered somewhere, the thing that will soon follow are prospectors.  And once those prospectors have some gold in their pockets the next things to follow are bars and brothels.  When gold was discovered in Montana in 1863, the town of Virginia City sprung up and within a year had a population of between eight and ten thousand people.  Businesses appeared overnight, and one of them was the Bale of Hay, which kept going until it closed in 1908. 

I will be honest, there is not a lot of documentation online about this bar, but it is roundly declared to be the oldest in Montana.  It reopened in 1945, and had such an authentic feel that the saloon was used as a set in the 1973 Dustin Hoffman movie Little Big Man.  Today, the Bale of Hay is part of another gold rush for Virginia City; tourism.

Miner’s & Stockman’s Saloon, Hartville, Wyoming

Number 8, est. 1862:

Miner’s and Stockman’s Steakhouse and Saloon, Hartville, Wyoming.

In eastern Wyoming, out where the open range meets the foothill slopes of the Rocky Mountains, 100 miles from Cheyenne and 120 miles from Casper, there in the shadow of Laramie Peak, lies the town of Hartville, population 76, home to one of the most beloved destination bar and restaurants in the state. 

The Miner’s and Stockman’s Steakhouse and Saloon goes back to the earliest days of Wyoming settlement, when it wasn’t even Wyoming.  It was still the Dakota Territory. Located just up the North Platte River a few miles from Fort Laramie-the western most military post on the great plains at the time-  when copper deposits were discovered in the area hills in the early 1860’s and it wasn’t long before the miners showed up.  Following the miners came herds of cattle, and of course, a trading post and a saloon. There was probably a brothel, but nobody talks about that anymore.  The Miner’s and Stockman’s is also rumored to have been a frequent stop of outlaws Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid, and the Hole in the Wall Gang.  Now it’s home to of some of the best steaks in Wyoming, along with a great saloon with a genuine old west feel.

Number 7, est. 1861:

The Saloon, San Francisco, California

Of all of the bars on this list, the history of this one is probably the best documented, perhaps because people knew early on that the history of San Francisco was going to be important.  Originally established by Alsatian immigrant, Ferdinand Wagner, as a grocery store during the gold rush years of the 1850’s, but in 1861 Wagner applied for a water license and began to purvey beer, wines, and spirits. 

Wagner’s Beer Hall, located between the Telegraph Hill and North Beach neighborhoods, witnessed everything from the Great Earthquake and Fire of 1906, the development of Alcatraz Penitentiary, to the spanning of the Golden Gate Bridge, to the building of the Transamerica Pyramid.   Still a thriving drinking establishment and music venue, the Saloon is crowded with neighborhood regulars and tourists alike every evening.

The Saloon, aka Wagner’s Beer Hall, San Francisco CA, circa 1870

Number 6, est. 1859:

The Buffalo Rose Bar & Grill, Golden, Colorado.

How many bars can say that they were once also the home of the Territorial Legislature? Opened as a saloon more than a decade before the Coors family established their now famous brewery, the second floor of the Saloon was home to the Territorial Council when the town of Golden was the Capital of the Colorado Territory.  Besides a saloon and legislative chamber, the building housed a bowling alley –the first in Colorado- and from the early 1900’s, a swimming pool in the basement – no longer used, but it’s still there.  And during the earliest period the hall above the saloon also served a church. 

After the Civil War, the building was remodeled into the Overland House, a hotel and restaurant, as well as a stagecoach stop for the Wells Fargo Company.  Famous guests included U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant, and Generals William Sherman and Phil Sheridan.  The bar even boasts to be home of one of Golden’s first shootouts, in the bar room, where it is said that the ghost of the man shot dead still lurks.  Today, the Buffalo Rose is one of Golden’s premier watering holes and events centers, with outdoor and indoor entertainment year round.

Hays House, Council Grove KS

Number 5, est. 1857:

Hays House, Council Grove, Kansas

The founder of this establishment, Seth Hays, was the Great Grandson of one of America’s most famous frontiersmen; Daniel Boone.  Like his famous great grandfather, Hays was a wandering soul, and he along with his cousin Albert Gallatin Boone, had a license to trade with the Kansa Indians along the Santa Fe Trail.  By 1847 they had built a log cabin trading post at the spot where the town of Council Grove would be established.  Ten years later in 1857, The Hays House Building was established just up the Trail, and it has been a going concern ever since.  The restaurant served both meals and libations, and the trading post outfitted local hunters, settlers, and travelers along the trail.  Also, the building was used by the United States Government as a courthouse and post office.  On the close of business on Saturday nights all of the liquor bottles had to be put out of sight, because on Sunday mornings the building was used for church services.  Famous customers from the past include George Armstrong Custer, and it is rumored that Jesse James stopped by, but incognito, it is said, as he was on the lam at the time. 

In 2011 a major fire destroyed a good portion of the original building, and the business would have been abandoned had it not been for a consortium of local residents who banded together and restored the building and reopened the business.  Today Hays House is primarily a restaurant, from pancakes to prime rib, with a full bar, but it is also kind of a local museum, and a contributing resource on the Santa Fe Trail National Historic Landmark.

Genoa Bar, Genoa, Nevada

Number 4, est. 1853:

Genoa Bar, Genoa (pronounced “je-NO-uh”), Nevada.

Labeled as “Nevada’s Oldest Thirst Parlor,” this is the real deal: an old west saloon that has changed little since it opened in 1853 during the early days of silver mining in northwestern Nevada.  The business has more seating in the backyard than in the interior of the original red brick building itself, but the interior is an absolute historic jewel.  From a diamond dust mirror, imported from Scotland during the silver rush, to the converted oil lamp light fixtures, and the cobwebs over them, little has changed in this place since Mark Twain drank here in the 1860’s when he was a reporter for The Territorial Enterprise newspaper.  Other figures from the old west to stop in included Presidents Ulysses S. Grant (that guy seemed to get around to a few saloons), and Teddy Roosevelt.

Video Tour of Genoa Bar, Genoa NV

Other famous visitors have included John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, and Raquel Welch, who donated her bra to be hung from the antlers of a stag’s head mounted behind the bar.  Many celebrities have frequented the saloon, given its close proximity to Lake Tahoe and many Hollywood film locations.  The bar has been a set for a number of films, itself, including The Shootist,  Honky Tonk Man, and Misery.  A number of famous musicians, coming down from their shows in Reno, have also visited; Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash, and John Denver, just to name a few.

Number 3, est. 1852:

Brietbach’s Tavern, Sherill, Iowa.

            Not only is Breitbach’s the oldest tavern in Iowa, as far as I can tell, it is the only one on this list to remain in the same family for nearly its entire history.  The sad part of this story is, that while the business is still on the original site, due to a fire in 2007, none of the historic fabric of the original building remains.

Breitbach’s Tavern, Sherill, Iowa; photo of the original structure from 1852, with additions. This building was destroyed by fire in 2007 and replaced with a new structure.

Jacob Breitbach wasn’t the first owner of that tavern, but he did purchase the business and held the license beginning in 1862.  Since that time, six generations of Breitbach’s have ran the restaurant and bar.  After the fire in 2007, the local population rallied around their beloved tavern and helped rebuild the building, only to have a second fire the next year destroy that building.  A third building was built and opened in 2009 and remains in operation today.  A favorite haunt of both locals and tourists traveling along the scenic Mississippi River valley of eastern Iowa, Brietbach’s is known for good food and legendary hospitality.

Number 2, est. 1842:

O’Malley’s Pub, Weston, Missouri.

Every website on the internet, when Googling “oldest bar in Missouri” will have O’Malley’s come up as the result.  The building was originally the Weston Brewing Company from 1842, closed during prohibition, and was not associated with drinking again until the 1970’s as a bar by the O’Malley family.  The current owners started a brew pub in 2005, and while it has not continuously operated as a tavern, it does have the distinction of being the oldest building in the state with an operating bar.

O’Malley’s is neat place, and great Irish pub.  I’ve been there a few times, and the old brewery storage cellars have been restored giving the pub a great feel, over three stories DEEP; that’s right, the bar is in a cellar- the restaurant is on the first floor.  Great vaulted brick ceilings, fantastic woodwork, good food, great drink, wonderful music venue, the place is magnificent.  A must destination if you are in the greater Kansas City area.

Jean Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop, New Orleans LA

Number 1, est. 1772:

Jean Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop, New Orleans, Louisiana.

            A full 70 years older than its nearest competitor, the bar that is in the oldest building west of the Mississippi River is clearly Jean Lafitte’s. There are some discrepancies surrounding the facts of this establishment.  First it’s claimed that Lafitte started a tavern here in the 1772.  It couldn’t have been so, because Lafitte wasn’t born until circa 1780 in France.  The building was actually built in the 1720’s, and with Lafitte born circa 1780, so it is obvious that he did not own the property when it became a tavern in 1772.  It appears as if he took possession of the property some time in the 1790’s, shortly before the United States acquired the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.

Jean Lafitte (c. 1780-c. 1823) is best known to American History as the Pirate who aided Andrew Jackson in the defeat of the British at the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812.  But, Lafitte’s association with New Orleans is long and rich. While called a pirate, Lafitte was really more of a smuggler and a fence for stolen goods.  It is said that the Lafitte’s tavern was really a front for moving contraband that he acquired through his primary profession, under the nose of the Spanish and then later the American authorities.  Also, Jean’s brother Pierre was a blacksmith, and it seems he may have practiced his trade in the French Colonial building. 

And then there are those that say that Jean Lafitte had no connection to the property at all.  Again, as so often happens; don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story.

For many years the building lay empty; no one is sure how many, but ownership in the 1940’s, upon discovering documentation that proved a connection with the famous pirate, reopened Café Lafitte.  The bar has long been a haven of bohemians (the lifestyle, not the nationality), including the vibrant gay community of the crescent city, including famed people like Noel Coward, and one of my favorite authors, Tennessee Williams.  The building was named a National Historic Landmark in 1970, for both its historic and architectural significance, being a rare example of Brick and Post French Colonial Architecture.

Interior view, Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop, New Orleans, LA

I’ve been to Lafitte’s.  Back 1993, my friend Louis Saltafromaggio, from New Orleans himself, asked me to come along to Mardi Gras, and what a time it we had.  We snuck into Lafitte’s on an afternoon, the Sunday before Mardi Gras.  “Gotta see Lafitte’s, Tatman!” he said.

The bar was about half full, as most folks were off watching parades, catching beads, and looking at … well you know what.  We were drinking beers and sipping whiskey, when I caught aroma of cannabis wafting through the air.  I looked up and at the end of the bar, two fellas were passing a joint.  I looked at the other end of the bar, and police officer, on his break, enjoying a cup of coffee and reading his newspaper didn’t even look up.  I turned to Louis, gave him a nudge and whispered.  “Are those guys really toking up with this cop in the bar?”

Louis looked at the fellas smoking, then looked at officer, then turned back to me and said, “Welcome to da big easy, dere Tatman.”

Honorable Mention?  Maybe the Oldest in Missouri?

I have one more bar to tell you about.  It didn’t make this list, but maybe it should have.  I let you decide.

In 1849 German immigrant, Joseph Knaupf, arrived in the State of Missouri.  An entrepreneur, Knaupf established a foundry and blacksmith shop, was an investor in both a brewery and distillery, and began to purchase land for development.  In 1856, he purchased a wooden frame building just on the edge of town on a small bluff over the Missouri River, and in this building he carried on transactions related to his various businesses.  In 1863, he replaced the wooden building with a 2 story brick structure.  It appears that besides farm implements, real estate, and blacksmith work, that Knaupf was also selling liquor and beer out of the shop, because on a number of occasions between 1863 and 1865, he was fined for selling alcohol to the Union soldiers camped on the hill near the building.  Knaup died in 1870, and his widow sold off his various business interests, including the two-story brick building.  The new owner, Nicholas Frank, took the building into its next life as a tavern, naming the establishment The West End Saloon, the last watering hole on the road going west out of town.

Frank died in 1881 and his nephew, John Peter Raithel purchased the property and business and continued the saloon operation,.  In 1891, Raithel purchased the adjoining piece of property, and two years later built a brick addition, abutted to the original building.  He also added a Mansard style roof which enclosed a third story of small rooms that were used as small apartments and rooms for board.   

West End Saloon, Jefferson City MO, est. 1870.  Photo circa 1880-1890

In 1896, with a new bridge built to cross the Missouri River on the same block as the saloon, Raithel changed the name of the business to The Bridge Exchange.  Immediately across the river, on the north side of the river, the county was dry, while the county where Raithel’s tavern was situated, on the south side of the river, was still wet.  Raithel understood what the people who crossed the bridge wanted to know; where could they get a drink?  He hung a sign perpendicular to the building that read differently for the travelers crossing the bridge.  For those traveling south it read “First Chance,” and for those traveling north it read “Last Chance.”  He didn’t have to tell them what those chances concerned.

Raithel died in 1907, however his wife retained ownership of the property and hired others to run the tavern for her.  When Prohibition was enacted in 1920, the saloon converted to a soda shop and drug store in the separate halves of the first floor.  In 1923 a raid was conducted upon the businesses by the local county prosecutor, and the operators of both the soda shop and the drugstore were arrested for selling intoxicating liquors, which is evidence that alcohol was being sold from the establishment during Prohibition.

When Prohibition ended in 1933, Pat Conrad and his wife, Della, purchased the business and the building.  Conrad ran a bar and a package liquor store out of the property, and leased the rooms above the bar as apartments.  Although Conrad retained the name of The Bridge Exchange, the patrons began to refer to the business as Pat’s Place or The First Chance Last Chance, as the county north of the river, despite the end of Prohibition, remained dry. 

Conrad died in 1949, but Della continued to operate the tavern until 1969 when she handed the reigns over to her daughter and son-in-law, Victoria and David Patterson.  The Patterson’s operated the tavern until they sold the property in 1983.  In the 17 years between 1983 and 2000, the tavern went through 4 separate unsuccessful owner-operators.  In 2000, a new owner purchased the business, and changed the name to let the town know that the business was under new ownership. Three years later he and his wife bought the building.  In 2014, because of the owners’ lead in the process, the property was placed on the National Register of Historic Places, for significance in local commerce, specifically being the oldest continuously operating tavern in the town.  The establishment is well known for good food and hospitality, and retains a steady, loyal clientele and customer base.

And how do I know so much about this place?  Well, a lot of you already know.  The name of the bar: Paddy Malone’s Irish Pub, in Jefferson City Missouri and that guy who purchased the business in 2000, was me.  And it was my wife, Marilee and I, who bought the building in 2003. 

Interior view, Paddy Malone’s Pub, Jefferson City, MO   Photo by David Luther

Should Paddy Malone’s be considered the oldest bar in Missouri?  Well, with  no evidence of another place in the state continually selling alcohol since 1863…  Well…

Allen Tatman: Producer, Writer, Narrator
Brian McGeorge: Technical Director
Hishtory Podcast recorded at Rivers Edge Studios and Paddy Malone’s Irish Pub
A Wylde Irish Production, LLC All Rights Reserved

Oldest Bar in Every State West of the Mississippi River

Alaska:            B&B Bar, Kodiak                                                                    1908

Arizona:          The Palace, Prescott                                                              1877

Arkansas:       Ohio Club, Hot Springs                                                         1905

California:      The Saloon, San Francisco                                                    1861  

Colorado:        Buffalo Rose Tavern, Golden                                                1859  

Hawaii:           Smith’s Union Bar, Honolulu                                                1935

Idaho:             White Horse Saloon, Spirit Lake                                          1907

Iowa:               Breitbach’s, Sherill                                                                1852  

Kansas:           Hays House, Council Grove                                                   1857  

Louisiana:       Jean Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop, New Orleans                     1772  

Minnesota:     Neumann’s Bar, St. Paul                                                       1887

Missouri:        O’Malley’s, Weston                                                                1842  

Montana:        Bale of Hay Saloon, Virginia City                                          1863  

Nebraska:       Glur’s Tavern, Columbus                                                      1876

Nevada:          Genoa Bar, Genoa                                                                  1853  

New Mexico:  El Patio Cantina, Mesilla                                                       1934

N Dakota:       Peacock Alley, Bismark                                                         1933

Oklahoma:      Eishen’s Bar, Okarche                                                           1896

Oregon:          Huber’s, Portland                                                                  1879

S. Dakota        Buffalo Bodega Bar, Deadwood                                           1877

Texas              Scholz Bier Garten, Austin                                                    1866  

Utah                Shooting Star Saloon, Huntsville                                          1879

Washington   The Brick Saloon, Roslyn                                                      1889

Wyoming        Miner’s and Stockman’s Steakhouse, Hartville                  1862              

Sources Cited:

Davis, Tom.  “Scholz Garten History.” January, 2014.

http://nebula.wsimg.com/fea4ff7ce653fd1a734d9b521575785d?AccessKeyId=45DCF70772C4BE1550C3&disposition=0&alloworigin=1

Drysdale, Bethany. “Genoa Bar and Saloon.”  Sierra Nevada Geotourism, Sierra Business Council.

http://www.sierranevadageotourism.org/content/genoa-bar-and-saloon/sie9f062be5e76e39145

East, Katherine.  “Jean Lafitte: The Patriot Pirate.”  U.S. Capitol Historical Society. July 5, 2013.

https://uschs.wordpress.com/2013/07/05/jean-lafitte-the-patriot-pirate/

Huet, Ellen.  “The Saloon, San Francisco’s Oldest Bar and Live Blues Venue, Turns 150 This Weekend.”  San Francisco Weekly Online. Oct. 7, 2011

http://archives.sfweekly.com/shookdown/2011/10/07/the-saloon-sfs-oldest-bar-and-live-blues-venue-turns-150-this-weekend

Keane, Katherine.  “Hays House Restaurant and Tavern in Council Grove, Kansas.” National Trust for Historic Preservation.  Dec 17, 2015.

https://savingplaces.org/stories/hays-house-restaurant-and-tavern-council-grove-kansas#.WEZhHaIrL-Y

Keane, Katherine.  “O’Malley’s Pub, Weston, Missouri.”  National Trust for Historic Preservation.  Jan. 21, 2016.

https://savingplaces.org/stories/omalleys-pub-historic-bar#.WEaC_qIrL-Y

Klemaier, Josie.  “Buffalo Rose in Golden to Begin Major Renovations in February.” Denver Post. April 24, 2014

http://www.denverpost.com/2014/12/19/buffalo-rose-in-golden-to-begin-major-renovations-in-february/

“Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop.” New Orleans Official Guide Online. 

http://www.neworleansonline.com/directory/location.php?locationID=1149

Meltzer, Matt.  “The Oldest Bar in Every State.”  Thrillist Travel, Sept. 19, 2014

https://www.thrillist.com/travel/nation/america-s-oldest-bars-the-oldest-bar-in-all-50-us-states-and-washington-dc

“National Historic Landmarks.” Kansas Historical Society.

https://www.kshs.org/p/national-historic-landmarks/15743

“The Oldest Restaurant in Wyoming has a Truly Incredible History.”  Only in Your State. July, 2016.

http://www.onlyinyourstate.com/wyoming/the-oldest-restaurant-in-wy/

Paulson, D. “The Oldest Restaurant in Iowa has a Truly Incredible History.”  Only in Your State. August, 2016.

http://www.onlyinyourstate.com/iowa/oldest-restaurant-in-iowa/

Reeves, Sally.  “Searching for Laffite the Pirate.” New Orleans French Quarter Online.

http://www.frenchquarter.com/jeanlaffitte/

Stokes, Keith.  “Hays House 1857.”  Kansas Travel, Tourism, and Restaurants.  2016

http://www.kansastravel.org/hayshouse.htm

Webb, Cindy and Willy.  “Welcome to Genoa Bar and Saloon, Nevada’s Oldest Thirst Parlor.”  Genoa Bar Website.

http://www.genoabarandsaloon.com/about.cfm

United States Department of the Interior.  “National Register of Historic Places Inventory: Virginia City, Montana.”  Certified September 1978.

https://www.nps.gov/nhl/find/statelists/nv/VirginiaCityHD.pdf

United States Department of the Interior.  “National Register of Historic Places Form: West End Saloon; Bridge Exchange; Pat’s Place; Conrad Apartments; aka Paddy Malone’s: Jefferson City Missouri”  Certified May 15, 2014.

http://dnr.mo.gov/shpo/docs/WestEndSaloon-14000374.pdf

Give Me Liberty or Give Me Whiskey!

George Washington reviewing the troops being deployed against the Whiskey Rebellion - Washington Reviewing the Western Army, at Fort Cumberland, Maryland, 1794. Courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY.

Taxes.  One of the founding principles of our country, or actually the reluctance to pay them that was the founding principle.  Needless to say, we’ve had a bad relationship with taxation ever since.

Nobody likes to pay taxes, but we can all agree there are some things we can do better as a community than we can do by ourselves.  Building roads, public utilities, law enforcement, fire department, the list goes on and on.  But, defense, is a big check mark on the list.  As a nation, one third of our federal budget is devoted to the military.

But, how do you finance a war effort if you can’t levy taxes?  During the Revolutionary War the young United States had that very problem.  They literally begged, borrowed, and stole whatever money they could from various sources by any means possible, including piracy (they called it “privateering”).  They also obtained high interest loans from the other countries, including France and Spain, they cut deals with investors from the Netherlands, and borrowed hard currency from all 13 colonies.  Interesting times they were; fighting a war for independence on borrowed money and borrowed time, being crushed by interest payments-  thoughts ofpaying down the principle were far off in the future.  They were in a spiral, from the beginning of the rebellion in 1775 until the Treaty of Paris in 1783, the only real choice that the Continental Congress had was to continually borrow more money to cover the interest on the loans that were already in arrears.  By the end of the war the world’s newest republic was broke.  The Continental Dollar was worthless, they owed money to investors and the states, and had nothing to pay the soldiers and sailors of the Continental Army or the US Navy, many of which had not been compensated from the beginning of their service.  Their first order of business was getting the government in order, and to do that they had to figure out a way to implement and levy taxes and raise some coin…  But what were they going to tax? 

One of the things they decided on was whiskey.  And that decision almost caused a civil war seventy years before the big one.

Just a small sample of the whiskies and liqueurs available at Paddy Malone’s, Jefferson City MO

Whiskey has been a part of our history from the beginning of the English colonies in North America.  And it only makes sense that art of whiskey making was brought to North America by British subjects, many of whom were from Ireland and Scotland, the cradle of whiskey’s evolution. 

Irish monks in the late First Millennia AD brought the art of distillation to Ireland from the Near East.  But, distilling was not used to produce alcohol for consumption as we would think of it today; it was used for producing medicines and perfumes.  Arabs and Moors had been using the alembic still for production of aromatics, perfumes, and medicines for probably 2,000 years before the science reached Western Europe.  The aforementioned monks, traveling to the Holy Lands and Northern Africa, brought Alembic stills back to the monasteries of Ireland and Scotland, to be used for the very same reasons as the Middle Eastern cultures; medicinal and aromatic therapies.

Drawing of an Alembic Still credited to Persian alchemist Jabir ibn Hayyan, circa late 9th Century or early 10th Century CE

So, at some point in time, we are not sure when, some of these monks had the brilliant idea of distilling ale.  Basically, what we call neutral grain spirits is nothing more than a fermented mash of grain and/or malt that is then distilled.  Distillation is pretty simple chemistry; it is separating of alcohol from the other liquid in a solution.  This is easily achieved because the boiling point of alcohol is 79 degrees Celsius, whereas water boils at 100 degrees.  Within an enclosed still, the solution is heated in a lower chamber, the alcohol turns to vapors before the water does, those vapors rise into an upper chamber where they condense, turning into liquid, which then flows into a reservoir.   This is distillation at its simplest form, and the basic process for creating any spirit. 

The monks called these earliest distilled spirits Aqua Vitae, Latin for “The Water of Life,” but in the local vernacular, the Gaelic language, Water of Life was Uisce Beatha, which over time was shortened to Uisce, and later was Anglicized by the English speakers to “Whiskey.”

Image of monks distilling Aqua Vitae, circa 15th Century CE

The first written record of whiskey comes from Ireland, in The Annals of Clonmacnoise in 1405, where it was described that a head of one of the clans died at the monastery after drinking an excessive amount of aqua vitae.

Within the next 100 years, in Scotland, the distillation of whisky was well underway; in 1494, James IV of Scotland granted a large amount of malt to one Friar John Cor specifically for the making of aqua vitae for the Scottish court.

In England and Ireland, whiskey distillation made its way into the public realm after King Henry VIII’s dissolution of all of the monasteries in the first half of the 16th Century. 

In the Scottish Reformation, under the Stuart dynasty, the monasteries were not dissolved, however they were not allowed to recruit any new members., and by 1573, during the reign of James VI of Scotland, Catholic monasteries in that kingdom, for all intent and purposes, ceased to exist. 

The friars and monks in both Scotland and Ireland, who had previously distilled whiskey for the church, then began to work for the wealthy lords and landowners within the realms, taking whiskey making to the public.  The tenants and workers on these estates learned the art of distillation from the monks and then began practicing it themselves.  To avoid taxation, even in these early years, these illicit Scots and Irish distillers practiced their craft far up into the mountain draws, and generally did their work at night.  This illegal spirit that they concocted began to be called by a couple of now quite famous nicknames; mountain dew and moonshine.

In 1620, the first recorded distillation of whiskey in the North American English colonies was chronicled.  George Thorpe, a settler of the Berkley Hundred in the young colony of Virginia, first figured out how to distill a sour mash made from maize, what they called Indian corn, ushering in the first truly unique American alcohol, Sour Mash Corn whiskey. Later on this became the key ingredient in both Kentucky Bourbon and Tennessee Whiskey.  Thorpe’s venture didn’t last long, however; in 1622 he was killed in the Powhatten Indian uprising of the James River area of Virginia.  

Image depicting George Thorpe distilling corn liquor on Berkley Plantation in 1620.

But, the making of whiskey didn’t really catch on in the American colonies for another century after Thorpe.  Rum was the prevalent distilled spirit in the American Colonies throughout the late 1600’s and into the early 1700’s, and even remained the primary spirit of choice in New England until the beginning of the American Revolution.  Molasses from the West Indies was the primary ingredient in the production of rum.  Yankee merchants, especially those from Massachusetts, shipped molasses up from the Caribbean to New England, where it was distilled.  Rum was cheap, it was plentiful, and was the primary hard liquor consumed in the colonies until the arrival of a new immigrant group beginning in the early 18th Century; the Scots Irish. Without them, America isn’t America and the story of American whiskey would have been completely different. 

The Scots Irish were primarily of Scottish lowland stock, people from the border area of southern Scotland along the border with England.  In the late 1500’s and early 1600’s the English crown under Elizabeth I and her successor, James I, invited these Scots to settle on lands in Ireland, mainly in the province of Ulster in the north of the island.  These lands had recently been seized from the Irish Catholic lords who the English had defeated in the Nine Years War, who then ran off to the continent.

These Lowland Scots had always been a thorn in the side of the English.  They were fiercely independent, staunchly loyal to each other, and very undisciplined.  They kept their own council, they took care of their own, and they gave their allegiance to neither the English nor the Scottish crowns.  They practiced a staunchly Calvinist brand of the Presbyterian faith, and hated Anglicans and Catholics alike, considering both churches to be idolatrous.  A good number of their population made a living as reivers, that is cattle thieves.  They lived very meagerly, in shoddily built hovels or cabins, so if they found themselves in trouble with the authorities or were on the run from another warring clan or family, they would quickly abandon their homes, move into the hills, where they would easily build another shelter and hide until they needed to move again. 

Now, these people are not to be confused with the Highland Scots.  The lowland Scots were their own culture all together.  They didn’t speak Scottish Gaelic, nor did they speak English.  They had a unique vernacular dialect that had developed over a thousand years, a mix of Gaelic, English, and Scandinavian.  This native tongue was sometimes called Broad Scots or Lallenders.

The English crown’s theory was this; if we offer these Lowland Scots, who have always been a pain in our ass, lands of their own in Ulster, they would be able to keep the Irish Catholic peasantry in check.  This was known as the “Great Plantation of Ireland” and was the beginning of the troubles in Ireland between Protestants and Catholics that has only recently abated with the Good Friday Peace Accords of 1998.

Beginning in 1603 with the ascension of James I to the English Throne, for the next century, with only brief respites here and there, there was a continuous state of guerrilla warfare existing between the transplanted Scots and the native Irish.  These Ulster Scots were not backing down, and in most years they were winning, primarily because they had the strength of the British garrisons in Ireland behind them.  But, the English, in their infinite wisdom began to alienate these loyal subjects.  A series of statutes call The Penal Laws were passed in Ireland.  One law in particular, seemed to piss everybody off.  At first, it forced only the Catholics to tithe to the Anglican church, but, then somebody thought this law should apply to all faiths dissenting from the Anglican church, including Methodists, Baptists, Quakers, and Presbyterians.

The Ulster Scots were furious.  Now granted, most did not leave Northern Ireland, most remained behind, especially those who had built up reasonably large estates in that country, and they stayed and lobbied the crown to rescind the laws.  But, there was a significant minority who had nothing to lose by picking everything up and going to the colonies of North America. 

A trickling of immigrants from Northern Ireland occurred prior to 1700, but the major migration occurred after.

In 1717, Philadelphia based Quaker merchant Jonathan Dickenson wrote in a letter to a colleague, “…from Ye north of Ireland many hundreds (arrived in Philadelphia) in aboute four months.” 

Two years later, Dickenson wrote, “This summer we have had 12 or 13 sayle of ships from the North of Ireland (with) a swarm of People.”  Following that first wave of immigration in the second decade of the 18th century, anotherwave, even larger, occurred in the late 1720’s, and then again an even larger wave in the 1730’s. 

They were not always openly welcomed by the colonists already in Pennsylvania and the other colonies, and truthfully at times openly disdained by the settled populations of British North America.  But, between 1700 and 1775, a quarter of a million people emigrated from Northern Ireland to the American Colonies, and the greatest portion of those came through the port of Philadelphia.  But, where did they go?

They went to where there was land.  And there was land on the frontier.

Scots-Irish settlers on the 18th Century Appalachian Frontier

An uneasy truce had developed on the American colonial frontier between the British and French empires with the end of the Queen Anne’s War in 1713.  During that Conflict, the majority of the Native Americans of the Appalachian and Trans Appalachian frontiers had allied with the French, and the tribes were still unhappy with the incursions of the English colonists into their lands.  The English colonies needed a buffer, something between the settled eastern seaboard and the wilderness of the Appalachian Mountains.  Send in the Scots Irish.  The colonies offered these immigrants lands of their own on the frontier, and all they had to do was settle and improve their claims.  And the Scots Irish were the perfect people to go the frontier.  They never backed down from a challenge, they were survivalists who knew how to live off of the land, being independent and self-reliant.

In 1744 King George’s War broke out again between the French and their Indian allies and the British colonies. The conflict saw the Scots Irish settlers playing an important role in the security of the frontier, acting as rangers and scouts.  As far as Colonial North America is concerned, that war ended in a stalemate in 1748, however, the long bitter rivalry between France and Britain reignited just six years later in 1754.   The French and Indian War, known in Europe as the Seven Years War, ended in 1763, with Great Britain ultimately victorious.  

With the signing of the Treaty of Paris signed France ceded all of its territory in North America to Britain, which included all of the lands west of the Appalachian Mountain and east of the Mississippi River. 

And the ranks and file of the British colonial militias that fought that war, and helped Britain obtain all of that new territory, were filled with Scots Irish frontiersmen.

But besides a fighting spirit and tenacity, the other thing that the Scots Irish brought to the American frontier was the art of whiskey making which they had been illicitly perfecting in Northern Ireland over the previous generations.    As they were settling on the western frontiers of colonial Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, they shared the art of distilling with other disenfranchised ethnic groups that also settled along the edge of the wilderness; Welsh, English from the northern counties of England, French Huguenots, and German Palatines. 

What these frontier hunter-farmers soon discovered was that transporting grain from their farms on the wilderness borderlands to the eastern markets was labor intensive and expensive.  A far more efficient way of optimizing income from grain farming was to turn their grain into alcohol. Alcohol was easier to transport; one bushel of maize, after turned into sour mash, will make about 3 to 3 and ½ gallons of 80% ABV corn whiskey.  It was easy to see how much simpler, and more profitable, it would be to haul distilled spirits versus bulk grain over distances where the best of roads were really only little better than deer paths.   Once these frontiersman began to cross the Appalachians and settle in the newly won territories of Kentucky, Ohio, and Tennessee, it became even more important to be to able turn their grain into spirits.

Before the end of The French and Indian War, there was hardly any reason to believe that the British American colonies would ever take up arms against Mother England.  As a part of the greatest military power in the world, the Colonies received the full protection of the Crown from any outside incursions or attacks, potentially from Spain and France, but there were also other world powers to consider; the Netherlands, Portugal, and Russia were still in expansion mode in the late 18th Century.  Also, the colonists paid little in taxes compared to their counterparts in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland.  Domestic economic activities- that is buying and selling of goods internally- received very little interference from London. 

But, the colonists were required to adhere to the Navigation Acts in regards to foreign trade, which required that all goods shipped to foreign lands had to first go through England before reaching final destination, and that all transportation of goods within the British Empire be done on ships that were constructed, owned, and a manned by British subjects. 

These rules in themselves didn’t bother the majority of the colonists, although a few members of the wealthier merchant class might have had a slight problem with them, but not so much that it would foment rebellion.

But, then the Crown started to pass some laws which affected the day to day lives of the common man.  First, Britain changed its stance on land policy on the frontier; whereas before 1763 settlers were encouraged to claim lands and act as a buffer between the settled areas and the wilderness, after that year all western settlement was forbidden by the Proclamation Line of 1763.  Britain’s primary objective behind the Proclamation was to seize control of the lucrative fur trade in the Trans Appalachian frontier, but they tried to sell it to the colonists as cost cutting feature.  The Crown claimed it could not afford to protect its subjects beyond the Appalachian Mountains.  So, not only did the Proclamation forbid any further land claims west of the mountains, it nullified any existing claims. 

This was especially unpopular with the settlers of western Pennsylvania, eastern Kentucky and Tennessee.  The new policy immediately put these folks, mostly Scots Irish, in violation of the law.   To enforce this new policy, a standing army of 7,500 regulars was posted throughout the frontier in the recently captured French forts and outposts.  And to pay for these soldiers, the Brits had to raise some coin.  And, this contributed and led up to the taxation policies that brought on the revolution.

Now, some historians have said that the taxes that Britain levied in America between 1763 and 1775 were absolutely necessary for the protection of the Colonists, by maintaining a standing army on the frontier.  But, this could debated.  Here’s why.  For 100 years prior to the French and Indian War, the colonists had been protecting themselves and settling the western frontiers without any aid from the Redcoats.  Secondly, the Army wasn’t on the frontier to protect the colonists; it was there to keep settlers from homesteading and hunting on protected lands.  Fur trading enterprises, like the chartered Northwest Company, were obtaining furs off of the frontier through trade with the native tribes.  This was big business in the 18th Century, and big business didn’t want the little guys horning in on their fat pile of cash, or in this case pelts, furs, and skins.  In my opinion, this issue is the cradle of the American Revolution.  Everything after this is just a result of the Proclamation of 1763.

A contemporary map illustrating the Proclamation of 1763.  Cantonment of His Majesty's forces in N. America according to the disposition now made & to be compleated as soon as practicable taken from the general distribution dated at New York 29th. March 1766 by Daniel Patterson

Source: Library of Congress

Between 1763 and 1775, a series of taxes and acts upon the colonies passed by Westminster created a powder keg, which finally blew at Lexington-Concord; the Sugar Act, the Stamp Act, the Quartering Act, the Townshend Duties, the Tea Act, and the Intolerable Acts, all led up to convincing a third to a half of all American colonists that they would be better off on their own.  A few months after Lexington Concord, the Continental Congress drafted the Olive Branch Petition, and sent it to George III.  The petition asked for the recognition of American rights, some form of representation in Parliament, and the repeal of the Intolerable Acts in exchange for a ceasefire in Massachusetts.

The King summarily rejected Congress’s proposal, and he then he declared the colonies to be in open rebellion.

The fact of the matter was this: the American Colonists, even with all of those taxes that were passed just before they opening of the Revolutionary War, were paying only 2 to 3 % per capita of what the British subjects in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland paid at that very same time.  Let that sink in for a moment.  Keep that in mind while you read the rest of this blog.

So during the war, with Congress having no power to impose taxes (and I doubt it would have gone over well with the people if they could have), they ran a huge debt to finance the war, with costs climbing to one hundred and 65 million Pounds Sterling, or around 22 billion dollars in today’s currency. Most of the money had been borrowed from the individual states, but some came from France, and Spain, and more yet from Dutch investors.  With the war ending in 1782, all of these notes started to come due; Congress had really only been able to pay the interest on most of these loans during the war, and only paid the principle when it was absolutely necessary to stay in the good graces with the lenders.

In 1781 with Washington’s victory at Yorktown, the war was all but over, only a peace treaty remained to be signed.  Congress appointed financier and Pennsylvania Congressman Robert Morris as Superintendent of Finance.  His charge was to keep the young Republic from complete bankruptcy. Morris devalued the dollar, and then begged, borrowed, and stole $2 million from the states. But his most controversial move was to suspend the pay of the Continental Army soldiers and officers. Instead, he gave them debt certificates or land grants of property in the west that the country would receive in the peace settlement.  In other words, they were given IOU’s and promises of land that the country didn’t yet have to give.  This gave the government some breathing room, but didn’t solve the problem.  In 1782, Morris suggested that total debt was so high that Congress just set up a schedule to pay the interest and –in his words- “… leave posterity to pay the principle.”  A strategy we are all to familiar with in the modern age.

With the implementation of the Constitution in 1789, economically things began to stabilize for the country.  The Constitution brought order to the nation’s finances, created a common market, common currency, it regulated commerce and trade between the states.  But, there was still that one thing that loomed over the young nation’s shoulder: that massive amount of debt, most of it going back to the war. By this time the Federal government still owed $54 million in debt, and the individual states in all held debt in the amount of another $25 million. 

Our 1st Secretary of the Treasury, and the most influential founder in determining American fiscal policy.

Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton persuaded Congress to lump all of the debt together, and then the Federal government would work out the method of paying it down.  The young country made most of its money at this time on import duties of luxury goods from Europe, and Hamilton believed those rates were as high as the consumers would tolerate.  So, a new tax had to be implemented. And that tax was on Whiskey.

It was actually an excise tax on all distilled spirits, but since the rum production in New England had nearly ended after losing access to Britain’s sugar plantations in the Caribbean, whiskey was the main spirit that the new law impacted.  It was the first tax in the history of the country that was levied upon a domestically produced product.  The Washington administration knew the tax would be unpopular, but they didn’t really know how much so.

In March of 1791, The Distilled Spiritis Excise Tax went into law.  George Washington’s administration, under the leadership of Hamilton, set up revenue districts and appointed revenue supervisors, inspectors, and enforcement officials.  Many citizens on the frontier immediately announced that they wouldn’t pay the tax.  The farmers in the western regions of the states believed that the tax economically targeted them unfairly; it was harder for them to transport grain to the eastern markets, giving eastern farmers an unfair advantage.  Also in the west, hard currency was often scarce, and many workers and laborers were paid in whiskey, which they could then drink or sell to someone else.  Essentially, for these working people and those who paid them, the whiskey tax was, in this regard, an income tax that wealthy easterners did not have to pay. 

Cries of no taxation without representation bellowed out from the frontier, the same rallying cry that had been used to recruit many of the frontiersmen to the Continental Army.  Remember, a large portion of the Continental Army veterans had been given land grants on the frontier in lieu of payment for their service to their country.  Furthermore, they did not understand why they, those living in the west, should have to pay for debts accrued by the rest of the states, especially those who lived in the east.

Another thing that burned the western farmers’ butts was a payment policy instituted by the government that they saw as favoring larger distillers.  See, Hamilton set up two methods of paying the tax; the distiller could either pay a flat fee or he could pay by the gallon.  Larger distillers generally had cash on hand to pay the fee, whereas small distillers, many of which were little more than dirt scratch farmers, usually did not have enough cash to pay such a fee.  See the more whiskey that a distiller could produce, if he paid the flat fee, and he made enough whiskey, he could get his tax costs down to 6 cents on the gallon, while the rate if paid by the gallon was 9 cents per gallon.  This regressive tax rate put a greater burden upon smaller producers than it did on the large operations. 

Another thing that contributed to the westerners irksome disposition to the tax was that on the cash strapped frontier, whiskey sold for considerably less than it did in the more populated cities and town of the east, so a larger percentage of any profits, on any thing sold locally, would be lost to taxation.  Some of the smallscale distillers believed that Hamilton had it in for them, that the flat fee was set up to favor larger producers, and thereby making the markets too competitive for smaller producers to compete, which promoted big business and forced smaller competitors out of the market.  So, whether intentional or not, larger distillers saw the advantage that the tax gave them in the marketplace and they supported the tax. 

In the Summer of 1791 a convention of concerned westerners met in Pittsburgh and drafted a petition listing their grievances regarding the tax, and it was sent to Washington (the President not the city, the city didn’t exist yet), the Pennsylvania State Assembly, and to the United States Congress.   As a result of this and other petitions, Congress dropped the excise tax on the whiskey by 1 cent per gallon, going into effect in May of 1792.  Like most tax cuts, you’ll take what you can get, but of course, the folks on the frontier wanted more relief.

The first whiskey tax collector to be attacked was tarred and feathered in Washington County, western Pennsylvania in September of 1791.  The officials who were sent to serve warrants on those who had attacked the tax collector were also tarred and feathered.  Other tax collectors and officials were also threatened with violence, so in many parts of the western states, the taxes went uncollected in 1791 and 1792.  In the newest state, Kentucky, which entered the union on June 1st, 1792, no one could be found who would take the position and enforce or prosecute the distillers for tax evasion.  Hamilton was furious over the resistance to the tax, and advocated military action to arrest those in violation, but Attorney General Edmund Randolph convinced President Washington the it would be hard to prosecute those in violation. 

Tax Collector being tarred and feathered by Whiskey Rebels.

In August 1792, a second convention of tax resistors was called in Pittsburgh.  This gathering was much more radical.  Calls for secession from the country were discussed by the angiest of those gathered.  One group, the Mingo Creek Association, took control of their local militia, and urged other groups to do the same.

Meanwhile, back in Philadelphia, President Washington and Secretary Hamilton saw this resistance to Federal law as embarrassing and unacceptable.  The President put the wheels in motion to quash the whiskey rebels.  A Presidential Proclamation was drafted, denouncing the rebels and their resistance to legislatively initiated excise taxes.  It was signed by the President and published on September 15, 1792 in newspapers and on broadsides to be posted throughout the western areas.

Over the next few months, all along the western counties of Appalachia, anyone associated with the Federal government or the collection of taxes was intimidated, turned out, or forced away.  Farmers who complied with the law and paid their taxes would be tarred and feathered, or had their barns and houses burned by the rebels.  One tax collector was abducted from his home and held at gunpoint until he renounced his commission with the federal government.

It was 1794, and George Washington had had enough.

He ordered federal district attorneys to serve writs upon any and all distillers who had not paid their excise taxes. The writs were really never meant to have the cases go to trial, but merely to coerce the violators to pay their taxes.  But, most ignored their tax bill.  And some even retaliated against the government officials.

In July 1794, a group of armed insurrectionists surrounded the fortified home of one General John Neville, at Bower Hill, Pennsylvania.  Neville had been appointed by the Washington administration as an Inspector of Revenue over the whiskey tax.  The whiskey rebels believed that a federal marshal was in his home, however that man had left earlier in the day for Pittsburgh.  Shots were exchanged, with one of the rebels being mortally wounded.  The next day the rebels returned with a force of 600 anti-tax militiamen, led by Major James McFarlane, a veteran of the Revolutionary War.  Neville had also received enforcements from Pittsburgh, but only numbering a handful of soldiers, led by a Major James Kirkpatrick.  Before the rebels arrived, at Kirkpatrick’s insistence, Neville and his family escaped the house, and hid in a nearby ravine.  After a brief negotiation between McFarlane and Kirkpatrick (both SCOTS IRISH names, eh?), the women and children in the house were allowed to leave the home, then the shooting did begin.  After about an hour of firing, it became obvious to McFarlane that the anti-tax forces could not take the house, and he called for a ceasefire.  As he stepped into a clearing under a white flag, someone from inside the house shot the Major down.  The militiamen went into a frenzy, set fire to the house and outbuildings.  Kirkpatrick surrendered and was taken prisoner.  The surviving United States soldiers were sent back to Pittsburgh to tell the rest of the garrison there that they should leave.

McFarlane was given a heroes’ funeral, and his death galvanized the frontier against the federal government and, as they saw it, it’s oppressive taxation.  A few days later, a band of rebels robbed a U.S. Mail coach as it left Pittsburgh, finding a number of letters from civic leaders who were condemning the actions of the rebels. 

On August 1 a gathering of over 7,000 anti-tax rebels and resistors assembled on Braddock’s Field just east of Pittsburgh. The anger over the whiskey tax had spread.  Convinced that if they did not stand against this tax, others were soon to follow.  At this gathering there were calls to march on Pittsburgh, burn the homes of the rich, and burn the government buildings to the ground.  There was praise for the French Revolution (imagine that, on the frontier of North America), and a call to bring the guillotine to the United States.  There was talk of seceding from the United States and joining the monarchies of England or Spain.  The crowd marched through Pittsburgh, but the only buildings it burned were those of the prisoner Major Kirkpatrick.

President Washington read the reports and considered them carefully.  This was perhaps the most critical incident in the short history of the young republic.  He first sent commissioners to negotiate with the rebels, but also called for the raising of an army to prepare for the march west.  On September 1st, when it became obvious that the negotiations were fruitless, Washington issued an executive command that the insurgents disperse immediately or else.   Now, the full power of the United States was heading to western Pennsylvania.

The state militias of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Virginia, and Maryland were assembled in Philadelphia, a force of over 12,000 fighting men; as large an army as Washington had commanded during the Revolution.  In October of 1794, Washington rode west to lead the troops, the first and only time a sitting president has ever led troops in the field.  Alexander Hamilton, who had been Washington’s Aide de Camp during the Revolution, rode at his side.

The insurrectionists fled before the army arrived, and the whiskey rebellion was over before the end of October, 1794.  A federal grand jury issued 24 warrantsfor high treason, however most of the accused fled deep into the frontier, and only 10 were arrested to stand trial.  Of those 10, only two were found guilty of treason, and they were sentenced to death by hanging, but, before the sentences could be carried out, the men were pardoned by President Washington.  The Pennsylvania state courts, however, were far more successful and were able to issue warrants, arrests, and convictions for assault, battery, and property damage related to the whiskey rebellion.

Washington’s handling of the rebellion was met with widespread national approval.  And our first president’s actions set a precedent for the enforcement of federal law.  He truly was the Father of our country.  One thing that continued after the rebellion, however, was the difficulty in enforcing the whiskey tax on the frontier.  Those Scots Irish settlers, well they just turned back to their old ways of moonshining, distilling whiskey in the hills and hollows by the light of the moon..  When Thomas Jefferson became president in 1801, two years after President Washington’s passing, he, along with congress repealed the whiskey tax.

A couple of things to leave you with.  George Washington, in the last decade of his life leading up to death in 1799, had a successful whiskey distillery operation at Mount Vernon.  It was operated by a Scots Irish immigrant named James Anderson.  President Washington’s whiskey was made primarily from rye, and they now produced a reproduction of that recipe at the National Historic Landmark.

Video of living history of demonstration of making whiskey at George Washington’s Mount Vernon.

And you remember how the colonists were so eager to leave Great Britain because they were paying too much in taxes.  Well, be careful what you wish for.  You see, one of the results of independence was that the tax burden per capita after the formation United States grew to 10 times more per capita for the Americans than what it was when they were British subjects.

See, being free isn’t free.

HISHTORY Episode 3, released December 6, 2016
Writer/Producer: Allen Tatman
Technical Director: Brian McGeorge
Recorded at Rivers Edge Studios and Paddy Malone’s Pub, in Jefferson City MO.
A Wylde Irish Production, all rights reserved, Wylde Irish Productions LLC
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Works Consulted:

Baack, Ben. “Economics of the American Revolutionary War”. EH.Net Encyclopedia, edited by Robert Whaples. November 13, 2001 (updated August 5, 2010). URL http://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-economics-of-the-american-revolutionary-war/

Cummings, Hubertis M., Scots Breed and Susquehanna. University of Pittsburgh Press, 1964

Ellis, Joseph J.,  Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation. New York, Random House, 2002

Regelski, Christine.  “The Revolution of American Drinking.” U.S. History Scene,  2016. http://ushistoryscene.com/article/american-drinking/

Smiley, Ian B. BSc. , Making Pure Corn Whiskey.  Canada, Self Published. 1999 

Smith, John L. Jr.,  “How Was the Revolutionary War Paid For?” Journal of the American Revolution. February 23, 2015.  https://allthingsliberty.com/2015/02/how-was-the-revolutionary-war-paid-for/

Standage, Tom,  A History of the World in Six Glasses. New York.  Walker & Co., 2005

Theobald, Mary Miley, “When Whiskey was the King of Drink.” Colonial Williamsburg, Summer 2008.  http://www.history.org/foundation/journal/summer08/whiskey.cfm

 Uncredited.  “George Washington’s Distillery.” George Washington’s Mount Vernon. 2016. http://www.mountvernon.org/the-estate-gardens/distillery/

As American as Apple… Cider?

When I was in elementary school we were told the stories of the great American folk heroes that helped explore, settle, and exploit the American frontier. Some of you are old enough to remember the guys I’m talking about-  Walt Disney made them famous back in the 1950’s.  They actually showed us the cartoons in the classroom.  There was Paul Bunyan with his Blue Ox, Babe, who conquered the north woods by chopping down and clearing out millions of acres of pine trees from Maine to Minnesota.  And the steel driving man, John Henry, who could drive a rock drill with a sledgehammer faster than a steam powered machine, cutting tunnels through the Appalachian Mountains for the expanding railroads across the country.  And Pecos Bill who was raised by coyotes on the high plains of Texas, used a rattlesnake as a lasso, once roped a tornado and rode it into submission, and scared all of the war paint of them Injuns, which made the painted desert.

Yeah, kind of gave all of us in elementary school back then a warped sense of history, being that some of our greatest American heroes were completely made up bullshit.   

But, there was one of Disney’s American Legends that was an actual person; Johnny Appleseed.  And according to Disney, he may have been the most IMPORTANT of all American frontiersmen.

According to old Walt’s cartoon, Johnny Appleseed’s story was told by an old settler who knew him well (more on that guy later).  Armed with only a Bible, a bag of apple seeds, and a tin pot for a hat, Johnny was encouraged by his VERY own guardian angel to go west and plant orchard after orchard of apple trees from Massachusetts to Pennsylvania, over the Appalachian frontier into Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, so the settlers across this growing land could have tasty apples to make Apple Tarts, Apple Cobbler, Apple Sauce, Apple Butter, Apple Fritters, Apple Cake, and, on and on and on.  We were all taught that only because of Johnny Appleseed and his dedication to spreading the apple across our nation, we have that most American of foods, Apple Pie.

But, there was one thing that Disney didn’t really explain; John Chapman, (his real name) wasn’t growing apples for Apple Pie.  He was growing them for cider.  And not the kind of cider that we let the kids drink on Halloween.  No, John Chapman was cultivating orchards and nurseries of apples for one purpose; hard cider, Early America’s favorite alcoholic beverage.

The Forbidden Fruit
Ah, the apple.  Eve tempted Adam with it.  An argument over a golden apple between the Greek Goddesses started the Trojan War.  Odysseus, returning from that war, yearned for the apple orchards of his childhood while struggling to return to his home in Ithaca.  It was believed by the Vikings that the Norse Gods owed their immortality to the apples given to them to eat by Idun, the Goddess of Rejuvenation (although apples didn’t reach Scandinavia until the Middle Ages, but let’s not let the truth get in the way of a good story).  The Arabian Nights tales featured an apple that could cure all maladies and human disease.  You know, that one a day that keeps the doctor away.  (More about that old saying later).

Idun and the Apples by James Doyle Penrose

We all know the apple.  We’ve been eating them since we were children.  And most of us know the non-alcoholic cider as a sweet autumnal treat, but many people are surprised to learn that fermented cider was the most popular drink in Early America, given that until just very recently, in the last 20 or 30 years, finding hard cider in an American liquor store was nearly impossible, except in specialty import purveyors.

What Americans call Hard Cider (and the rest of the world just calls Cider) is an old beverage.  The first historic documentation of fermented apple juice being consumed in Western Europe is from 55 BCE in Britannia (what is now England).  The Romans found the delicious drink there to be the favorite of the native Celtic populations, but cider was already a very old beverage even by then.

Tradition has it that Alexander the Great introduced apples to Europe when he brought apple trees out of the forests of Kazakhstan back to his home in Macedonia.  Apples became a favorite fruit of both the Greeks and the Romans, for both eating, and fermented apple juice was consumed by the poorer populations of both of those cultures.  But, it was in Northwestern Europe where Cider found its greatest appeal.  Apples, and apple seeds, were probably introduced to the Celtic peoples of Gaul during their invasions of the Roman states in the 4th and 3rd Centuries BCE.  Taking the apple back to their homelands in what is today modern France, the Celts then spread the trees to northern Gaul (that is today Normandy and Brittany), Galacia in northwestern Spain, and southern England. 

Apple trees thrived in the cooler climes of northwestern Europe, whereas grapes cultivation was problematic at best- (Even today, both Normandy and Brittany produce far more apples and cider than grapes for wine). When planted by seed rather than grafted or planted saplings, apple trees have a wonderful ability to adapt to the environment where they are planted, and the fruit could potentially be nothing like the parent stock.  Botanists call this Extreme Heterozygosity, and it’s great for evolution of the fruit, producing a multitude of diverse apple varieties that can thrive from Ontario to New Zealand, which has easily facilitated the spread of the fruit so widely over the world.  But, this trait is also a minor setback for apple growers who want a consistent variety of apples from generation to generation; the only way that can be assured is by grafting of branches from a desired fruit tree variety onto an established rooted trunk.

Grafting an Apple Tree at Woodleaf Farm

Julius Caesar’s Roman expeditions into the British Isles found the Celts drinking cider in the 1st Century BCE.  The Germanic Angles and Saxons, who were from a grain based ale drinking culture, noted at the time of their invasions of Britain in the mid first Millennia CE that the Romanized Britons mainly drank what they called æppelwīn, which was similar to a drink that they made from fermented apple juice themselves.  The Vikings, who invaded the British Isles beginning in the late 8th Century CE, wrote of  the fermented apple juice of Britain in their sagas, calling the beverage Veig, meaning ‘strong drink.’

Now while the Celts in in Northern France, Britain, and Northwestern Spain established the cultivation of apples for cider production, it was the next wave of invaders that embraced the beverage; the Normans.  As a matter of fact, the word cider is a variation of the Norman French word, Cidre.  Who were the Normans? The word Norman is a contraction of the words Nord Hommes or North Men, and they were actually Vikings that the French paid off (to keep them from continuously attacking Paris) by giving them the Duchy of Rouen in northern France, the area that we today call Normandy.

In the rolling hills of Northern France, through the process of selected growth and grafting, the Normans perfected the cider apple.  The natural sugars in the Norman apples were perfect for fermenting a slightly sweet, crisp, dry cider of about 4 to 6% alcohol, very similar to the ciders found in Normandy, Britain, and Ireland today.  Even today, Normandy ciders are considered the connoisseur’s choice.  Having been to Normandy I can attest to this. There are three kinds of cider in Normandy; Cidre Doux (sweet cider), Demi-Sac (semi-sweet), and Cidre Brut (dry cider)- all of which are delicious.  Besides cider, Normandy is home to two excellent apple liquors using distilled cider.  Calvados, an apple brandy, is distilled using copper stills in the same manner as Cognac, aged in oak barrels, and is exclusive to Normandy. The other is Pommeau, a blend of unfermented sweet cider and Calvados, also aged in oak, typically served pre dinner or as an appertiff.  Aussi, delicieux! 

Apple Trees of Normandy by Jean Baptiste-Armand Guillaumin

With the Norman Conquest, William the Conqueror (the Duke of Normandy), defeated Harold of England in 1066 at the Battle of Hastings.  William’s great grandson Henry II took Ireland a century later.  The Normans established cider orchards across England and Ireland, and it became the favorite beverage of the masses.  It was not superseded in popularity by ales until the introduction of hops to the beer brewing process during the reign of Henry VIII.  Over the next few centuries, varieties of apples of three main types were cultivated; cider apples, cooking apples, and eating apples, and these were the varieties that the English and Irish immigrants brought to the American Colonies.

Two of the pub’s favorite beverages from apples; Magner’s Vintage Cider from Tipperary, Ireland and Busnel VSOP Calvados from Normandy, France

Cider Comes to America
From the beginning, transported in planter barrels, apple trees were brought by ship with the English coming to America.  Within a few years of its establishment in 1607, Jamestown had a working cider orchard.  In 1620, the pilgrims traveled with a cider press on board the Mayflower, and the large iron screw of the press was actually used to shore up a cracked beam on the voyage over the North Atlantic.  In 1623, William Blackstone, one of the first settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony planted an orchard in Boston only nine days after arriving in the New World.  Tenants on Governor’s Island in Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1630’s paid their rent in two bushels of apples a year.  In 1634, Lord Baltimore, the founder of Maryland, instructed the early settlers of Maryland to bring seeds to grow both apples and pears, for in his words, “thee Maykinge thereafter of cider and perry.”   Perry is cider made from pears, and it’s also delicious.  Within fifty years, cider became the most prevalent and widespread alcoholic beverage in the English colonies. 

Apples thrived in North America, much more so than grapes.  Grains like wheat, rye, and barley were needed for bread and porridge, so grain based beer was more expensive, so the colonists brewed beers from other foodstuffs; pumpkins, persimmons, spruce, sassafras, and even green corn; beer was drank but it played second fiddle to cider.  Cider was the king of colonial beverages.

Cider Press in 18th Century New England

But why were alcoholic beverages so important in the pre industrial era?  The answer to that is ‘water.’  In most places it wasn’t safe to drink, especially in areas of concentrated populations, because human and animal wastes often tainted the water supply with microbial death bugs; typhoid, cholera, dysentery - anyone of which would cause death by diarrhea and dehydration.  In low lying areas along the eastern coast of British America, the water table might be a brackish mix of salt and fresh water, and the over consumption of salt water caused excessive urination causing a person to expel more water than they actually consumed, leading to eventual kidney failure, and death.  Ah, the good old days.

Now most people at the time didn’t know the science behind bad water, they just knew that if you drank it you could die.  My grandfather who grew up in a rural area of Northeast Missouri was scared of drinking water, even from the tap.  He’d only drink brewed tea and coffee.  I asked him why he didn’t drink water and he told me because he had known people who had died when he was a kid from drinking well water.

Alcohol, even in concentrations as low as 3%, in cider and beer, acted as purifying agent, killing pathogens that would otherwise make one ill.  The boiling of water for brewing tea and coffee does the same, but during the colonial period those beverages were luxuries, you couldn’t drink them all the time.  Distilled spirits, like corn whiskey and rum, while popular, were entirely too strong to be drank in massive quantities.  But cider and beer were drunk by nearly everyone in Colonial America, young and old alike, and more cider was drank than beer, and they drank a lot. 

Natural historian Michael Pollan writes of apples, “Up until Prohibition, an apple grown in America was far less likely to be eaten than to wind up in a barrel of cider. In rural areas cider took the place of not only wine and beer but of coffee and tea, juice, and even water.”

In the book, Customs and Fashions in Old New England, written in 1911, the author, Alice Morse Earle claims that in the year of 1721 a town of forty families turned out 3,000 barrels of cider, equaling and estimated 3,150 gallons of cider per family.  With estimated households of the day having an average of 6 family members, that equaled 525 gallons of cider per person per year, or about one and a half gallons of cider per day per person. Those numbers were probably inaccurate, given the author’s motivation.

Alice Morse Earle was an active member of the temperance movement of the early 20th Century and she hated drinking.  She once stated, and I quote, “The study of tavern history often brings to light much evidence of sad domestic changes. Many a cherished and beautiful home, rich in annals of family prosperity and private hospitality, ended its days in a tavern.”

A more reliable survey from the State of Massachusetts in 1791 calculated that every citizen over the age of 15 annually consumed 34 gallons of beer and cider, 5 gallons of distilled spirits, and 1 gallon of wine, which sounds like a good week to me.  But that is still a lot more than the average consumption of Americans today; according to the World Health Organization, we Americans on average consume 3.8 gallons of alcohol a year, half of which is beer. 

America’s Favorite Drink
Cider was firmly entrenched as America’s favorite drink when America gained its Independence from Great Britain.  Our second President, John Adams drank a quart tankard of cider every morning with his breakfast, and he lived to see 91 years of age.  Thomas Jefferson, our third President, grew cider apples on his estate at Monticello. 

Other famous Americans in history who were fond of cider included Ethan Allen of the Green Mountain Boys, who mixed half cider and half rum, calling it “Stonewall” because it was said a man drinking it could run through one.  Undoubtedly he and the lads from Vermont were drinking their favorite cordial when they captured Fort Ticonderoga from the British in 1775. 

Benjamin Franklin said of the Apple,  “It is indeed bad to eat apples, it is better to turn them all into cider.”  Old Ben seemed to have a dislike of apples, but he did like to have a drink, or two… or five, or a dozen.

Cider even had an impact on one of our presidential elections.  In 1840 William Henry Harrison became the ninth man elected to the Presidency of the United States, and he was also the FIRST man to actively campaign for the office, what was known as the “Log Cabin and Hard Cider” campaign, an appeal to the common man of the frontier and western states, (despite the fact that he himself was of a landed aristocratic family of the Virginia Tidewater region, and never, ever, lived in a log cabin),  AND it appears as if he had the first campaign slogan:

“With Harrison our country’s won,

No treachery can divide her

Thy will be done with Harrison

Log Cabin and Hard Cider!”

Image of William Henry Harrison campaign poster.  Notice the barrel of hard cider represented on the right.  Harrison’s followers would often build mock cabins and pull them along on wagons.  “Tippicanoe and Tyler Too” is a reference to WHH’s nickname, “Old Tippicanoe” given to him after leading troops in a victory against the Shawnee and other allied tribes at the Battle of Tippicanoe during the War of 1812.

When giving stump speeches at political rallies, Harrison and his teams of supporters would have along barrels of cider, the drink of the common man, and would give out draughts to the potential voters, urging them to help him give the country back to the common man.  He campaigned on a populist agenda against the incumbent, Martin Van Buren, who was dealing with an economic downturn at the time.  Harrison won the election by 234 electoral votes to Van Buren’s 60- one of the largest differences in the electoral college since the two elections of George Washington; (only James Monroe’s defeat of John Quincy Adams, 231 to 1, in 1820 was greater). 

At his inauguration, Harrison (who, at the age of  68, was the oldest man to be elected to the office until Ronald Reagan, who was the oldest to be elected until Donald Trump) strived to keep his common man of the people image intact by riding to the ceremony on horseback, rather than in an enclosed carriage, on a cold and wet day, wearing neither hat nor overcoat.  He then gave a speech of two hours in length while exposed to the elements.  After the ceremony he rode through the streets of Washington, greeting the people who had braved the elements to see their new president, then he attended three inauguration balls, where it is said that he drank well into the early morning hours.  We can only assume that there was some cider being quaffed.  Within three weeks of the inauguration Harrison had developed a cold, which morphed into pneumonia and pleurisy, and died 30 days after his inauguration, giving him the distinction of having the shortest term in Presidential history.

The Apostle of Apples
Now, of course, with everybody in America drinking cider, somebody had to have planted all of those apple trees, and the somebody who planted a large swath of them, from Pennsylvania to Illinois, was Johnny Appleseed.  But, he wasn’t really anything like the Disney legend. 

Paul Rudd would make an excellent Johnny Appleseed.  Somebody get onto his agent.  Let’s work up a project!

First, let’s dispel some myths.  Johnny Appleseed wasn’t a wandering planter, freely distributing apple seeds to anyone who needed them, or just tossing them willy nilly across the land.  On the frontier of the Old Northwest (that is the land west of the Appalachians, north of the Ohio River, and east of the Mississippi River), land could be claimed if it was developed, requiring the planting of at least 50 trees, which Chapman did by planting seeds and developing nurseries.  He did move, and move quickly at times, but always with the goal of establishing a claim to more land.

Despite what the children’s books might say, none of the apples he grew were for eating.  The seed born trees produced a hardy growing, tart apple called “spitters” which were unpalatable for eating, however were excellent for cider, which we have already established, was highly in demand on the frontier.

His legendary look also seems to have some inaccuracies.  Often described as wearing a burlap sack as a shirt and a tin pot as a hat, yet neither claim has been verified.  Burlap, even if you’re the toughest sonovabitch on the frontier, wasn’t worn as clothing.  More than likely his clothing was of the coarsely homespun linsey-woolsey variety, the most common of attire on the frontier during the late 18th and early 19th Centuries. 

And, a tin pot for a hat?  Why?  So apples wouldn’t bonk him on the head?  As headwear it would have been cold in the winter and burning hot in the summer.  More than likely he wore a brimmed hat made of wool felt or woven straw, as most farmers did at the time.  The only eyewitness account of his wearing a tin pot for a hat came from amateur historian and travelogue writer, Henry Howe.  But much of Howe’s information about the Old Northwest has been debunked.  Like a lot of historians, and authors of the early American frontier period, there was a plethora of romantic, and inaccurate, information being published, probably done to engender a sense of nationalism for the young republic.  So, they made shit up.  Along with the tin pot for a hat story, Howe also told a story of how Chapman was sleeping in a hollow log to awaken to find a black bear and her cubs had joined him, so he decided it best not disturb the bear, and snuck out of the log, built a fire outside and slept in the snow…   Yeah… Okay, moving on.

John Chapman was born in Massachusetts in 1774, growing up in the cradle of the American Revolution.  His father, served as a Minuteman at the Battle of Lexington-Concord, and his mother died when he was only two years of age, leaving John to be raised by relatives until his father was discharged from the Continental Army. In 1792 Champman moved from Massachusetts to Pennsylvania, where he took up the profession of nurseryman.  It was here that he began to collect seeds at the cider mills in during the harvest pressing.  He planted the seeds on his claimed lands, or he sold them to others, which became his life pattern.  He would develop nurseries, leave them in the hands of workers, then go on to build more, returning every couple of years to check on his holdings.  Other nursery lands he sold once he had them developed.

When Chapman died near Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1847, he left an estate of over 1,200 acres of nurseries to his sister.  He also owned plots of land in Allen County, Indiana, that held apple trees numbering over 15,000 trees, as well as hundreds of acres in Ohio.  Other than what was left to his sister, the remaining holdings were sold on public auction to cover back taxes and litigation, and his nurseries ended up in the hands of others, who continued to grow the apples for the demand in cider. 

Chapman’s legacy was nearly wiped out with Prohibition beginning in 1920.  With the zealotry of the reformers behind them, the Treasury Department and the FBI destroyed most of America’s cider nurseries, including a lot of Chapman’s.  And the memory of cider as America’s favorite beverage was nearly lost to future generations.

Other factors conspired to end the popularity of cider in America.  Immigrants from Germany and Eastern Europe were more familiar with and favored lager beer.  The development of industrial brewing by the Anheuser Busch, Miller, and Coors families, along with the invention of bottling and refrigerated rail cars in the late 19th Century, made transportation of beer across the country possible. Prohibition was just the final blow to cider’s reign as America’s drink.

Remarkably, you can still visit one of Johnny Appleseed’s trees.  In Nova, Ohio, there is a 176 year old tree, documented to be planted by John Chapman on one of his early land claims that he returned to a few years before his death.  It still produces apples that are used for cooking, and cider.

And the saying, “An apple a day keeps the doctor away?”  A version of the saying originally appeared in Wales in 1866; “An apple before bed will keep the doctor from earning his bread,” but that expression never really caught on. And the saying that we know doesn’t appear in the American lexicon until 1922, during Prohibition.  The American apple growers were going bankrupt because they could no longer make cider.  A group of them got together, hired a marketing guy to come up with a catchy saying, and they were able to have ‘An apple a day keeps the doctor away,’ placed in the Farmer’s Almanac, one of the most read publications in the country at the time, and it worked.  Before long the saying was so well known to every American that it was said everywhere.

And to whom did marketing guys attribute this quote?

Benjamin Franklin. 

HISHTORY Episode 2
Writer/Producer: Allen Tatman
Technical Director: Brian McGeorge
Recorded at Rivers Edge Studios and Paddy Malone’s Pub, in Jefferson City MO.
A Wylde Irish Production, all rights reserved, Wylde Irish Productions LLC
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Please Enjoy Your Favorite Alcoholic Beverages Responsibly.

Works Consulted:
Earle, Alice Morse. Customs and Fashions in Old New England. New York, Firework Press, 1911.

 “Italy in the White House: Carusi’s Saloon Menu.”  The White House Historical Association. https://www.whitehousehistory.org/photos/italy-in-the-white-house-carusis-saloon-menu

Pollan, Michael.  The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s Eye View of the World.  New York, Random House, 2002.

 Puchko, Kristy.  “9 Facts That Tell the True Story of Johnny Appleseed.”  Mental Floss. 9/26/2015 http://mentalfloss.com/article/62113/9-facts-tell-true-story-johnny-appleseed 

Rupp, Rebecca. “The Highs and Lows of Hard Apple Cider History.”  The Plate: National Geographic.  10/18/2015
http://theplate.nationalgeographic.com/2015/10/08/the-highs-and-lows-of-hard-apple-cider-history/

 Rupp, Rebecca.  “The History of the ‘Forbidden Fruit.’” The Plate: National Geographic. 7/14/2014 http://theplate.nationalgeographic.com/2014/07/22/history-of-apples/

Stewart, Amy.  The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create the World’s Greatest Drinks.  Chapel Hill NC, Algonquin Press, 2013

Stewart, Amy.  “The History of Cider Making.”  UTNE Reader. June 2013.
http://www.utne.com/arts/history-of-cider-making-ze0z1306zpit?pageid=3#PageContent3

Wilcox, Kathleen.  “Why You’ll Find the Best Cider in Normandy.” Vinepair. 7/23/15
http://vinepair.com/wine-blog/why-youll-find-the-best-cider-in-normandy/

So Australopithecus Walks into a Fruit Grove: Alcohol and Early Man

Thirst.  The physiological drive to drink liquid.  It’s deadlier than hunger.  You can survive without food for three weeks.  But, without liquid sustenance, even in ideal conditions, you’d be hard pressed to make it a week before your body begins to shut down. Of course, the most abundant liquid in our world is water.  Some species of animals and plants are made up of almost 95% water.  We humans are only 68%, but every living thing we know of is at least 60% H2O.  So- thirst.  Other than breathing, it is the strongest compulsion that we have; more than hunger, more than sex… well, usually more than sex, at least in normal people.

Another urge that most species of fauna seem to share is the pursuit of altered consciousness.  Grazing herd animals in North America seek out Jimson Weed- what is more commonly called Locoweed.  Reindeer and caribou are known to forage for mushrooms and fungi in the boreal forests of Canada, and Scandinavia  for the pursuit of a psychotropic trips (Maybe that’s how Santa Claus gets them to fly).  And let’s not forget our household tabby cat, which if allowed to, would stay so looped on catnip that it might skip eating altogether. 

But, the preferred substance to get messed up on by most species, from elephants, to birds, to snails, and man, is alcohol.  We humans have perfected the intersection of these two instinctual desires of thirst and getting drunk. 

We generally think of History, that is History with the capitol H, as one big monolithic thing; all of the activities of human beings since the beginning of man’s recordation of events.  Sometimes we divide the history of mankind by a race of people, or a culture, or civilization or a society, or of a piece of land.  But, as the philosopher of science, Karl Popper noted, “There is really no history of mankind, there are only the many histories of all kinds of aspects of human life.” 

And the one aspect of human life that has been with us since before we even started to write down our history is alcohol.

In the Beginning There Was Sugar and Yeast

When did man start producing alcohol for consumption?  Well, that’s the wrong question.  The real question is when did alcohol first begin to occur in nature.  The activity of fauna, that is animals and insects, getting drunk probably predates the human species by about 61 million years.  Paleontologists and Paleobotanists tell us that as far back as the Cretaceous, 65.5 million years ago there is evidence of alcohol naturally occurring in nectar bearing flowers and fruit bearing plants.  It could be surmised that many ancient species probably sought out fermented nectar and fruit, as many animals, birds, and insects do today. 

Just go on line and Google, DRUNK BEAR, DRUNK MOOSE, DRUNK ANIMALS- you’ll find all kinds of wildlife getting smashed.  We can only assume that it is because of the way it tastes and makes them feel, which is our same motivation for drinking beer, wine, and spirits.  Also, animals in the wild will eat until there is no more food to be eaten; it’s the feast or famine survival instinct.  Ethanol plumes, that is the gas that’s produced as a byproduct of fermentation, can attract animals from over many miles. 

Video Clip: Bear Drunk on Fermented Apples

So, to create Ethanol (i.e. alcohol) all nature needs is some juicy fruit sugars, some wild yeasts, and just a little bit of time.

So Australopithecus Walks into a Fruit Grove…

Now, It appears as if the earliest ancestors of humans, frugivorous primates, were probably getting drunk from the beginning.  Even today, if monkeys are given access to alcohol they will drink themselves into a wild stupor. In some countries monkeys seeking out places where humans drink in an attempt to steal alcohol is a major problem. 

Video Clip: Drunk Monkey with a Knife

Now because the consumption of alcohol acts as an appetite stimulant, early primates and gatherer hominids probably ate as much fermented fruit as they could, when they could find it. Those early fruit eaters wouldn’t want to see that fruit go to waste, so binge drinking probably actually began as binge eating, and predates tool making, animal husbandry, or agriculture, and undoubtedly it remained an activity with the early hunter-gatherer groups of humans who moved out of Africa 50,000 years ago. These nomadic bands who went from place to place to exploit the seasonal food availability undoubtedly knew where the fruit trees were and when the fruit would ripen.  

Now, with some fermented fruit being able to have an alcohol content as high as 10 to 12 %, (similar to low ABV wine and some naturally fermented hard ciders), it looks like we’ve been getting drunk for a long time. 

Somewhere in the Fertile Crescent: a Brewer is Born

Fast forward to 10,000 BCE; in the Middle East, particularly between Mesopotamia and the Nile Valley- the area known as the Fertile Crescent- where humans first abandoned the hunter-gatherer lifestyle of the Paleolithic period and begin to adopt farming and animal husbandry, ushering in the Neolithic.  At the end of the last Ice Age, the uplands of this region were densely populated by herds of wild goats, sheep, cattle, and swine, which were attracted to dense stands of wild grain-bearing grasses.  It was a proverbial promised land for these hunter-gatherers.  Over the next 5,000 years they learned how to domesticate all of these animals, began harvesting the wild grains, and eventually figured out that if you kept some of the grains and planted them again, more grasses, more grains, every year, equals a constant food supply.  And the nice thing about grain is that it keeps well if stored in a dry environment, so it becomes the staple food source year round. 

Now, with this behavioral shift from nomadic hunting to sedentary farming, man settled into villages that later grew into cities.  One of the things that farming did for these groups was free up time whereas other activities could be pursued beyond just finding food, such as the development of new technologies including pottery, masonry, wheeled vehicles, metalworking, writing, and (most importantly as far as we’re concerned) brewing.

Beer was first brewed some time between the end of hunter-gathering cultures and the development of early agricultural cultures.

When the first beer was intentionally brewed is not known, but it most certainly happened between 10,000 BCE and 4,500 BCE.  A pictogram from 6,000 years ago found on a ceramic seal in Mesopotamia shows two figures drinking beer through straws from a large pottery jar.  The use of straws in the picture is the key clue to let us know that it was beer; ancient beer had bits of grain, chaff, yeast, and other residue floating on the top or settling on the bottom of the vessel, so using a straw to pull the liquid from the middle of the jar was necessary to avoid swallowing this gunk.

Earliest known depiction of drinking beer, clay pictogram from Mesopotamia, ca. 4,000 BCE

The earliest written documents from 3,400 BCE tell us nothing directly about the origins of beer, but what is certain is that the rise of beer is associated with the cultivation of cereal grains, like wheat and barley.  Archaeologists have found ruins of a huge brewery in Egypt dating from this period.  The brewery was so large that it could produce up to 300 gallons of beer each day, so it can be assumed that since the brewing process was being done on such a large scale by then, it had to have been around by then for a very long time.  But, the question is how much earlier?

Drink like an Egyptian.

Wild cereal grains gathered were probably first consumed by hunter-gatherers, eaten like berries or nuts, then they began making porridges or as soups, with the grains being cracked, soaked, and cooked. Other foodstuffs would have been mixed in with the softened grains; berries, meats, nuts, and so forth, creating a stable and nutritious diet.   The earliest cooking methods consisted of placing the grains with water into plaster lined basket or ceramic vessel, then heating stones and dropping them into the vessel using forked sticks and crude shovels.  The grains, of course, contained starches, and in the hot water the starches were released, thickening the broth considerably, and the longer you cook it, the thicker the soup would become. 

But, what happens if you forget to cook the soaked grains?  Whole grains when left in warm water will begin to germinate, that is, sprout.  The germination process converts the starches in the grain into sugars, including glucose, maltose, maltotrioses, and maltodextrines; the processes related to Malting.  Other enzymes also develop, called proteases, which break down the proteins in the grain allowing yeasts to process the fermentable sugars into alcohol. 

Undoubtedly, beer, or any other fermented beverage, was discovered complete by accident, sometime around 10,000 to 12,000 years ago.  The grains were probably left to soak in the water, the water became warm, but not hot enough to cook the grain, thus the grains germinated.  The germinated grains, or malt, turned the starches into sugars, and yeasts converted the sugars into alcohol.  Rather than throwing the grain out, they undoubtedly ate it, perhaps even drank the water, liked the way it tasted, really liked the way it made them feel.  Of course, consumption of alcohol leads to other fun things, like sex (see accompanying photo).  So, undoubtedly in an effort to recreate the magic that the Gods had given them in this delicious concoction, they began to experiment and try to replicate the creation of this wonderful concoction. 

Terra Cotta plaque from Ancient Babylonia, ca. 1,800 BCE, proving that alcohol and sex have been associated for a long time.

Today we would find this early kind of beer almost unpalatable.  Fortunately, somebody discovered how to control the malting process and then a few millennia later, some Benedictine monks in France added hops into the brewing process, which is really when the modern ale styles began to emerge in Europe. Lagers came later in Germany. 

In the great civilizations in Mesopotamia and Egypt, beer was the one thing that everybody would have drank on a daily basis, especially where there were large populations and the water supply would have been tainted by diarrheal microbes from animal and human waste. And when I say everybody drank beer, I mean everybody; from babes and toddlers who were off of the teat, to the elderly.  Everyday beer at this time would have only been about 3% alcohol, which will kill most dangerous bacteria.  Beer was nutritious, delicious, safe to consume, and it made you feel good.  These civilizations flourished because of it.  But alcohol also helped other civilizations on their rise, as well.

Other Civilizations, Other Ways to Get Buzzed

In China: Archaeological discoveries in the Yellow River Valley show that a type of Rice Mead (made from rice, honey, water) was being fermented as far back as 9,000 years ago, making it one of the earliest verified intentionally brewed beverages. Early Chinese societies preferred rice and grain wines, which were made from either rice, millet, grain sorghum, or a mixture thereof. 

In Persia, that is modern Iran, the early Persians seem to be the first civilization to actively practice the art of ‘viticulture,’ that is cultivate grapes and make wine, going back to 7,500 years ago.  From Persia, the art travelled first to Babylon (who already had their beer), and then by 2,000 BCE onward to Greece.  Through trade routes, viticulture subsequently spread far throughout the entire Mediterranean world, from Phoenicia to the Iberian Peninsula, and was the dominant beverage by the time of the rise of the Roman state.

Before they learned about wine, the early Greeks drank mostly mead, fermented honey water.  Evidence of mead brewing was has also been found as early as 2,800 BCE by the Bell Beaker Culture in Central Europe, spreading from there throughout the continent.

In the Indus Valley, evidence shows that a beverage called Sura was being consumed as early as 3,000 BCE.  Sura was brewed from rice meal, honey and/or sugar cane, along with botanicals and fruit.  It was considered the favorite beverage of the Hindu gods.

And even Pre-Columbian American cultures and societies were brewing alcohol.  We usually don’t think of alcohol when we talk about the Native Americans, because of the stereotypical idea that they “couldn’t hold their liquor,” but this is because of a perceived racial intolerance to strong distilled spirits, that were introduced with the European invasions of the Late Second Millennia AD.  Truthfully, almost all agricultural societies of the New World, especially in Mesoamerica and the Andes, brewed beverages, made from crops and plants specific to their cultures; agave, pineapple, maize, manioc root, yucca, and saguaro.  Even the Iroquois of Northeastern North America made a mildly alcoholic drink from fermented maple sap.

Final Toast: To Our Ancestors!

Next time you sit down with a delicious pint of beer, or a glass of wine, or some sake or mead, thank our now long gone forbearers, who sought to find a better way to brew and ferment alcoholic beverages.  Every glass represents countless generations of knowledge about brewing and fermentation.  So, raise a glass to those who brewed before us, because, you can’t have a beer, unless somebody learned how to brew it.  Cheers!

HISHTORY Episode 1

Producer: Allen Tatman

Technical Director: Brian McGeorge

Recorded at Rivers Edge Studios and Paddy Malone’s Pub, in Jefferson City MO.

Music for Hishtory Theme Song is from www.bensound.com

Hishtory is a Wylde Irish Production, LLC, all rights reserved.

Find us on Facebook

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Email: cheers@hishtory.com

Please subscribe and post a review on iTunes. 

Tell your friends about us and share.

Please Enjoy Your Favorite Alcoholic Beverages Responsibly.

Works consulted:

Dudley, Robert, 2004.  “Ethanol, Fruit Ripening, and the Historical Origins of Human Alcoholism in Primate Frugivory.”   Oxford Journals, Vol. 44, No. 4

McGovern, Patrick.  Interview: Were Humans Built to Drink Alcohol?  Why I Brew Ancient Beers.  National Geographic, September 2016

Preedy, Victor R., Ronald Ross Watson, eds.  Comprehensive Handbook of Alcohol Related Pathology. San Diego, Elsevier Academic Press, 2004

Samorini, Giorgio. Animals and Psychedelics: The Natural World and the Instinct to Alter Consciousness. (English Translation) Rochester, VT, Park Street Press, 2002

Standage, Tom.  A History of Civilization in Six Glasses.  New York, Walker & Company, 2005