AS A CHILD, ONE OF MY GREAT FANTASIES WAS GETTING to tour Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. It was crushing to learn that, no, there are no golden tickets hiding in Wonka bars, and no eccentric geniuses willing to let you sample their most experimental creations. But as an adult, I have discovered that a private tour of the original Sam Adams research and development brewery in Boston, Massachusetts, comes pretty darn close to that dream. Chewing on chocolate-roasted malts, getting my hands sticky with lupulin, even catching a forbidden whiff of the mythic, wild yeast ale known as the Kosmic Mother Funk: sweet stuff for any lover of beer, or history, for that matter, because the brewery, built way back in 1870, practically leaks the stuff. The highlight of the tour comes at its conclusion, seated at the bar in the tasting room. It is a Friday, the brewers have just punched out for the day, and their stories begin to flow like the beer. The sort of inside scoop you don’t usually get on the back of a bottle. Over a pint of original Boston Lager—the freshest, without a doubt, I’ve ever had—I learn that Rudolph Haffenreffer, who owned the facility long before it ever brewed Sam Adams, piped out the excess heat from the brew kettles to heat his own house. In the old days, I found out, there was a tap outside the building that was open to locals, and that Babe Ruth used to drop by for a quick mug or five. And that strange, truncated smokestack with only half of the brewery’s original name along its side? Hurricane Gloria lopped the top clean off in 1985, and it’s read FENREFFER BREWERS ever since.
The Boston Beer Company’s R&D brewery is located at the original headquarters of Haffenreffer beer, in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts. Legend has it that Babe Ruth and his Red Sox teammates used to swing by for pails of Haffenreffer.
Courtesy of Boston Beer Company
There is one story, however, recounted over these end-of-the-day pints, that I find even more incredible than the rest. I hear it from brewer Dean Gianocostas, who has been at Sam Adams since the mid-’80s, back when it, alongside a few upstarts on the West Coast, was the only American craft alternative to the brewing behemoths. Still, it’s hard for me to believe. How could the Boston Lager I’m currently drinking, the beer that effectively started a revolution and altered the landscape of American brew culture forever, have had its origins not in some Old World beer academy or state-of-the-art testing room, but rather in an attic, buried beneath a stack of old Motor Trend magazines? Yes, Motor Trend. Apparently, this was where Jim Koch, the creator of Samuel Adams beer and founder of the Boston Beer Company, discovered his great-great-grandfather’s recipe for a distinctive style of lager. A beer of the sort Americans had once savored, in the days before Prohibition, but that had long since been forgotten. It truly was a different, older style of brew—one which eschewed “adjuncts” (fillers like corn, rice, or wheat) in favor of a higher-quality two-row barley, and called for rare varieties of noble hops to lend it some character. A beer that, lager yeast aside, was much more like the darker, hoppier, higher-gravity ales of New England’s first settlers than the diluted pilsners that eventually came to supplant them. As something of a visionary—and a rebel—Jim Koch recognized this right away. And, if the story is to be believed, he also lost all his kitchen wallpaper in the process. According to Dean, the steam from brewing his first batch took it right off the walls.
I thank the brewers once the beers are done, and I make my way back downtown. I still have a couple hours to kill before my bus departs for New York, time enough for one more stop before leaving Boston: the Bell in Hand Tavern. Admittedly, it is something of a tourist stop, and yes, the flat-screen TVs don’t lend themselves to historical reflection. But the place was built in 1795—just a dozen years after the American Revolution—and it doesn’t take much imagination to envision what the bar must once have been. It was in taverns just like this that the first rumblings of independence began, as men like Sam Adams and John Hancock capitalized on an age-old English tradition of airing gripes and planning next steps in the local alehouse. The bartender asks me what I’d like, and I see that Sam Adams brews a special colonial-style ale just for the Bell in Hand. I order one, with a bowl of chowder to go with it, and with the first taste of the pint, realize that perhaps the story Dean told me about the origins of Boston Lager isn’t so far-fetched after all. If American democracy itself could have been born over mugs of beer in a humble tavern such as this, maybe a long-lost family recipe could have ignited the flame that would reintroduce regional craft beer to the American mass market.
A young Jim Koch in front of an early batch of his signature Samuel Adams Boston Lager. In the 1980s, he helped reintroduce our nation to a revolutionary idea: that American beer could actually have character.
Courtesy of Boston Beer Company
But with such a good tale, I have to know for sure. And as soon as I get back to New York, I can’t help but ask Jim Koch himself. Did Sam Adams really begin up in an attic, buried beneath a stack of old magazines?
“This is all true!” comes his enthusiastic reply. “In 1984, I told my father I was going to quit my job as a consultant to become a brewer. He looked at me and said, ‘Jim, you’ve done some stupid things in your life. That’s just about the stupidest.’” This, according to Jim, wasn’t an unexpected reaction—the Koch family had been making beer for generations, and his father, who worked as a brewmaster for a regional beer maker, had seen small breweries fold by the dozens. Making carefully crafted, old-fashioned beer in a market dominated by mass-produced macrobrews seemed doomed to fail. Nevertheless, the elder Koch took his headstrong son up to the attic where the family kept its old records, and, more important, where a few of the family beer recipes could still be found. This included, as it turned out, his great-great-grandfather’s Louis Koch Lager—the beer that would eventually become the Boston Lager we know today. And the wallpaper? Jim has an answer for that as well. “When I brewed my first batch in my kitchen, two things happened,” he tells me. “The steam peeled the wallpaper off the walls, and I fell in love with the taste of this beer which came to be known as Samuel Adams Boston Lager.”
Yes, revolutions can begin in rather unexpected places—and when Jim Koch pulled that brittle piece of paper out from beneath stacks of Motor Trend (and, I learn, Road & Track) to create Sam Adams, he didn’t just resurrect an old Koch family recipe—he reintroduced America to a significant piece of its own lost brewing heritage. With the return of darker malts, more aromatic hops, and eventually even ale yeast, he brought back to New England a tradition of beer making that had not begun in 1776, but much earlier, in a misty isle across the sea. To understand the history of beer in New England, we’ve got to make a quick stop in the old one.
The British Isles are the site of some of the oldest beer-related artifacts discovered in Europe—indeed, even the world. On pottery shards uncovered to the north in the Scottish Isle of Arran dated to 3000 B.C., scientists have detected traces of cereal and honey residue that point to beer consumption. Grooved pot fragments from Balfarg farther east, dating to the third millennium B.C., also indicate grain residue, as well as the pollen of henbane* and meadowsweet—ingredients known to be used as flavoring agents in alcoholic drinks in ancient times. And taking a cue from their Neolithic predecessors, Bronze and Iron Age Celtic Britons took to brewing with equal alacrity, a fact attested to by the generally alarmed observations of ancient scholars. In the fourth century B.C., the Greek explorer Pytheas wrote that these “barbarians” who lived in the more frigid parts of Britain prepared a concoction from honey and grain; several centuries later, another Grecian by the name of Dioscorides would describe how much British Celts relished chugging back a barley beer known as kourmi. T-shaped structures dated to the first century A.D. were almost certainly used as grain kilns and would have provided beer for the many feasts held in honor of great warriors. In short, the Brits have been beer enthusiasts since the very beginning.
Beer can be made from any number of grains, although in Britain and much of Europe, barley has always been the cereal of choice.
Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Celtic Britons weren’t the only Europeans who developed a strong hankering for British beer, though. One generally thinks of Romans as wine drinkers, but when Britain was added to their empire in the first century A.D., it didn’t take Roman troops long to pick up on Celtic customs. The provincial soldiers who served in the Roman army were especially fond of local brews and often demanded them as part of their daily ration. Among the remains of the northern outpost of Vindolanda, a tablet was recovered from around A.D. 100 in which the decurion Masculus writes to the prefect Flavius Cerialis with the urgency of a Cancun spring breaker: “My fellow-soldiers do not have any cervesa; I request that you order some to be sent.” Carbonized malted grain residue at Roman fortress excavations in Bearsden and Caerleon indicate that not only did Caesar’s legions stationed abroad drink large quantities of beer, they got so desperate for it they made it themselves—proof, if nothing else, that standing around guarding Hadrian’s Wall all day was just as dull as it sounds.
The real history of English beer drinking, however, doesn’t start until after the Roman Empire’s collapse in the fifth century, with the appearance of a couple feisty Germanic tribes called the Angles and the Saxons. When Rome finally abandoned its British outposts, the indigenous Celts were left unprepared to deal with the warlike tribes of Picts and Gaels that leered at them menacingly from the island’s wild fringes. Out of desperation, the British Celts invited Angles and Saxons as mercenaries to come across the Channel and help them out. And the arrangement of money-for-protection went off more or less without a hitch—until it became clear that, just like the Hells Angels at Altamont, these unruly Germanic bodyguards did not much appreciate being told what to do. One can almost imagine the tremendous lump in the Celtic king Vortigern’s throat when he realized his belligerent, beer-guzzling guests were not only refusing to do as he asked, they were in fact bringing a few thousand of their kinsmen from northern Germany and southern Denmark to join them.* Battles between the native Celts and Anglo-Saxons would rage for centuries, with Celtic civilizations living on in Wales to the west and Scotland to the north. But “Angle-Land,” as it came to be known, was born—a rather bellicose beginning for Jolly Old England.
But just who were these rowdy Anglo-Saxons? One might describe them as precursors to the Vikings. They hailed from the same northern Germanic world, they worshipped roughly the same pantheon of war-hungry gods, they plundered the same foreign lands, and most important for our purposes, they had the same robust thirst. The Anglo-Saxons drank a variety of beverages, including wîn (wine), medo (meade), ealu (ale), and beor (you can figure that one out on your own). Mead and wine were certainly feasting hall favorites, but they were upper-class drinks, perhaps even special-occasion tipples not unlike modern-day champagne; the honey needed to make mead was a rare commodity, and wine had to be imported at great cost from the warmer, more grape-friendly parts of the European continent.
But beer? That was the everyday, every man’s drink. Anglo-Saxon lexicon wasn’t overly concerned with alcoholic distinctions, and the terms ealu and beor were used interchangeably to mean various drinks made from fermented grains. What didn’t vary was their love for the stuff. In the late ninth century A.D., Alfred the Great described “weapons and meat and ale and clothes” as the only thing an Englishman really needed. In the famously inscrutable Old English poem Beowulf, King Hrothgar—technically a Scandinavian, but described through an Anglo-Saxon lens—evokes Grendel’s scorn by constructing his massive beor hall Heorot, where warriors boasted of their deeds over brimming beor cups. Inevitably, such bragging often ended in a good old-fashioned beor brawl, a central part of Anglo-Saxon life, and a source of concern for those in charge. King Ine of Wessex passed an eighth-century law that stated: “If, however, they quarrel at their drinking of beor, and one of them bears it with patience, the other is to pay 30 shillings as a fine.” Oftentimes, though, the dispute went beyond what a few shillings could fix. The venerable chronicler Cynewulf would also condemn those bewitched by alcohol, writing that “drunk on beor, they renewed old grievances . . . being stricken with wounds, they released their souls to flit doomed away from their body.” In Anglo-Saxon England, beer was a part of everyday social life, albeit one that could turn dangerous at the drop of a helmet.
In the centuries that followed, England changed immensely. The arrival of Christianity banished the old gods, the Norman conquest upset the social order, and the florishing of the High Middle Ages pulled the English further from the primordial murk of Grendel’s moors. At last, it seemed, those rowdy Anglo-Saxon tribesmen had put on their tights, picked up their lutes, and come into the fold of pan-European culture. One thing that would not change was the English fondness for beer. Or beers, more accurately, because by the early Middle Ages, English brewing had evolved enough to provide them with a panoply of options. There was sweet ale, new ale, Welsh ale, double-brewed ale, clear ale, sour ale, honey ale, good ale . . . why, there was even a mild ale, which one can only imagine was akin to modern near beer. But they were all ales. By medieval times, that name had won out, used to describe the generally sweet, dark, alcoholic drink that the English preferred above all others. It wasn’t especially hard to make, at least not on a smaller scale, in its most rudimentary form. Simple domestic ale brewing involved little more than steeping malted barley in boiling water to produce a sugary liquid called “wort,” then pitching in a little yeast once the wort had cooled. A few days or weeks of fermentation, and Bob’s your uncle: English ale. Cider was enjoyed to some extent in the southwest of England, and wine continued to be imported as the ritzy potation of the landed class. Ale, though, was akin to bread—something no Englishman could do without.
In medieval England, brewing was largely the domain of skilled women known as “brewsters” or “alewives.” Everything changed, however, with the rise of cities and the arrival of hops. Mother Louse, pictured here, was one of the last of her kind.
Interestingly, it was not Englishmen who were brewing it. While today the post of “brewer” may conjure images of bearded and beflanneled gentlemen, for most of the English Middle Ages, brewing was an occupation dominated by women. Due largely to rural divisions of labor at the time—women were unquestionably the bosses when it came to most grain-based preparations—brewing fell under the auspices of the lady of the house. Known as “brewsters” or “alewives,” they produced ale primarily for their own households, but they would also sell their surplus to friends and neighbors. The practice was common and widespread. In a fourteenth-century account from Brigstock, Northamptonshire, three hundred women—roughly one-third of the women who lived on the estate—brewed and sold ale. A similar share of women brewed and sold ale in Wakefield, Yorkshire, and Alrewas, Staffordshire. Brewing was still a cottage industry, but there were hints of the demand that would eventually pave the way for alehouses and taverns—direct ancestors of the modern English pub. The burgeoning popularity of both formal drinking establishments and ale is demonstrated rather heroically by this quick census of London taverns from 1309: with a population of around eighty thousand inhabitants, the upstart capital had only 354 taverns specializing in imported wine; at the same time, the fast-growing city boasted some 1,330 brewshops offering good old-fashioned English ale. That’s one ale seller for every sixty inhabitants.
As to how much volume the English consumed, it’s difficult to say with any precision, but evidence indicates they drank the stuff like water—for good reason. England underwent profound changes in the wake of the Black Death that ravaged the country in the middle part of the fourteenth century. With a third of the population lost to the plague, labor shortages and redistribution of wealth helped give birth to a new urban class. Essentially, a nation of rural peasants suddenly became upwardly mobile. And as this new cohort of more skilled and savvy laborers coalesced, English cities formed alongside them. The upside was the end of Old English feudalism, and the birth of a more modern world that was beginning to bear at least some resemblance to our own. The downside? Filth. Townsfolk would pour out their sewage into any open body of water, while tanneries and other caustic businesses dumped their runoff wherever they could. English water quickly became unsafe to drink, and in its place, the English drank beer. The boiling associated with brewing went a long way in killing bacteria, even in the case of ales that had very little alcohol at all, making it a safe and nutrient-rich replacement for local water—something only the most poor and desperate Englishman would dare to drink.
Some estimates put the per capita daily consumption for medieval England at around a gallon, which may seem implausible, although there is evidence to back it up. A hospital for lepers in northern England doled out to its patients four liters of ale a day in the fourteenth century, and not too far away in Great Yarmouth, sailors were given a ration of 4.5 liters for each day they spent in service of the navy—that’s more than a gallon to help brave the high seas. Those may be extreme examples, but ale was certainly consumed in large quantities, by men, women, and children alike. But does that mean entire households were perpetually inebriated? Did families that drank together stay together? Not exactly. Because while, yes, some certainly did overindulge in strong ale, most of what people consumed at the dinner table was very low in alcohol. A common English small ale may have only been 1 or 2 percent alcohol by volume, making it more than suitable as an everyday drink.
As one can imagine, this social upheaval had a profound effect upon brewing as well. Ale making, formerly the domain of rural women whose primary objective was domestic production, increasingly became commercialized and professionalized. Sadly, this meant the majority of women were pushed out of the business, as male-dominated trade guilds took over. This change was especially pronounced in the urbanized southeast, or East Anglia, which abutted London and included many of its surrounding towns. Initially, female brewers did play a crucial and active role in the establishment of urban brewing as a respected trade; in a tally conducted in 1420 by the London Brewer’s Guild of ale hucksters, more women are mentioned than men. Over the decade that followed, overall guild membership would consistently come out to roughly one woman for every three men and was very likely higher because many women brewers used their husbands’ names as false fronts to gain easier admittance. But by the end of the fifteenth century, women would make up only 7 percent of the guilds, and most of those were widows of deceased male members. By the early 1500s, brewing guilds were composed almost entirely of men, as women were squeezed out of their traditional roles and unfairly relegated to more subservient and unskilled positions in alehouses and taverns—an unjust end, unfortunately, to the venerable history of the English brewster.
New, more technologically advanced methods of production also came into play in the new world of industrialized ale making. At its essence, brewing was still a matter of adding yeast to boiled malt and allowing it to ferment into an alcoholic drink. But to produce ale on a rapidly growing commercial scale, new materials and machinery were needed. Whereas a rural alewife would have made do with little more than a brew kettle and a stir stick kept in the kitchen, commercial breweries required separate brewing spaces to house their vast array of equipment. The will of a deceased fourteenth-century brewer gives some indication of what that might have included: “a brewhouse, three shops, two leaden vessels, a lead cistern, a tap-trough, a mashvat, a vat for letting unwanted matter settle out, a vat to hold the finished ale, tubs, and other utensils.” An inventory from 1486 also includes twenty small tubs of yeast as well as a loose wooden frame with small openings or false bottom for the mash tun. And with so much beer being made, some form of industry regulation became necessary for maintaining quality control. The new class of urban breweries may have been privately owned, but government oversight wasn’t far behind, to ensure brewers weren’t cutting corners to make a few extra pounds. To keep up with the rise in production, the position of royal “aletaster” or “aleconner” was added to the civil service roster, under the auspices of the very official-sounding Assize of Bread and Ale. In what may very well have been the greatest job in the history of the world, the aletaster’s sole responsibility was to sample each batch of fresh brew and report back to the king if it was too watery, weak, or otherwise unsavory. And it appears such vigilance was necessary: for instance, in 1449, in the town of Oxford, nine brewers were found guilty of making weak beer and forced under oath to promise never to do it again.
As the old feudal structure of England fell apart in the Black Death’s wake, brewing transitioned from a domestic rural activity to a professional urban craft. Taverns and beer vendors became hallmarks of town life.
Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
The greatest change to English brew culture, however, was born not of plagues or cities or mechanical innovations but came courtesy of a small, mildly bitter relative of the cannabis plant. It’s known to science as the comical-sounding Humulus lupulus, but it’s far more familiar to us beer lovers as . . . (drumroll, please) . . . hops. And with its arrival, English ale was already well on its way to becoming New England beer.
The practice of adding flavoring agents to grain-based fermented drinks goes back thousands of years in Britain. We already know traces of henbane, honey, and meadowsweet were found on Neolithic drinking vessel fragments from various sites around the British Isles. Surviving documents from the medieval period show that ales were also brewed using additives such as bog myrtle, wormwood, heather, spruce sap, carline thistle, and tree bark, along with a host of other agents used for either flavoring or medicinal purposes. A substance called gruit, whose exact recipe has been lost to the ages, was at one point the dominant beer spice, used all across northern Europe to put some kick in the brews.
Initially the English were loath to add hops—a plant whose small, cone-shaped flowers were beginning to gain popularity across the Channel in the monasteries of Carolingian France. One of the earliest references to a hop-based beer comes courtesy of a statute from Adalhard the Elder, at the monasteries of St. Stephen and St. Peter in Corbie, France, from A.D. 822. In it, he insists that the porter ought to receive a portion of all hops given to the monastery as tithes, and in the event the porter’s hop supply was still low, he might “acquire for himself as much as necessary from which to make his own beer.” Hops also caught on in Germany, as suggested by an A.D. 860 mention of a “humilarium” (the fancy Latin term for hop garden) in the abbey of Freisingen. And why was this process of “hopping” beer adopted so quickly on the European continent? The twelfth-century writings of the abbess Hildegard of Bingen spell it out quite plainly: “In its bitterness it prevents spoilage in those drinks to which it is added, so that they can last much longer.” Meaning, those food preservatives listed on the back of your soft drink are not just a recent phenomenon. Monks and abbesses figured out early on that the hop plant had some rather handy antimicrobial and preservative properties. Granted, without the benefits of modern chemistry and microbiology, they didn’t understand the exact mechanism by which the hops preserved their beer, but through trial and error, they figured it out. As anyone familiar with Mendel and his bean plants can attest, the two things monks have historically had in copious amounts are free time and garden plots, which led to a great deal of experimentation. And thankfully for the beer fans of the world, those medieval monastics figured out that beer made with hops lasted longer and tasted pretty good, too.
Tasted good to them, mind you. Because just a quick boat trip away, the English would not suffer such a sacrilege as putting hops in their ale. Some have cited evidence from Old English poetry suggesting a natural English aversion to bitter drinks, but another explanation seems more likely. For while much of the medieval beer in northern France and Germany was being churned out by monasteries—large, efficiency-minded complexes that produced sizable quantities for an entire region—English ale remained, for most of the medieval period, a smaller domestic product brewed by alewives to be consumed in the home, with any surplus sold off to the neighbor or tavern next door.* And as such, the English were not overly concerned with batch consistency or spoilage. The bitterness of hops was then, as it is today, something of an acquired taste, and with their established traditions of localized rural brewing, the population of medieval England had no reason to acquire it. In fact, they loathed the stuff—at least, initially.
The prejudice against hops would last for quite some time. The first case of Continental-style hopped beer being made in England comes from the London City Letterbooks of 1391. Yet that didn’t prevent hopped beer from being actually outlawed in Norwich in 1471, and in Shrewsbury in 1519, where hops were labeled a “wicked and pernicious weed.” As late as 1545, Andrew Boorde would write in his treatise on dietary health that unhopped ale was the natural drink of an Englishman, while hopped beer,† which made men bloated and fat, was better for Dutchmen—by which he meant uncouth Continentals. For the fifteenth and a sizable chunk of the sixteenth century, hopped “beer,” as it came to be known, was looked upon by English ale drinkers much the same way a die-hard Schlitz fan from Milwaukee might a six-pack of Zima—as something foreign, effete, and flat-out disgusting.
The preservative properties of hops improved batch consistency and helped prevent spoilage. What had been a drink to be consumed locally and quickly became a commercial product capable of being casked and shipped to more distant markets.
Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
The English valiantly resisted the incursions of Continental hopped beer onto their ale-loving soil, but alas, as with the Normans several centuries before, it was an invasion they could not repel, and an arrival that would eventually prove necessary to the future of the industry. In fact, by the very end of the sixteenth century, they had actually developed a fondness for the stuff; hopped beer caught on, and unhopped, sweet-tasting ale slowly went the way of feudalism and jousting contests. In 1556, the remaining ale brewers of London were absorbed by beer brewers in an umbrella guild that included the former only as something of a historical curiosity. And by the 1570s, even the smallest beer brewers were producing more per year than the largest ale brewers. If any nails in the coffin were needed, they came by way of William Harrison, who wrote in 1577 that ale was “an old and sick man’s drink,” with waning popularity across the kingdom.
But the question remains: How did a country of ale drinkers become beer-loving hop-heads in less than a century? In short, the reason is quality control. With larger, more industrial breweries making ever-increasing quantities of beer, measures were required to ensure that each batch would come out the same (meaning no contamination by unwanted pathogens), and that it would last as it was transported to its many distribution outlets and sold across the city. And unhopped ale just wasn’t reliable. A very early example of this is the celebrated case of the fourteenth-century alewife Mary Kempe:
She took up brewing, and was one of the greatest brewers in the town . . . for three or four years until she lost a great deal of money, for she had never had any experience with that business. For however good her servants were and however knowledgeable in brewing, things would never go successfully for them. For when the ale had as fine a head of froth on it as anyone might see, suddenly the froth would go flat, and all the ale was lost in one brewing after another, so that her servants were ashamed and would not stay with her.
Here we have the problem in a nutshell: an independent alewife from a provincial town attempting to brew at a larger quantity for profit, and failing because of poor batch consistency. The hops used at the bigger commercial breweries in East Anglian cities and towns were able to solve the conundrum; their antimicrobial properties kept batches from getting infected with uninvited germs, and allowed them to remain free of such contamination long enough to be sold.
The other significant argument for hops, beyond simple preservation, was one of efficiency. English ale brewers had historically used large amounts of malted grain to strengthen their drink, in the hopes that it would keep longer. But when hopped beer arrived in London, brought from the Continent by immigrant Dutch brewers in the wake of the Hundred Years’ War, a less costly way to preserve beer came with it. Since beer brewers used hops to the same effect, less grain was needed. According to a treatise on hops written by Reginald Scot, “whereas you cannot make above 8 or 9 gallons of indifferent ale out of one bushel of malt, you may draw 18 or 20 gallons of very good beer.” This is supported by a beer recipe from 1502, which states quite confidently that a brewer could draw sixty barrels of beer from ten quarters of malt—about twenty-seven gallons per bushel. That came out to roughly half as much grain to brew hopped beer as unhopped ale. This naturally manifested itself in price, and as early as the fifteenth century, the cost of supplying English soldiers stationed in France was thirty shillings for a tun of ale, versus less than fourteen shillings for a tun of beer. In an expanding market that relied heavily on distribution—which England in the 1500s unquestionably was—the brewing of perishable, inefficient ales simply made poor economic sense. By the end of the century, London could boast some twenty successful breweries, positioned strategically along the Thames, churning out over one million gallons of high-quality, long-lasting, hopped English beer.
All of which sets the stage rather nicely for a trip aboard the Mayflower. Because as it turns out, hops wasn’t the only controversial idea that leapfrogged the English Channel and settled in East Anglia in the sixteenth century, as indicated by this little period ditty:
Hops, Reformation, Bays and Beer
Came to England in one bad year.
Indeed, the Reformation, led by the French theologian John Calvin, made its way to England around the same time hopped beer was beginning to catch on. There were some adherents—nonseparating Puritans—who advocated for change from within the Church of England. But there were others—the more radical Separatists—who saw their differences as irreconcilable, and sought, as their name implies, a total separation and a new beginning. And the folks we’ve come to know here in America as the Pilgrims were unquestionably the latter. It should go without saying that the distaste was mutual; fines and prison sentences were imposed upon those who did not attend Church of England services. The Pilgrim chronicler William Bradford explains:
But after these things they could no longer continue in any peaceable condition, but were hunted and persecuted on every side, so as their former afflictions were but as flea-bites in comparison of these which now came upon them. For some were taken and clapt up in prison, others had their houses beset and watcht night and day, and hardly escaped their hands; and the most were faine to flie and leave their howses and habitations, and the means of their livelehood.
A hard-knock life indeed for the predecessors of the Pilgrims, and when those fines and sentences began to mount, and circumstances became completely unbearable, they did what most would do in their position: they skipped town. And like any Englishman of that era, they took their fondness for taverns and thirst for English beer with them. After all, they did quite literally drink the stuff like water.
The pickings were slim in old Europe when it came to finding a new home—especially after a sojourn in Holland didn’t work out. But across the Atlantic, there were two entire continents to choose from. Guiana was proposed as a possible destination, but its climate was ultimately deemed too foreign, too hot. Virginia was another option, but that seemed a little too close for comfort to the king—the young colony was still governed by English law. The obvious solution? Found a colony of their very own. It took some finagling, and no small amount of intervention from well-connected friends, but land patents were secured and a plan was made: the Pilgrims would found a new plantation north of the nascent colony of Virginia, to be called New England.
On September 16, 1620, the Mayflower set sail, with just over one hundred passengers, and a hold laden with small beer—the low-alcohol brew preferred by Englishmen. Given the preservative properties of the hops, beer on voyages was far superior to water, which, if it wasn’t polluted to begin with, often turned brackish. But even with a considerable beer supply, there were still problems. Strong storms halfway through the trip not only blew them off course and sent them farther north than intended, they also damaged the ship and slowed her progress, leaving the passengers low on rations and vulnerable to illness. When the Mayflower at last limped into Plymouth Harbor, the passengers and the crew were desperate for food and beer. As William Bradford recounted, lack of beer was one of the key reasons the Pilgrims decided to drop anchor:
So in the morning, after we had called on God for direction, we came to this resolution—to go presently ashore again and to take a better view of two places which we thought most fitting for us; for we could not now take much time for further search or consideration, our victuals being much spent, especially our beer, and it now being the nineteenth of December.
Indeed, the beer shortage was a source of stress for all aboard the Mayflower. Tensions had escalated considerably between the passengers and the crew because of it. The captain, a man named Christopher Jones, was concerned he would not have enough for his men on the voyage back. Eager to get rid of the beer-glugging Pilgrims, he had no qualms about giving them the boot. “When this calamity fell among the passengers who were to be left here to settle,” Bradford writes, “they were hurried ashore and made to drink water, so that the sailors might have more beer and when one sufferer in his sickness desired but a small can of beer, it was answered that if he were their own father he should have none.” But the captain’s selfish attempt to save his own hide proved ill-conceived. When the same sickness that had enfeebled the malnourished Pilgrims spread to him and his men, he realized they would not be able to make the voyage back to England until they were fully recovered and restocked. Understanding at last that they were quite literally all in the same boat, he had a change of heart. He became “somewhat struck,” and “sent to the sick ashore and told the Governor that he could send for beer for those who had need of it, even should he have to drink water on the homeward voyage.” Needless to say, it was probably not the most upbeat beer run in the history of New England, but those few extra calories from Captain Jones’s private beer stash very likely saved the day. It was beer that dropped the Pilgrims in Plymouth, and beer, as it turns out, that allowed them to persevere.
The remaining stock of Mayflower beer didn’t last long, and although a brewhouse was among the Pilgrims’ very first projects, one can only surmise, based on the raw desperation of those first few years, that little if any beer was made. Only half of the original colonists survived that first trying New England winter, and it was only thanks to a little help from the region’s Native Americans that anyone survived it at all. The English grains the Pilgrims attempted to plant failed miserably; the meager six acres of barley, from which English beer had traditionally been made, was only “indifferent good,” and the peas “not worth gathering.” Corn, however, introduced to the Pilgrims by a sympathetic Wampanoag known to history as Squanto, did grow, and it was because of this New World grain that the Plymouth Colony was able to persevere. And while corn can indeed be made into beer, and certainly was by many indigenous peoples of North and South America, Pilgrim testimonies from the early years of the Plymouth Colony make it clear water had temporarily replaced beer as the everyday drink:
For the Countrey it is as well watered as any land under the Sunne, ever family, or every two families having a spring of sweet waters betwixt them, which is farre different from the waters of England, being not so sharpe, but of a fatter substance, and of a more jetty colour; it is thought there can be no better water in the world, yet dare I not preferred it before good Beere, as some have done, but any man will choose it before bad Beere, Wheay, or Buttermilke. Those that drinke it be as healthful, fresh, and lustie, as they that drinke beere.
As good Englishmen, the Pilgrims may have suffered an initial shock at having to drink water instead of beer, but they were also quick to adapt. Fortunately for them, beer was coming soon. By the late 1620s, the Pilgrim fathers had finally figured out how to grow barley in New England; the fast-ripening grain does best when planted in cool ground just above freezing, and given the harshness of Massachusetts winters and heat of its summers, farmers surely adjusted their traditional English planting schedule to suit the severity of the new climate. In 1628, to complement the increase in grain production, the first shipload of cultivated hops arrived in Massachusetts via the Endicott Fleet.
Fast on the heels of those early Puritan trailblazers, a fresh wave of better-prepared and better-provisioned immigrants was on its way from the townships of East Anglia, with plenty of malt and hops stowed away for the ride. In what would come to be known as the Great Migration, some twenty thousand Puritans left their cities and towns in southeastern England for the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies between 1620 and 1640, bringing their predilection for beer with them. In 1630, the ship Arbella pulled into Boston Harbor with 10,000 gallons of beer and 120 hogsheads of malt. Just two years after that, under the governorship of John Winthrop, the Massachusetts Bay Colony was already malting its own grains on an industrial scale to supplement imports, and by 1634, Samuel Cole had established “Cole’s Inn,” a licensed tavern that served beer and very likely brewed it as well, directly across from Governor Winthrop’s house. It’s a safe bet the good governor was not above stopping in for a pint. Stronger wine and distilled spirits may have been looked upon with a Puritan’s grim suspicion, but their beer—dark and cloudy due to its fire-roasted malts and top-fermenting yeast, oaky and tart thanks to time spent in the cask—was regarded in New England, just as it had been in Old England, as something both delicious and indispensable, a necessity and a joy.
When the Winthrop Fleet came to New England in 1630, it didn’t just bring hundreds of eager Puritans fleeing religious prosecution—it brought enough malt and barley to get the taps flowing again.
Not only did the drinking trends of southeastern England make the trip across the water, older traditions were born anew, in a society whose uncultivated hinterland and immature cities resembled more closely the English countryside of the Middle Ages than seventeenth-century London. As such, it may come as no surprise that some familiar friends made a comeback—one of whom was the alewife. Women by necessity once again took up brewing, and the art became, at least in rural areas, a quotidian domestic activity. The most famous New England alewife was Sister Bradish, who in the late seventeenth century was supplementing her baking income—just as provincial Englishwomen had done three centuries before—by brewing and selling her own beer. New England’s own native son Increase Mather would write of her: “Such is her art, way, and skill that shee doth vend such comfortable penniworths [of beer] for the relief of all that send unto her as elsewhere they can seldom meet with.” This was in Cambridge, mind you, evidence that even right outside of an urban center like Boston, it was still challenging to find a decent commercially produced beer.
The Pilgrims also returned to the Old English habit of using flavoring agents and ingredients other than hops and barley. This wasn’t a matter of preference, but once again, a question of necessity—hops shortages were common in seventeenth-century New England and would continue well into the eighteenth century as well. On occasion, even barley became scarce, or at the very least too scarce to brew with. Accordingly, early New Englanders sought other methods, just as their predecessors had back on the other side of the sea. One option was to use corn—a practice John Winthrop’s own son had tinkered with in Connecticut during the mid-seventeenth century, earning him membership to the Royal Society of London. Oats, wheat, and rye were sometimes incorporated, and when all else failed, the Puritans could rely on some rather unusual ingredients to fill in the gaps. A common verse from the period sums it up rather nicely:
If barley be wanting to make into malt,
We must be content and think it no fault,
For we can make liquor to sweeten our lips,
Of pumpkins, and parsnips, and walnut-tree chips.
Here’s evidence of just how far back those pumpkin-flavored fall microbrews really go. And when there was barley but a lack of hops, spruce was the most common flavoring agent thrown into the mix. Early colonists quickly learned, thanks again to a little Yankee ingenuity, that the fresh shoots of the black or red American spruce could be boiled to an essence and used as a replacement for both Old World cultivated hops and the wild American hops that could be sometimes found growing in the forest. So prominent was the practice of “sprucing” beer, it would become a treasured part of New England folk culture for some time to come. While you’re not likely today to see any “Spruce Light” on tap at your local Southie pub, it was for much of the colonial era one of the most prominent regional beers in America, appearing in cookbooks and brewing manuals well into the 1800s.
As the first scattering of New England settlements transformed into New England cities over the course of the seventeenth century, it was only natural that the most beloved English beer tradition of all would take a firm hold: the tavern. The making and serving of beer became a crucial part of urban professional life, as tradesmen and merchants sought out a place to relax and discuss the issues of the day. Commonly referred to as an “Ordinary,” the New England version of the old English tavern quickly became a fixture of life in the region’s towns and cities. Soon after Samuel Cole opened “Cole’s Inn” in 1634, Fairbanks Tavern broke ground between State and Water Streets in Boston, becoming a crucial gathering place for the community.* Stephen Hopkins and Francis Sprague followed suit with their drinking establishments in nearby Plymouth, and in 1636, a deacon named Thomas Chisholm even opened a tavern attached to his own church in Cambridge—a convenient way, no doubt, to spread the holy “spirit.”
Taverns and inns appeared in Watertown, Salem, Charlestown, and Dorchester and quickly spread beyond the colonies of Massachusetts. We know Rhode Island had laws in effect to restrict tavern operations on Sundays by 1647, by encouraging men to practice with a bow and arrow rather than drink, with the former deemed “both man-like and profitable.” In 1644, Connecticut towns were required to have at least one tavern, and in 1667, Maine received its first tavern in the form of a boozy ferry terminal in Kennebunkport. Back in Boston, by the late seventeenth century, the drinking scene had exploded, turning it into the tavern capital of New England. In 1673, Boston could claim twenty licensed taverns; four years later, that number had climbed to nearly thirty, and by the 1680s, there were dozens.* Men generally sat at benches after being served from behind a barred dispensary, and it was customary for newcomers to announce their name, profession, and hometown upon entering the establishment—an old New England habit that Benjamin Franklin would keep alive, even down in Philly, well into his old age. Some would serve imported wine and aquavitae (hard liquor), others allowed pipe smoking and the playing of bar games, and a few even doubled as courthouses and debate societies. But the one thing they all had in common was that they all served beer, and in many cases, brewed it themselves right on the premises.
It wasn’t only New England taverns that served up Puritan beer. The old English trade practice of beer rationing at workplaces and institutions lived on in towns and cities across the region. In 1638, a typical ration for a sailing ship’s crew in New England was a quart of beer per day, while a colonial cook by the name of Richard Briggs went so far as to demand workers be served only the finest beer while on the clock, stating that if poor-quality beer was served, “the drinkers of it will be feeble in summer time, incapable of strong work, and will be subject to distempers.” Even more highbrow workplaces practiced a healthy dose of daytime drinking. As an older man, Benjamin Franklin would fondly recall his beerdrinking days down at the printing press as such:
We had an alehouse boy who attended always in the house to supply the workmen. My companion at the press drank everyday a pint before breakfast, a pint at breakfast with his bread and cheese, a pint between breakfast and dinner, a pint at dinner, a pint in the afternoon about six o’clock, and another pint when he had done his day’s work.
You needn’t be an accountant to realize this adds up to quite a few pints over the course of a workday, or an HR rep to see that drinking beer was as much a part of office life in early New England as PowerPoint and Excel charts are today.
And speaking of highbrow establishments, no report on New England beer rationing would be complete without detailing the tumultuous brew history of that small liberal arts school Harvard University. Education was important to Puritans—they saw literacy and theology as crucial components of understanding the Bible—and establishing a place of higher learning was among their first priorities. “New College,” as it was first known, was formed in 1636 by the Massachusetts Bay Colony, with beer playing an important role from the start. According to legend (and some admittedly circumstantial evidence), the institution’s initial benefactor and later namesake, the Puritan minister John Harvard, learned the art of brewing back in England from William Shakespeare himself. The claim may be dubious, but there is no denying the founder of New England’s premier institution of higher learning had beer in his blood; his father Robert Harvard had been a tavern keeper in Southwark, England.
Unfortunately, Harvard the younger died early into his involvement with the fledgling university. The headmaster left in charge, Nathaniel Eaton, did not share John’s deep appreciation for the importance of beer and mismanaged its supply with disastrous results. While the newly named Harvard College could boast North America’s very first printing press by 1638, its students were in open revolt just one year later thanks to severe shortages of their staple drink, complaining that “they often had to go without their beer and bread.” That the university’s first president liked to whip the college’s students and tutors for fun didn’t help either.* Finally, the stingy and mean-tempered Eaton got the boot, and the beer situation improved dramatically. A new president, Henry Dunster, was appointed in 1640, and although a strict man, he made sure both ale and beer were served in the main hall with meals (tobacco, though, he preferred to be used “in private”). Under his leadership, the school constructed its own brewery—Dunster thought it better that students drink beer on campus than stronger wine and spirits at nearby taverns—and by 1667, rules were put in place to ensure the Harvard brewery was producing both small and strong beer for the students to drink. The provisions dictating a healthy ration of beer for all students would stay on the books through most of the eighteenth century, and if word around the finals clubs is to be believed, the drink is still enjoyed by Harvard students to this very day—part of a beer-guzzling New England collegiate tradition dating back almost four centuries.
As one can imagine, so much general beer drinking in New England society naturally caused concern among the Puritan elders—gentlemen who weren’t known for kicking back and letting down their hair. While few would deny that small beer in small quantities was a daily necessity, they did not approve in the least of overindulgence and intoxication.* And with the rise of taverns and workplace drinking, penalties for alcohol abuse were soon to follow. As early as 1637, the Massachusetts General Court was concerned about the amount of time colonists were spending in the “ordinaries,” and demanded nothing stronger was to be sold than weak penny beer. Tavern keepers were also ordered not to sell alcohol after nine o’clock on weekdays and forbidden to serve any customer who shirked his midweek church duties—early blue laws designed to keep order.
Predictably, these laws didn’t do much to curb problem drinking. The very next year in Plymouth, following a fresh batch of intoxication fines, a Mr. William Reynolds was “presented for being drunck at Mr. Hopkins house, that he lay under the table, vomiting in a beastly manner.” He was fortunate and only fined six shillings. His neighbor Mathew Southerland was not so lucky—he had to spend time in the stocks for his binge drinking. Corporal punishment was often implemented to punish piss-drunk Pilgrims, and while a first and second offense usually resulted in a fine, third offenses generally carried with them time in the stocks or whippings. A visiting Dutchman commented on New Englanders: “Whoever drinks himself drunk they tie to a post and whip him, as they do thieves in Holland.” As to what constituted the legal definition of drunkenness, the Puritan version of a roadside sobriety test was as follows: the drunk was he who “either lisps or falters in his speech by reason of much drink, or that staggers in his going, or that vomits by reason of excessive drinking, or cannot follow his calling.” In their efforts to curb tavern drunkenness, Puritan elders tried everything, from outlawing dancing to forbidding smoking; in 1643, they even banned shuffleboard, dragging the games from every tavern that offered it. None of it worked. From the get-go, it seems, New Englanders just liked to drink.
The first few generations of colonists were essentially transplanted middle-class English burghers from East Anglia imbibing in the New World just as they had in the Old. The same hopped beer, the same welcoming taverns, the same daily consumption and rationing as a staple. And in a wider historical context, these early-seventeenth-century Puritans, though at odds with the sanctioned church of their homeland, still thought of themselves fundamentally as English. The process of creating a uniquely American and regional identity would take time, but it did happen; through their interactions with their environment and climate and indigenous neighbors, a fresh idea began to take hold: they were Yankees, the New World progeny of a distant land—a country that faded further each year from living memory. And as we know all too well, friction between the emerging colonial identity and the English Crown was not far behind. The Puritans may have escaped the influence of the king and his church, but they were in no way exempt from English law and economic policy—even when they ceased to consider themselves English, or Puritans, for that matter. As more and more laws were passed back in London that favored the Old Country at the expense of the New, American habits were affected accordingly.
And drinking was no exception. Throughout the 1600s, beer had been the table beverage of all New Englanders, except for those trying first years when they were forced to drink water. But by the beginning of the eighteenth century, this was shifting—not due to changes in taste, but rather economic necessity. Mother England, who had colonies not just in New England, but throughout the Caribbean and the American South as well, needed surplus Yankee grain to feed its sugar and tobacco-producing plantations. New England grain production was highly regulated and taxed as a result. Grain shortages ensued (and subsequent hop shortages as well), and what barley, corn, and wheat was available came at a far steeper price.
So New Englanders began to look elsewhere for a reliable, mildly alcoholic beverage to take with their daily meals. And what did they drink when beer got too pricey? Cider, the fermented juice of the humble apple. Not that beer was no longer consumed—it was, especially in urban areas with easy access to imported malt and foreign brews. But particularly in small towns and on farms, it made little sense to make a drink from valuable grain, when fermentable apples could be had for next to nothing. The fruit trees, first brought to America by the Bostonian preacher William Blaxton in 1625, thrived in the New England soil and climate. It took the rest of that century for them to propagate and spread throughout the region, but by the late 1600s and early 1700s, apple orchards were so plentiful, the fruit was virtually free for the taking—most farms produced more apples than they could sell or consume. The natural solution was to ferment the excess and drink it right up. By the mid-1700s, some New England families were consuming as much as a barrel of cider each week; in the year 1771, Middlesex County, Massachusetts, alone produced 22,780 barrels of the drink. Taking into account the total population was only 14,028, this comes out to a barrel and a half for every man, woman, and child. At the King’s Head Tavern in Boston—owned by James Pitson for most of the first half of the eighteenth century—hundreds of barrels of cider were generally kept on hand, compared to only a few dozen bottles of beer. As the eighteenth century unfolded, cider came to challenge, and in many cases take over, beer’s role as the favored table drink of New England. Even a die-hard patriot like John Adams loved cider—he drank a tankard of it every morning before breakfast.
New England beer also found a colonial rival in the form of rum. With the explosive growth of Caribbean sugar production in the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries—much of it on islands owned by the British—there was suddenly a glut of inexpensive molasses. And the British, who were never lacking when it came to exploiting their colonies for financial gain, realized almost immediately that the New England colonies were the perfect place to dump it. New England’s first rum distillery appeared in 1648; by 1717, there were twenty-seven of them in Boston alone, and a decade later, that number had increased to forty. By the 1770s, the English colonies in America had some 140 molasses distilleries, making more than five million gallons of rum on their own, to augment another four million gallons being imported from the Caribbean. Whereas the Massachusetts Bay Colony had fined colonists for daring to brew with cheaper molasses in 1667, by the mid-1700s, spirits and brews made from molasses had become standard fare across New England.
Sam Adams wasn’t just a patriot and founding father—he came from a long family tradition of farming and malting barley for the beer industry.
Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
British mercantilist policies may have turned the region into a colony of cider freaks and rummies, but that doesn’t mean everyone was content with the status quo. Not one bit, as a matter of fact. As early as 1711—more than sixty years before the Boston Tea Party—Bostonians were rioting down by the harbor during a barley and wheat shortage and preventing the appropriately named merchant Andrew Belcher from sending off a shipload of the precious grain. The price of both bread and beer had inflated to unsustainable levels thanks to the hoarding of New England merchants like Belcher, who made a fortune selling local grain to British interests in the Caribbean, and the good people of Boston replied in kind by sawing off his rudder and raiding his warehouses. At Yale College over in New Haven, students were already eschewing British-controlled rum by 1764, insisting that “all gentlemen of taste who visit the College will think themselves better entertained with a glass of good beer.” And over the decade that followed, those first rumblings of discontent were fermenting into a genuine notion that perhaps New Englanders—indeed, Americans—would be better off severing ties with old King George completely. In 1765, the Boston Gazette published the following screed against British policies that prevented Americans from becoming self-reliant:
Taverns like the Green Dragon provided a safe haven for patriots, a place where they could trade rounds and ideas for besting the British. These establishments were direct descendants of the alehouses of East Anglia, where the first Puritans had also gathered to voice their dislike of the English Crown.
Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
A colonist cannot make a button, a horseshoe, nor a hobnail, but some snooty ironmonger or respectable button-maker of England shall bawl and squall that his honor’s worship is most egregiously maltreated, injured, cheated, and robbed by the rascally American republicans.
That same year, a group calling itself “the Sons of Liberty” began orchestrating effigy burnings and acts of vandalism to protest the passing of the unpopular Stamp Act and decry publicly the injustices of taxation without representation. A booze importer and beer lover by the name of John Hancock had no qualms voicing his disdain when the British confiscated his sloop Liberty in 1768 and charged him with smuggling for failing to pay duties. He was fed up with the high taxes and heavy-handed trade policies of Mother England, as were a growing number of his compatriots. This wasn’t just about taxes on booze; it was the beginning of a national call to arms. Following the Boston Massacre of 1770 and the Tea Act of 1773, the call became all the more pressing. When it came to planning the first stages of an open rebellion, however, there was only one place where a gathering of disgruntled colonials wouldn’t arouse undue suspicion: the local tavern. Clandestine meetings were held in establishments like Boston’s storied Green Dragon—ones not so very different from the secret gatherings rebellious Puritans once held in the taverns of East Anglia.
Hancock’s colonial associates rallied to his cause. Among them was the barley farmer, hereditary maltster, and latter-day namesake for one of New England’s most well-known brews, none other than Mr. Samuel Adams himself—the very man whose face (or at least some artist’s rendering of such) is staring at me proudly from the bottle of Boston Lager I just pulled from the fridge. As to whether or not he was actually much of a brewer is a matter of long-standing debate, but there’s no denying that he and his drinking buddies helped start a revolution.