by Iain Gately
16
All colonial era cider was “hard,” i.e., alcoholic, as the pilgrims lacked the technology to prevent it from fermenting.
17
The post of poet laureate was formalized, with an annual stipend of a butt of sack.
18
The same as a pint of small beer.
19
The same prohibition was reenacted in 1672—presumably to remind New Englanders of its existence.
20
Andros was later satirized as a megalomaniac lunatic in Androboros (“Maneater”), the first play written on American soil. The play also targeted his predecessor, Anthony Colve, who was characterized as Oinoboros (“Wineeater”).
21
A generic term for wheat, barley, rye, and oats.
22
Gin had acquired a variety of nicknames and brands—Old Tom, Strip-Me-Naked, et cetera—most of which alluded to its potency.
23
It was treasonous to drink the health of either the old or young pretender, and so Jacobites would toast each other holding their cups above a pitcher of water.
24
It was carbon dioxide.
25
French planters were allowed to export neither rum nor molasses, lest they compete with the brandy makers of the parent country.
26
The inscription refers to a circular letter sent by the Massachusetts Council to the other colonies, objecting to the Townshend Acts, which the governor demanded they rescind. “No. 45” refers to the issue number of The North Briton in which John Wilkes, the son of a distiller, published an article on abuses of power that led to his trial for treason and made him a hero of sorts in the Americas.
27
Italy competed with Carolina in the supply of rice to the slave trade.
28
I.e., everyone except the Rum Regiment.
29
Vaucluse was reputed to have been infested with snakes before Sir Henry took possession and drove them away: He imported five hundred barrels of Irish bog, which was dug into trenches around the perimeter of his property, and which kept all serpents, in obedience to St. Patrick’s valediction, off the land they enclosed.
30
Eighteenth-century catsup was made from mushrooms, not tomatoes.
31
“Rank taste when ripe, resembling the smell of a fox”—Robert Beverly, 1795, History and Present State of Virginia.
32
Barley.
33
A nightshirt cut very short that scarcely covered the buttocks.
34
Then poet laureate.
35
Albeit an image of the hero of “The Drunkard’s Death” did not number among the decorations.
36
And according to his tax returns, briefly the wealthiest man in the United States.
37
About one in ten of all adult males.
38
Who did not abbreviate their name to its initials—SOT.
39
A neologism coined in 1843.
40
The last two named after a band of brothers in the Bible who were the only people in its pages to take a vow of abstinence.
41
An expenditure of around $50 per head at current bar prices. For the sake of comparison, the Republican Party spent an average of $12.65 per vote for its victory in 2004.
42
Cantharides vesicatoria.
43
By then known as the Barbary Coast.
44
Sex shows.
45
Now buried under Union Station in central L.A.
46
By the elevation of Mouton Rothschild to the category of first growths in 1973.
47
Lavoisier is rumored to have carried out his last experiment at his own execution. Its purpose was to determine how long a severed head remains conscious. An assistant stood by the basket at the foot of the guillotine and counted how many times Lavoisier’s head blinked its eyes before they closed forever. Apparently he managed fifteen.
48
The great restaurants of Paris kept serving throughout the German siege, albeit with improvised menus. Voisin offered roast cat garlanded with rats, accompanied by Bollinger Champagne.
49
Urquell, the original Pilsner brewery, is still in production and is still celebrated for the excellence of its beer.
50
The Bavarian Reinheitsgebot of 1516.
51
And refused by the soldiers of the Temperance Regiment raised by the governor of Maine, who had pledged to serve dry.
52
His monomania alarmed Dickens, who thought Cruikshank had gone too far in the name of a good cause. In 1853 he issued a gentle rebuke, which accused him of introducing “a Whole Hog of unwieldy dimensions into the fairy flower garden.” Dickens accompanied his rebuke with a mock-temperance version of Cinderella, whose politically correct heroine was as dull as she was dry.
53
They could still buy beer at any age.
54
Prince Albert, spouse of Queen Victoria, was one of the last to be treated with this therapy, and was prescribed six pints of brandy per day in the hope of defeating the waterborne ailment that ultimately killed him.
55
In the sense of British expatriates.
56
As was his American hero—Edgar Allan Poe.
57
The taste then was for ultrarealist pictures of romantic or historical subjects— Salomé in Spanish costume, Napoléon on a stallion. Few bourgeois could imagine hanging the portrait of a common and elderly drunkard in their drawing rooms.
58
Nineteenth-century French slang for a flirtatious and attractive woman.
59
Who hath sorrow? Who hath woe?/ They who dare not answer no;/ They whose feet to sin incline,/ While they tarry at the wine.
60
She also crusaded against smoking.
61
When he was in drinking mode, London expected his liquor to kick. By his own high standards, absinthe was for lightweights: “The trouble I had with the stuff was that I had to take such inordinate quantities in order to feel the slightest effect.”
62
Sassoon records that the same commander tried to ban smoking among his men and prevent the issue of steel helmets lest these would “make them soft.”
63
The amendment was eventually ratified by every state except Rhode Island and Connecticut.
64
Prohibition had created a host of new synonyms for intoxication.
65
Champagne had a good Prohibition. It is estimated that dry-era America got through seventy-one million bottles—equivalent to a 300 percent increase in annual consumption when compared to pre-Volstead years.
66
His favorite, which he drank by the pint, was Pol Roger ’28.
67
Vomit.
68
Interestingly, much of the vocabulary of drug use was borrowed from the language of drinking. High appears in the 1927 Lexicon of Prohibition, as does splifficated; buzzing features in Benjamin Franklin’s Drinker’s Dictionary, and stoned dates back to Jacobean England as a term for lustful drunkenness.
69
It is currently the largest-selling brand of whisky in the world.
70
The legal drinking age in Japan has been twenty since 1922.
71
The actual drinking habits of American college students changed very little between 1973 and 1983.
72
“By nature, I am a gentle, responsible, useful person, with a few special insights and gifts. With liquor, I am insane.”
73
Lynch later pointed out to BATF that “your office should proceed with caution when deciding whether Thomas Jefferson’s writing is too dangerous to be read
by the American public.”
74
Lower limits were prescribed for women because they tend to weigh less and to have a greater percentage of body fat than men, leading to higher concentrations of alcohol in the blood and tissues after the same number of drinks.
75
A female binger needed less than two pints of beer, or three small glasses of wine, in an evening to qualify for the soubriquet.
76
And continues to do so in the present decade.
77
The problem of underreporting was not confined to Britain. A 1986 survey of drinking habits in Tucson, Arizona, revealed that while 85 percent of respondents said they did not drink beer, 75 percent of the city’s trash cans had empty beer containers in them.
78
A fatal weariness with gourmandisme.
79
Château Pétrus 2005 (rated 96-100 by Robert Parker) costs $4,000 per bottle.
80
Those between twenty-one and thirty-one in 2002.
81
A large cup of mouthwash can generate a BAC reading greater than .02.