THESE DAYS, YOU CAN FIND A GREAT MANY THINGS AT THE Old Absinthe House bar on Bourbon Street. There’s the plethora of Louisiana football helmets, collecting dust and hanging from strings. There are the vintage signs advertising their signature old-time cocktails, like the absinthe frappe and the mint julep, testaments to the city’s tangy blend of French and American pedigrees. There are the history lessons inherent in a place that’s been around for two centuries and has seen everyone from Andrew Jackson and Robert E. Lee, to Mark Twain and Oscar Wilde get liquored up upon its stools. And yes, finally, there’s even the absinthe, legal again after a hundred years, served beside the original marble absinthe fountain.
One thing you will not find, however, is Dixie beer—I know, I just asked. The bartender frowned and pointed instead to the small selection of mildly appealing micro- and macrobrews available on tap. It is a puzzling lacuna, given it’s one of the South’s few historic regional beers—a brewer by the name of Valentine Merz brought Dixie to the Crescent City way back in 1907. This part of the country has traditionally been more of an importer of beer than a producer, but Dixie is a notable exception. New Orleans’s unique position at the very end of the Mississippi has always provided the southern port city with a steady influx of northern grain and European immigrants—two catalysts that always seem to give beer a boost. To visit the birthplace of one of the South’s oldest and most storied local beers without sampling a bottle or two feels negligent at best. In fact, finally getting to try a Dixie was one of my primary reasons for hitting the French Quarter tonight—it’s even mentioned in A Confederacy of Dunces; how could I not? When it comes to learning firsthand about the history of brewing in the region, Dixie is as close to a Holy Grail as you’re going to get, which is why its absence is all the more galling. But as the saying goes, when life gives you lemons, have an absinthe instead. I forsake my “research” for a few moments and order one up, something so many writers and raconteurs did here so long ago. Yes, the establishment has taken on a bit of a sports-bar patina over the years, and indeed, you are more likely to see tourists from the Midwest than besotted southern writers. But if you squint your eyes and roll the wormwood-flavored spirit upon your tongue, you can almost imagine how the place must once have been . . . or if you’re lucky, hallucinate it as such. For better or worse, no visions come, and the friendly tourists from St. Louis and the dangling football helmets maintain their real, albeit familiar charm.
My next stop is the famous Napoleon House, a place where, according to legend, the little Corsican himself was once offered refuge during exile. The beleaguered general never made it over, but the establishment does boast a fine collection of paintings and busts in tribute to the man, and to southern hospitality. Classical music wafts from the dining room, and a mustachioed bartender asks what I’d like. After a quick glance, I notice that both Dixie and Dixie Jazz are on the menu. But the bartender confirms my worst fears: the New Orleans beer is not available this night. So I take their legendary Sazerac cocktail instead, made from northern rye whiskey with a dash of bitters, and follow that up with—and I’m embarrassed to admit it, but such things happen—a hurricane. Essentially fruit punch, mixed with a healthy portion of Caribbean rum, it’s perhaps not the smartest choice for a writer pursuing research, but then again, New Orleans has never been known to foster good decision making.
The Old Absinthe House has been getting the good people of New Orleans liquored up for more than two centuries. The abundance of Caribbean rum, northern rye whiskey, and French absinthe is a legacy of a southern plantation economy in which most manufactured goods had to be imported—alcohol included.
At last taken by the spirt of New Orleans, and ready to let the bon temps rouler, I make my way to Frenchmen Street. Just off Esplanade, the strip is somewhat removed from the gaudy allures of Bourbon Street, but no less lively. Jazz and blues, the rich legacy of nearly four centuries of African American culture in the South, seeps from every entry-way, and the streets are teeming with people drinking—yes, drinking—on the street, something you seldom see outside the Big Easy. The music sounds especially good coming from the bar d.b.a., and I poke my head inside, hoping they might actually have some Dixie on tap. And while the beer list here is a bit more promising, and includes such local delights as NOLA Blond, Abita Amber, and the decidedly Cajun-sounding Bayou Teche Miel Sauvage, alas, there is no Dixie. The beer that made New Orleans famous is apparently not so easy to find. The Abita, however, is quite pleasing on the palate, especially when served alongside a heaping helping of Delta Blues. I finish my first and treat myself to a second, which I pour into a to-go cup and proudly carry right back onto the street. What a town.
I’ve all but given up on finding my elusive Dixie, when I pass beneath the flashing neon sign of the Voodoo Mart liquor store. I hesitate, but decide it’s worth a shot. I push my way through the dangling beads and desiccated alligator heads, toward the coolers way in the back. I peruse the beer offerings without much luck and consider calling it a night, when a green bottle catches my eye. There it is: Dixie beer. True, it’s not terribly different from most of the other established pale lagers one finds in America, and there probably are a host of other more celebrated local beers to choose from. But none of them have the history of Dixie. A Louisiana staple for more than a hundred years, it’s a rarity in a part of the country where locally based beers didn’t really catch on until the craft brewing revival of the late twentieth century. And it’s a survivor. Today Dixie isn’t being made in Louisiana; it’s contract brewed by a company in Wisconsin, although there is a growing movement to bring it back to New Orleans. Its reasons for relocating may be related directly to Hurricane Katrina—when the levees broke, it flooded the Dixie brewery—but it is telling from a historical perspective. While Dixie beer was actually made in the South for a full century, many of the other libations historically enjoyed south of the Mason-Dixon were not. As the French absinthes, northern rye Sazeracs, and Caribbean rum hurricanes I’ve enjoyed this night can attest, alcohol was, for much of the South’s history, an imported product. Most manufactured goods, as a matter of fact, were imported products, in a society where plantation economics valued the exportation of a single crop above all else. It was a system kick-started way back in Jamestown, when Virginia’s first settlers realized two things: barley didn’t do too well in the southern heat, and tobacco did.
Nevertheless, there was brewing, with local styles defined primarily by innovative techniques specifically tailored for a warmer climate. The South can claim a brewing history all its own, beginning as early as the 1500s, when the first English explorers in the Tidewater discovered a strange new Indian grain could not only handle the warm southern climate—it could be malted and made into beer as well.
Corn.
Indeed, one could argue that American beer was born in the South, from the trial and error of those early English brewers who settled beside the Chesapeake. Their maize-based beverages never completely caught on, nor did commercial brewing in general (with the exception of a few well-positioned brands like Dixie, of course). But it wouldn’t take long for a fresh batch of immigrants from backgrounds both Scottish and Irish to figure out perishable corn beer could be distilled quite easily into a corn whiskey that only improved with age. And there certainly was a market for that. The discovery would steer the course of American drinking habits for much of the nineteenth century, and bring the massive northern beer industry to a standstill. This revelation had led me back to Bourbon Street this very night, for a shot of its namesake whiskey to finish the evening.
In a region where local beer has historically been scarce, Dixie is a proud exception—although damage from Hurricane Katrina forced the label to leave the Crescent City.
As soon as I finish this Dixie, that is.
To say the United States of America—and American beer, for that matter—has its origins in the South would be spot-on. Calling those first southern colonial ventures a success, however, would be stretching the truth. They were a disaster—at least at the beginning. And colonies and breweries were hobbled by many of the same problems: harsh climates, unfamiliar environs, and indigenous peoples not terribly inclined to bow before an unfamiliar king.
Men in Louisiana unload a truck filled with Jax beer, another one of the few southern labels. The beer was brewed in Jacksonville, Florida, from 1913 until 1956.
Courtesy of Library of Congress
England’s awkward entrée into New World colonialism began in the fifteenth century with John Cabot, a.k.a. Giovanni Caboto. Although Italian by birth, the mariner had made a home for himself in the seaports of Britain and was just as consumed as Christopher Columbus with finding a westward passage to the rich trading ports of Asia. Of course, Columbus found nothing of the kind, but rather an entirely new set of continents. Cabot was no doubt enraged when his paisan beat him to the punch in 1492, but he was also intrigued, and petitioned King Henry VII for permission to set out and claim at least some of those new lands, for England. King Henry encouraged would-be explorers to do the following:
Upon their own proper costs and charges to seek out, discover, and find whatsoever isles, countries, regions, or provinces of the heathen and infidels, whatsoever they be, and in what part of the world soever they be, which before this time have been unknown to Christians.
Politically correct, the fifteenth century was not, but ambitious, it was. Briefly, it looked as if England might catch up to its rival Spain in establishing a New World colony. In the summer of 1497, just five years after Columbus’s first voyage, Cabot set out with a small crew from the port of Bristol and made the Atlantic crossing, with a ship almost certainly laden with ale and beer to nourish them on their voyage. In the weeks that followed, Cabot and his crew would nose their little caravel ship around the coast of what was most likely Newfoundland, taking note of the promising lands and fish-rich seas, but not bothering to advance on shore “beyond the shooting distance of a crossbow.” Cabot returned to England after several weeks of scouting out the North American shoreline, to general fanfare and celebration—until an uprising in the Celtic lands of Cornwall distracted the king, delaying a second trip. When that second armada finally was put together to claim new lands for England the following year . . . well, nobody knows exactly what happened to it, although most historians assume it was lost at sea.
And so, while the sixteenth century saw Spain conquering the Caribbean and moving its attention to Mexico and South America, while Portugal was finding out just how big Brazil really was, and while the French were planting flags all across Quebec, England pretty much sat on its ass. Not that it didn’t have plenty to occupy itself with back home; conflicts with the Catholic Church, political strife, and uprisings in its Celtic colonies kept the Crown busy. Keeping its own house in order was enough trouble—the idea of expanding the empire across a sea was a pipe dream at best.
At least, that is, until mind-boggling riches began pouring in from the colonies of its European rivals. Silver and gold came back by the shipload from Spanish territories in Central and South America; tobacco and sugar flooded the European market from the Caribbean isles. By the late sixteenth century, England was finally catching on to the fiscal necessity of New World settlement. It wasn’t just about expanding boundaries—it was crucial to keeping up with its national competitors. Suddenly, England wanted in on the game. The Crown’s first colonies would be in Virginia, yet from the beginning, they would be financial ventures, aimed at duplicating the influx of riches that its European contenders had been enjoying for almost a century.
The English inspiration for New World colonization may have come from Spain, but their model of colonization was much closer to home. Just as Spain had honed its somewhat harsh colonial skills during the Reconquista and in the subjugation of the Canary Islands prior to turning its attention to the Aztecs or the Incas, the English had learned a thing or two about claiming lands and displacing native peoples in its own conquest of Ireland. In terms of strategy and logistics, their initial attempt at colonizing the New World would capitalize on the lessons of that earlier invasion, alloting “plantations” in the Tidewater as they previously had in Ireland. The first batch of Virginia planters was drawn from very much the same class of landed aristocrats who were granted estates in Ireland, after the Flight of the Earls drained the Emerald Isle of its Gaelic aristocracy. The same colonial policies that England had refined in its subjugation of Ireland would be adapted and applied to coastal Virginia.
Assuming, of course, they could get a settlement and a brewery going, both of which were crucial for a sustained English presence, and both of which proved exceedingly difficult. When the dashing Sir Walter Raleigh, himself a hero of the wars in Ireland, received permission from the “Virgin Queen” Elizabeth to found a colony in 1584, his initial attempt on Roanoke Island, as any student of American history can tell you, evidently ended in disaster. But it did have one important consequence: it was there that Englishmen brewed what was perhaps the first true European-American beer. Barley, as the English quickly noted, did not fare well in the southern heat—it was a cold-weather crop. Corn, on the other hand, an Indian grain entirely new to them, positively flourished. In a 1587 report aimed at encouraging immigration, an English settler of the Roanoke colony named Thomas Harriot would observe:
The graine is about the bigness of our ordinary English peaze, and not much different in forme and shape: but of divers colours; some white, some red, some yellow, and some blew. All of them yield a very white and sweet flower: being used according to his kinde, it maketh a very good bread. We made of the same in the countrey some Mault, whereof was brewed as good Ale as was to be desired. So likewise by the helpe of Hops, therof may be made as good Beere.
Corn bread and corn beer would have been familiar to many Native American civilizations, but to those first English arrivals in the American South, they were totally novel—and, as they discovered, quite tasty. But that revelation met a serious hurdle. The colony vanished, for reasons historians still can’t agree upon, and southern beer would have to be patient.
The wait wasn’t long, though. Under the auspices of the Virginia Company of London, and with a little help from John Rolfe (not to mention Pocahontas), another colony was established in Jamestown in 1607, and it fared somewhat better. In the years that followed, well-to-do country gentlemen from across southern and western England were given plantations to mind, and lower-class inhabitants of London and its environs were invited to do most of the heavy lifting as indentured servants. And just as in Roanoke, colonists were eager to find a sustainable drink, with “wine being too dear, and barely changeable and hard to grow.” Importing wine from Europe was astronomically expensive, and English barley withered in the southern sun. Again, corn came to the rescue. George Thorpe, an early overseer at the Berkeley Hundred plantation, was desperately searching for a solution to Virginia’s early liquor woes when he stumbled upon the same solution Thomas Harriot had almost four decades before, writing to a friend back in England:
Wee have found a waie to make soe good drink of Indian corne I hae divers times refused to drinke good stronge English beare and chose to drink that.
But alas, the curse of southern beer would strike again. For it seemed seeking out sources of alcohol wasn’t George Thorpe’s only hobby—he had been charged with founding what amounted to one of the first Indian schools, aimed at assimilating the native Powhatan people and absorbing their lands. Needless to say, the Indians were less enthusiastic about the idea than the English settlers, and in 1622, George Thorpe was killed in an uprising of the Powhatans, a people who were amenable to sharing their grains with the new colonists, but far less willing to forfeit their sacred way of life.
There was another plant besides corn that fared well in Virginia: tobacco. John Rolfe had smuggled a few seeds of the sweeter Caribbean variety up from Trinidad, and with that first crop of Nicotiana tabacum planted in 1611, the course of the South was officially set. With the old “plantation” system of agrarian allotment already in place in the new colony, it wasn’t a terribly great stretch to adapt it slightly to the production of tobacco. The chance at a gentlemanly fortune attracted the adventurous sons of aristocratic families from across the southern English countryside to try their luck as Virginia planters. Some were unable to inherit lands back home for reasons of primogeniture; others were from families who had fought on the wrong side of the English Civil War. All saw a plantation in the New World as a way to get rich.
What began with tobacco in Virginia would spread to other southern colonies as well and come to include sugar, rice, indigo, and eventually the biggest plantation crop of them all, cotton. With the local agrarian economies fully dedicated to the harvesting and exporting of a single and highly profitable crop, there was little impetus to invest money or resources in the manufacture of goods on a large, industrial scale. Beer, while still beloved by southerners, was no exception. Commercial brewing was exceedingly difficult in the early South; neither barley nor hops fared well in the heat, and in an age before refrigeration or commercial shipping, any beer produced would not last long enough for distribution, given the region’s long summers, lack of roads, and widely dispersed plantation settlements. It’s not that the early inhabitants of the southern colonies didn’t want beer—they simply lacked the barley, the hops, and the infrastructure to make it a viable commercial product.
The one group of southerners who did possess the experience and expertise to brew a truly local beer in the southern climate were also the one group generally forbidden to do so. As early as 1619, Jamestown was already using forced African labor; by the middle of the seventeenth century, slavery had become institutionalized and legally recognized in Virginia, replacing indentured servitude as the primary source of plantation labor, and spreading beyond to the colonies of Maryland and Carolina. It would exist in New England and New York as well, but the plantation system that encouraged the slave trade never took root there, and while the institution declined in the North, it became a mainstay of the emerging southern economy. During the colonial period, some six hundred thousand enslaved Africans would endure the horrors of the Middle Passage and be taken against their will to America.
With the discovery that tobacco could be grown on plantations in colonial Virginia, the South’s economic course was set for the next two centuries. Here, barrels are loaded with tobacco leaves to be shipped to foreign ports. Money gained from the sale of plantation crops could be used to buy imported products, beer and other libations among them.
Courtesy of Library of Congress
The first African Americans brought few if any material possessions, but culturally, they came to America with their own distinct traditions in language, religion, music, food,* and yes, brewing. Africans from a wide range of ethnicities and cultural backgrounds had been brewing and fermenting alcoholic drinks with ingredients other than barley for thousands of years. Both biblical and archaeological evidence supports the existence of brewed beverages made from emmer wheat in Egypt and Ethiopia. A Portuguese explorer from the sixteenth century noted the abundance of fermented honey mead in West Africa; in the Congo and in Angola, a palm wine was preferred, and across sub-Saharan Africa, beers brewed from sorghum,† millet, and even plantains were enjoyed, as they still are to this day. Pombe, tembo dolo, burukutu, tchakpalo—all are produced in warmer climates where European barley simply does not thrive, and all have roots that stretch back well before the arrival of European-style brewing.
One can imagine how the South might have developed a host of local, African-inspired sorghum beers and palm wines to call its own, as an alternative to the barley-based concoctions preferred in the cooler North. After all, it had been African slaves in the Caribbean who had first discovered and shown Europeans how sugar cane molasses could be distilled into spirituous rum. It’s quite likely that under more permissive circumstances, various forms of African beer could have been adopted in the American South as well. In addition to the many basic freedoms they were deprived of, though, slaves were also generally forbidden to make or consume alcohol. Masters usually frowned on the practice, and many states actually banned it.
With fines and possible prison time on the line, slaves were rarely involved with alcohol consumption or production. There are some exceptions, though. George Washington was known to employ slaves in distilling and probably brewing as well at his Mount Vernon plantation in the late 1700s. Documents indicate the Baumgardner Distillery of Augusta County, Virginia, owned and hired slave brewers and distillers just a few decades later. And across the South, Christmas was an occasion when many plantations permitted drinking and brewing among the slave population. Subsequently, enslaved Americans of African descent created their own resourceful methods for providing a festive holiday beverage when commercially produced alcohol was not provided for them—which, on special occasions, it sometimes was. Persimmons grew wild in the forests that bordered many farms and plantations, and when occasion allowed, they were used as a brewing ingredient.* West Turner, a former slave from Louisiana, recalls such resourcefulness:
The continent of Africa has rich brewing traditions all its own, often incorporating grains other than barley. In this illustration, pombe is being brewed using ground millet. In the American South, however, enslaved Africans were generally prohibited from brewing—although there were rare occasions when their unique skills could be put into practice.
Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
We made persimmon beer, too. Just stuck our persimmons in a keg with two or three gallons of water and sweet potato peelings and some hunks of corn bread and left it there until it began to work.
Similar recipes come from Mississippi, Georgia, Maryland, and Arkansas, giving some evidence that the practice of making homemade persimmon beer was relatively widespread throughout the South, and generally involved a similar recipe of corn, sweet potato peelings, and persimmons. The seeds of the locust plant could also be brewed into a beer, and according to many accounts, the beverage was nearly as popular as persimmon beer for special occasions. Charlie Hudson, who had once been a slave in Georgia, would recall:
Christmas we went from house to house looking for locust and persimmon beer. Children went to all the houses hunting gingerbread. Ma used to roll it thin, cut it out with a thimble, and give a dozen of them little balls to each child. Persimmon beer and gingerbread! What big times we did have at Christmas.
So, although heavily restricted, small-scale brewing did occur in antebellum African American communities. Relying on local southern ingredients and African traditions of non-barley-based brewing that stretched back hundreds if not thousands of years, they were able to provide, even under exceptionally difficult circumstances, their own unique regional beer to help celebrate the holidays.
The more privileged segments of southern society, meanwhile, failed to achieve quite the same success of their northern counterparts in brewing. Nevertheless, they did have options when it came to drinking. Some simply found alternatives to local beer. Those with enough money enjoyed imported Madeira wine, a fortified alcoholic product that could not only survive the warm summers—it actually improved under warm conditions. A prominent feature of colonial plantation homes was the presence of a Madeira loft in the attic, a place where the casks could ripen in the rising heat. Virginia dram, a brandy made from the peaches introduced to the region in the seventeenth century, was also a popular drink of the colonial era in the South. And of course there was rum, enjoyed in Virginia, the Carolinas, Maryland, and Georgia, just as it was in the English colonies to the north. Either shipped in directly from the Caribbean, or from the rum-producing distilleries of New England, it proved to be the common southern spirit of the colonial era as well.
Imported Madeira and rum may have filled the gap when it came to wetting southern whistles in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but one mustn’t forget that the plantation culture of the lowland South was fundamentally English in origin, with many of the most prominent families hailing from either rural aristocratic estates or wealthy clans of London merchants. And while their plantation society was formed under a fundamentally different economic and cultural model than the staunchly middle-class Puritans in New England, they shared more with their northern cousins than an inability to pronounce R’s. The English predilection for beer very much persisted—the conundrum was how best to get it.
Unlike New England and New Netherland, where drinking often centered around the trade guilds and taverns that dominated town and city life, much of the drinking and entertaining in the plantation South was conducted in the home—farms were widely dispersed, and urban centers few and far between. For that reason, the home brewing of low-alcohol “small” beer became a common practice, just as it had been in rural English estates for centuries. The following recipe penned by George Washington, both founding father and true Virginia aristocrat, gives some idea of what a typical home brew on a southern plantation would have consisted of in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries:
Take a large Sifter of Bran Hops to your Taste—Boil these 3 hours. Then strain out 30 Gallons into a Cooler, put in 3 Gallons Molasses while the Beer is scalding hot or rather drain the molasses into the Cooler & strain the Beer on it while boiling Hot. Let this stand till it is little more than Blood warm. Then put in a quart of Yeast if the weather is very cold, cover it over with a Blanket & let it work in the Cooler 24 Hours. Then put it into the Cask—leave the Bung open till it is almost done Working—Bottle it that day Week it was brewed.
Worth noting here is the primary ingredient: molasses. With limited barley malt to add into the mix, southerners found other fermentable sugars with which to brew, allowing the rural English practice of domestic brewing to persist in the colonial American South, albeit with slightly altered ingredients.* Evidently, such impromptu southern beers, be they made with molasses, as the gentry seemed to prefer, or persimmons, which slaves and others without access to processed sugars used when they were able, could actually turn out quite good—even by finicky British standards. A molasses small beer was surely a rich and sweet accompaniment to a colonial meal, perhaps even akin to a weak stout, and a persimmon beer made from wild yeast, one can only imagine, was almost certainly a tart and refreshing treat—the fruity southern lambic of its day. An Englishman passing through Maryland in the early 1700s made the following observation of the local beer:
The beer they brew is excellent, which they make in great Quantities, of Parsimons, &c., of Molasses; for few of them are Come to malting their corn, of any kind, at which I was much surprised; as even the Indian Grain, as I have found experimentally, will produce an wholesome and generous Liquor.
As this traveler astutely notes, local grain supplies were not generally malted or used in brewing—whatever grain was cultivated would have been used for cooking in the Big House, or given out to feed field hands and livestock. In most cases, improvised small beers made from available ingredients formed the closest thing to a true locally made southern brew, and even those types of beverages were seldom brewed on a commercial scale, but rather made in the kitchens of southern plantations, to be consumed domestically by the family and its guests, and on special occasions, by the slaves who toiled long hours in the neighboring fields.
But does that mean no good, strong beer was available in the early colonial South? Hardly. For just as the exportation of plantation crops brought tobacco to England, so did the establishment of transatlantic trade routes bring English beer to the southern colonies, through most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Thanks to that imported beer, early southerners were able to keep alive the drinking traditions of the homeland.
With the addition of new southern colonies, the market for malty imports only grew. When Georgia was established in 1733, its landed elite drew from the same class as Virginia and the Carolinas to the north. Under the leadership of a south English aristocrat named James Edward Oglethorpe, whose family hailed from the ancestral estate in the Surrey town of Godalming, the colony received its official charter. One marked difference, though—Oglethorpe initially banned slavery in the infant colony, and along with it, large plantation estates. Something of an idealist, Oglethorpe envisioned a settlement where men of all classes and creeds owned and worked their own land. Oglethorpe was also an early temperance advocate and prohibited strong spirits in the colony. Again, English beer wasn’t the only import—rum, from both the Caribbean and the distilleries of New England, was beginning to flood the southern market. In typical English fashion, however, Oglethorpe saw beer not as an intoxicant, but a necessity for daily life. Oglethorpe even went so far as to distribute beer rations to thirsty colonists, first issued upon their arrival and continued so long as they remained residents of Georgia. Eventually, the alcohol options for early Georgians reflected what was available through much of the southern colonies, rum excepted: “Strong-beer from England, Melasses for brewing [small] Beer, and Madeira Wines, which the People might purchase at reasonable Rates.”
Given the dearth of other options, early Georgians did attempt to brew some “strong” beer of their own, to augment local molasses small beers and imported English beer. Major William Horton, who oversaw Jekyll Island in the 1740s, was among the very first English settlers in Georgia to try brewing on a larger scale. In 1746, a visitor to his farm took note of “a very Large Barnfull of Barley not inferior to ye Barley in England,” among other seemingly flourishing crops. Just one year later, Horton ordered a “Great Copper” pot, ostensibly to begin turning some of that barley into drinkable beer. But his dream of a commercial Georgian brewery was not to be. Whatever barley that visitor took note of appeared to be either a fluke, or surreptitiously imported—by 1748, he would admit defeat, writing that his holdings on Jekyll Island were “totally unfit for cultivation,” and his brewery was scrapped. Ultimately, Major Horton ran into the same problem as his southern brewing predecessors: the barley he needed to make English-style beer simply did not thrive in the local climate, and the basic economics of plantation agriculture didn’t lend themselves to the development of local industry. Sadly, within a year, William Horton succumbed to what was very likely malaria, “to the universal sorrow of all his acquaintances.” Alas, yet again, a noble attempt at a commercial southern beer ended in an unfortunate disaster. Had things turned out different, perhaps Georgians, even coastal southerners as a whole, would be sipping on cold bottles of Horton’s Jekyll Island Ale to this very day—but that was not the case. By 1751, a group of immigrants from Salzburg, attracted initially to Georgia by its reputation as a land of freedom and opportunity, were disappointed to learn the following:
At this time . . . [A] brewer is not needed for as yet too little barley is grown; and the inhabitants who have the ability to cook a healthy beer for themselves out of syrup [molasses], Indian corn and hops, or the tops of the white and water firs, which is very cheap. Strong barley beer comes from New York, at times also from England. A quart of which is worth 4d. It is cheaper by the barrel. In these lands little beer is drunk.
James Oglethorpe’s vision was not to be—upon losing its charter, Georgia became another royal colony, and as such, another part of an increasingly thirsty and import-dependent South. But as the passage above clearly indicates, southern drinking habits were changing by the mid-eighteenth century. For starters: with the idea of a unique “American” identity congealing, and the revolution that would win it its own nation just a few decades away, southerners were finally catching on to the use of native “Indian corn” as an ingredient in their local beers, as opposed to simply using Caribbean molasses. And more important, although the strong beer consumed was still being imported at that time, the bulk of it was no longer coming from England, but from New York. Both New York and Philadelphia possessed an entrepreneurial climate favorable to large-scale industry, and a burgeoning commercial beer industry to boot. In a development that no doubt irked British breweries to no end, the two cities by the mid-eighteenth century had a brewing industry that could compete directly with British imports. According to the Virginia Gazette, which reported quite regularly on imports of Philadelphia beer to the southern colony, between April of 1765 and April of 1766, a total of 1,288 barrels of Philly’s passed through its ports. And while individual shipments of only six or seven barrels were commonplace in the 1740s and 1750s, by 1774, with the American colonies on the very cusp of open rebellion, single shipments of thirty barrels were not uncommon. America’s allegiance to a foreign king was wavering, but its thirst was not; by the 1760s and 1770s, many Americans began to voice the idea that they deserved their own country, and more than a few Americans had given up English beer in favor of something a little more domestic.
Included among them was the original founding father himself, George Washington. Like many southern aristocrats, George had a predilection for foreign Madeira wine and imported porters. When tensions finally escalated into all-out war with the British, though, the patriotic southern officer ceased ordering his porter from England and became the enthusiastic customer of a Philadelphia brewer named Robert Hare—a practice he would continue well after the war was won. Following an especially festive Fourth of July parade in the city in 1788, Washington would write the following to a local friend, with a mischievous wink: “I beg you will send me a gross of Mr. Hairs best bottled Porter if the price is not much enhanced by the copious droughts you took of it at the late Procession.” Evidently, he had second thoughts and actually decided to order more of Mr. Hare’s fine Philly porter. Just two weeks later, he would follow up that request with the following:
As the price of Porter according to your Account has not been enhanced and is good in quality, I beg if this letter gets to hand in time, that you would add another gross to the one ordered in my former letter.
If there were any lingering doubts among foreigners as to the prospects of America or its beer, Washington dispelled them quite peremptorily one year later in the following missive to his good war buddy, the Marquis de Lafayette:
We have already been too long subject to British prejudices. I use no porter or cheese in my family, but such as is made in America: both these articles may now be purchased of an exceptional quality.
Like his revolutionary brother Benjamin Franklin, Washington espoused the idea of severing the bonds of foreign dependency when it came to alcohol and replacing it instead with a tall glass of self-reliance, by drinking beer that was American, if not southern. Even a man as tenacious as Washington ran into the same hurdles as the many would-be southern brewers before him. In the year 1787, while George was no doubt savoring Philly porter, his own barley crop at Mount Vernon was a total failure. He would write to Colonel Clement Biddle that “my Barley, this year, shared the same fate with my other crops. The drought during the summer was so excessive that I cannot form any just opinion of what it might produce in a seasonable year.” Whether it was sixteenth-century Roanoke, seventeenth-century Jamestown, or eighteenth-century Mount Vernon, it did not matter: the thirst for beer was there, but the barley to brew it simply was not.
Southerners tried anyway. The “Home brew’d is best” slogan that brewers rallied around in New York and Philadelphia was eagerly adopted by some southerners as well, who, with English imports dwindling, were willing to try their hand at brewing. The advertisements posted in Virginia publications of that period certainly indicate a market for those with skills in brewing, as well as the equipment with which to do it. According to the Virginia Gazette, a man named John Mercer was offering to fill bottles sent to his brewery in Marlborough “with beer and porter at 6s. or with ale at 4s.” The partners Joseph Jones and William Woodford collaborated on a sizable brewery in Fredericksburg in 1771, consisting of a “Brewhouse, Malthouse, Counting-House, Cooper’s Shop, &c. all new, and in good Order for carrying on the Brewing Business.” Unfortunately, simply having the proper equipment to brew was not the same thing as running a successful brewery. Just three years later, their failed Fredericksburg brewery was for sale, and although the exact outcome of John Mercer’s brewery is not recorded, it seems to have met a similar fate. Making commercially viable beer in the South was difficult at best; competing with the huge breweries of Philadelphia and New York was all but impossible.
Competing when it came to beer, anyway. The eighteenth century saw at first a trickle, and then a deluge of immigrants hailing from lands where beer was not simply brewed—it was distilled. And while southern beer would never hold a candle to its northern competition, southern whiskey as sketched out above, would drive the American beer industry to the brink of extinction for a sizable part of the nineteenth century. All thanks to a feisty people we’ve come to know as the Scots-Irish.
The notion of “drink” in Scotland and Ireland is practically synonymous with whiskey. In fact, the word whiskey itself derives from uisce beatha, Gaelic for “water of life,” and the origins of whiskey lie in the medieval histories of those two Celtic nations. Long before they were sipping on single malts or pounding the poteen, though, the Celtic and pre-Celtic peoples of both lands were enthusiastic drinkers of beer. In fact, some of the earliest archaeological evidence for beer consumption in Europe comes from northern Scotland. On an excavation of stone circles in the Isle of Arran, pottery with traces of grain and honey were found and dated to 3000 B.C. At Kinloch, on the Isle of Rhum, Neolithic pot shards dated to 2000 B.C. indicated traces of mashed cereal straw, cereal pollens, and meadowsweet—a common ancient beer flavoring. Should any classical scholarship be needed to verify the assumption that these ancient peoples were drinking beer, it comes by way of the Greek explorer Pytheas of Massalia, who wrote of a misty land in the north of the British Isles, close to the “frigid zone,” whose inhabitants relied heavily on a drink made from honey and grain—the occasional tipple to ward off the chill was apparently as much appreciated by Scotland’s early inhabitants as it is today.
Just across the Celtic Sea, beer shared a similar popularity. The enjoyment of brewed drinks in Ireland predates Christianity by centuries, likely even millennia. Pagan Irish mythology makes frequent reference to the drink. The fabled Ulster Cycle is filled with references to beer and mead halls, much like the Germanic mythology of England and Scandinavia, and in the Finn Cycle, the warrior Fothad refused to drink his beer without the severed heads of his enemies to garnish it. Severed heads aside, things seemed to have changed little with the coming of Christianity via Saint Patrick in the fifth century. St. Brigit was certainly the most celebrated brewer of Irish beer in the early Christian period, and when her own brewery came up short, she relied on divine intervention: a number of her reported miracles involved turning water into beer, be it for midwives, lepers, or at least in one case, an entire diocese of eighteen churches.
In fact, the Celtic enthusiasm for Christianity and beer would effectively introduce monastic brewing to Europe, as Hiberno-Scottish monks took their missions to the Continent. But cultural exchange is a two-way street. While Celtic missionaries helped encourage brewing in European monasteries farther south during the medieval period, the friars of Spain and Italy were learning a few tricks of their own—including the old Arab technique of liquid distillation, which proved handy for turning wine into something far more potent and durable. And they were not shy about sharing this fact with their religious brethren to the north.
One small problem: For while grapes abounded in Spain and Italy, they didn’t exactly thrive in Scotland and Ireland. Grain, on the other hand, did. While the Latinate monks of southern Europe got pretty good at turning wine into brandy, Celtic distillers discovered the same technique could work just as well with beer. Simply by heating their barley brew in a copper pot still, collecting the alcohol vapors, and cooling them back into a liquid, they learned to duplicate the process, albeit with a different alcoholic beverage in mind. This “distilled beer,” as whiskey truly was, would never completely eclipse actual beer in Scotland and Ireland, but it would certainly give it a run for its money. With the rise of the Scots-Irish distillers of the early nineteenth century, the same pattern would eventually emerge in America as well.
The predecessors of the Scots-Irish were relatively poor farmers from the southern Lowlands of Scotland. As English-speaking Protestants—albeit Presbyterians—they were recruited by the English to populate the “plantations” in the Irish province of Ulster and were relied upon as a natural buffer against the Gaelic-speaking Catholics they had displaced. Beginning in 1609 with the Plantation of Ulster, large numbers of these Scottish border people began arriving in Ireland, where they were granted tracts of tenant land on farms confiscated from the native population. Over the century that followed, the “Ulster Scots” would become entrenched in the north of Ireland, as assistants in a British policy of cultural assimilation, and as the first line of defense in the many bloody rebellions and uprisings that ensued because of it.
Obviously, this wasn’t the most secure position to be in, and many sought better opportunities across the sea. Between 1717 and 1775, perhaps as many as a quarter million Ulster Scots emigrated to America, lured by the promise of unclaimed land and religious freedom. The coastal areas of Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas were dominated by large commercial plantations, but the rugged frontier to the west was up for the taking—especially following the American Revolution. The British had discouraged settlement beyond the Appalachians, concerned about potential French and Native American hostility on the other side. Once their independence was won, however, Americans were all for it, and the land-craving, freedom-loving, whiskey-making Scots-Irish were happy to be at the vanguard, and more than willing to trade in their skills with a musket for a chance at finally owning their own farm.
East of the Appalachian Mountains, early whiskey-making settlers had relied heavily on rye for distilling. It was relatively common, easy to grow, and cheap to buy. After Daniel Boone led the first batch of settlers through the Cumberland Gap, all that changed. As pioneers filtered down into what was to become Kentucky, Tennessee, and West Virginia, they quickly came around to what southern settlers as far back as Roanoke had already discovered: the native corn fared far better in the summer heat than any other grain. But unlike their somewhat snobby English predecessors, who had been reluctant to use rugged Indian corn as a substitute for fine British barley, the Scots-Irish had no qualms making whiskey out of it—adaptation is, after all, the key to frontier survival.
This changed everything. With the arrival of a whole new drink to the tavern scene, the brief beer revival that followed the American Revolution came to a screeching halt. Yes, rum was out of the picture, but frontier whiskey wasn’t far behind it. Americans had learned to do precisely what Benjamin Franklin had hoped—create a spirit from our own native grains. But in doing so, the sudden abundance of inexpensive whiskey struck a tremendous blow to our native beer industry. In an age of frontier expansion, whiskey just made far more sense. Beer was a perishable commodity that, even with the most hops and best of intentions, couldn’t be transported commercially across bumpy frontier roads during hot southern summers. Whiskey, on the other hand, not only survived the journey—it actually improved in quality as it aged and experienced temperature change. By the early nineteenth century, even cities on the East Coast were being flooded by this new “western” whiskey, and discovering to their surprise that after months of travel, it was actually quite good. This passage from an 1818 distilling manual states what was happening in fairly unambiguous terms:
The rapidity of improvements in the western parts of the United States, is a matter of some consideration to the distillers of the Atlantic States. They have already made considerable progress in the art of distillation, and the vast quantities of grain which are produced by their fertile lands, beyond the necessary consumption, cannot be so well disposed of in any way as in pork and whiskey. Here we already find Tennessee and Kentucky whiskey in our sea ports, and it is generally preferred to that made nearer home; this by the way, is a powerful argument against the common prejudice against using corn, and the western whiskey is chiefly made of that grain . . . As they depend upon the rise of the rivers to send their whiskey to market, it acquires some age: this also, and the motion of travelling, has considerable effect on improving it.
Even George Washington, the great porter lover and beer advocate of the South, would get in on the whiskey game, founding one of the country’s first large commercial whiskey distilleries at Mount Vernon in 1797. He used both rye and corn in his recipe and experienced great success in selling it to his friends and neighbors. In short order, what had been a fringe drink of Indian traders and Scots-Irish mountaineers was suddenly being enjoyed by Virginia planters with aristocratic English pedigrees. And from there, its popularity would only continue to grow. In 1801, some 50,000 gallons of whiskey traveled through the Louisville Custom House in Kentucky on its way to market. In 1810, that number had increased to 250,000 gallons, and by 1822, it had reached 2,250,000 gallons, destined for bars, taverns, and general stores across the country. A new frontier west of the Appalachian Mountains was open, corn was being grown there in copious amounts thanks to the richness of the soil, and Scots-Irish settlers weren’t just making beer out of it—they were distilling it and sending it down the river to be sold all over America. Beer on its own was bulkier by volume and could never survive the journey; whiskey was far more potent, and it most definitely didn’t spoil with age.
The effect on the beer industry was of course disastrous. Whatever gains it had made with rum’s demise in the wake of the Revolution were quickly nullified by whiskey’s ascendancy. While the annual per capita consumption of commercially produced distilled spirits had rocketed to nearly five gallons in 1810—almost three times the present rate—annual per capita intake of commercial beer was under a gallon—some twenty times less than Americans drink today. In the young city of Cincinnati, the same 18 cents that could buy only a single bottle of beer in the early 1800s could purchase a half gallon of whiskey. Is it any wonder that Americans were increasingly choosing the latter? Even the brewery-heavy states of Pennsylvania and New York would end up reeling. In 1819, one estimate stated that the value of the entire beer industry had plummeted by nearly 60 percent in just four years. Matthew Vassar, one of the nation’s few successful brewers of the era, would also lament what had become of America and its brewing industry from his office on the Hudson. “The times are awful, awful!,” he exclaimed in a journal entry dated 1837, “worse than this or any other country witnessed.” Thanks to the Scots-Irish settlers who populated the South’s westernmost hinterlands, the region finally had its own commercially viable drink—but all that bourbon took a serious toll on even the most prominent American breweries.
Ultimately, it would be Scots-Irish pioneers on the rugged frontier who would solve the South’s liquor woes. The warm climate and wild terrain may have been hostile to perishable corn beer, but corn whiskey only improved with age. In the late 1700s, bourbon was born, and it would eventually give the American beer industry a run for its money.
Courtesy of Library of Congress
Beer may have been in serious decline, but it still had its champions, even in the whiskey-drinking South. Foremost among them was a Virginia aristocrat named Thomas Jefferson. A great lover of drink, Jefferson had become a connoisseur of both wines and porters during his time in Paris and Philadelphia, respectively. And while he wasn’t totally against stronger spirits when enjoyed in moderation, he was known to frequently lament “the poison of whiskey, which is destroying [the middle classes] by wholesale.” He had labored together with James Madison to curb the new nation’s craving for spirits in the aftermath of the Revolution, and he was a strong advocate of both wine and beer as local substitutes. Upon retiring to his Monticello estate at the end of his presidency in 1810, he took up the life of a country gentleman and devoted a great deal of time to the brewing of beer. In 1813, he feverishly hunted down a New York brewing manual called The American Brewer & Maltster, which included methods of malting Indian corn—a useful technique for a home brewer who lived in a region where barley did not fare well. He eventually corresponded with the author, Joseph Coppinger, an ambitious entrepreneur who approached the retired president with an intriguing proposition: a national brewery. Coppinger was a champion of “the establishment of a Brewing company at Washington as a National object,” an endeavor that would “unquestionably tend to improve the quality of our Malt Liquors in every point of the Union and serve to counteract the baneful influences of ardent spirits on the health and Morals of our fellow Citizens. . . .” His asking price to establish the first “national” brewery in Washington? A mere $20,000.
The original American beer geek and home brewer himself, Thomas Jefferson. His dream of seeing the United States become a beer-drinking nation again would be realized, but not in his lifetime.
Courtesy of Library of Congress
It is possible that Coppinger was full of hot air, but it may also have been a brilliant idea. A federally sponsored brewery based in the nation’s capital could have revived a flagging industry and allowed beer to replace whiskey in the urban centers of the coast. But alas, the nation would never find out. Jefferson liked the idea, but ultimately said no. While he admitted to sharing Coppinger’s views on the dangers of spirits, and to brewing a great deal of beer for personal use with corn and wheat—his farm did not grow barley—he politely declined, writing that he was “too old & too fond of quiet to engage in new & distant undertakings.” While perhaps a younger Thomas Jefferson would have embraced such a fiery idea, the retired Thomas Jefferson simply wanted to enjoy his dotage and the occasional fine glass of beer. He would continue to brew beer and experiment with various brewing techniques right up until his death in 1826—on the Fourth of July, interestingly enough.
Jefferson’s legacy may not include the salvation of the American beer industry, but his résumé does contain the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, an unprecedented act of land acquisition that brought huge tracts of western territory, formerly French, directly into American possession. This included fresh access to the Mississippi River, as well as that lively jewel of a city at its terminus: New Orleans. With its thriving port and constant stream of river traffic, the town was unique in the American South, and its abundance of job opportunities attracted immigrants galore throughout the nineteenth century, one of whom happened to be a German man by the name of Georg Merz. As an aficionado of fine beer, Herr Merz was dismayed by the locally made southern-style beverages that greeted him upon his arrival in Louisiana—peculiar brews of “molasses and wormwood” that bore little resemblance to the crisp lagers he had known back home. He began brewing his own beer in 1855, at the Old Canal Steam Brewery on the Carondelet Canal; thirteen years later, he would invite his nephew, Valentine Merz, to come work for him. Unlike his uncle Georg, young Valentine did not hail from old Deutschland—he was a first-generation German American, fresh off the farm in Indiana. Once settled in New Orleans, the eager and ambitious Valentine would go on to master the trade and, eventually, succeed in doing the one thing everyone from George Thorpe to Thomas Jefferson had failed to do: create a commercially viable southern beer. More specifically, he created Dixie beer, a brew beloved by New Orleanians and thirsty writers to this very day. But while Valentine Merz may have left behind the Middle West to seek his fortune, many more German Americans did not. And the breweries they founded in the nation’s heartland would ultimately change beer—and America—forever.
Of course this means I’m going to have to drink as many of these Dixie beers as I can before I have to make my way back up north. Challenging research, to say the least—especially in a city like New Orleans, where so many seductive beverage options fill the menu, and southern hospitality is always on tap.