The Mayflower took off from England on Sept. 16, 1620, bound for the area that is now New York City, on the journey that would lead to the founding of the United States of America.
Filled with just over 100 Pilgrims and their supplies, the vessel was blown north. As a rough voyage brought them closer to Plymouth Harbor, the Pilgrims decided to disembark and make a new life there.
One essential factor in their decision to land where they did?
They had run out of beer.
“We came to this resolution,” wrote future Plymouth governor William Bradford, “to go presently ashore to take a better view . . . or we could not now take much time for further search or consideration, our victuals being spent, especially our beer.”
In “The United States of Beer,” author Huckelbridge shows how beer, the most popular alcoholic drink in America and behind only water and soft drinks in beverage sales overall, has been America’s essential thirst-quencher throughout our history.
With the average drinking-age American quaffing almost 30 gallons of beer a year, there is no doubt that America is a beer-loving nation.
During the Pilgrims’ voyage, 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,” writes Huckelbridge.
The ship’s captain, Christopher Jones, thought he wouldn’t have enough beer for his crew on the way back. He kept it from the Pilgrims, causing tension, until he and his men took ill. Once he realized he’d need to stay in the colonies and recover instead of returning directly home, he became more generous and allowed the Pilgrims to share in the beer.
One of the settlers’ first projects in the new world was the attempted establishment of a brewhouse. Little was accomplished at first, as fewer than half the Mayflower’s passengers survived year one and the grains they had brought from England either failed to grow or produced crops “not worth gathering.”
They were forced to drink water instead of beer — a significant and strange adjustment from their usual routine — but by the late 1620s, they had learned how to grow barley on American soil and adjusted their planting schedule accordingly.
The first shipload of hops arrived in 1628, and by 1630, beer brewing and consumption was a force in the colonies.
“In 1630, the ship Arbella pulled into Boston Harbor with 10,000 gallons of beer and 120 hogsheads of malt,” Huckelbridge writes. Industrial-scale grain production began just two years later, and the first tavern was in place four years after that.
In 1636, the Puritans, who prized education, founded the country’s first college, then called “New College.” It’s been rumored throughout the years that the school’s benefactor, Puritan minister and tavern-keeper’s son John Harvard, had “learned the art of brewing back in England from William Shakespeare himself.”
Harvard died two years later — the college took his name in tribute — but his replacement, Nathaniel Eaton, was no fan of beer. He “mismanaged” the school’s supply, leading to what might have been the country’s first protest on a college campus — and it was all about beer.
America is a nation of beer drinkers. We always have been, to varying degrees, and we most likely always will be.
“While the newly named Harvard College could boast North America’s very first printing press by 1638,” Huckelbridge writes, “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.’ ”
Eaton was replaced by Henry Dunster shortly after, and not only were the beer-supply issues solved, but the school built its own brewery.
By the time of the Revolutionary War, the colonists viewed beer as a necessity for their fighting men, with each soldier receiving “1 quart . . . beer or cider” per day.
General George Washington was a fan of English porters but switched his allegiance to American beer, becoming “an enthusiastic customer of a Philadelphia brewer named Robert Hare.”
Washington shared his enthusiasm with the world, writing in a letter to “his good war buddy,” the Marquis de Lafayette, “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.”
Independence was won, but the war took a dire toll on the young nation’s brewing industry, which the founders realized would need to be rapidly revived to help boost the country’s economy and morale.
“It is to be hoped, that the Gentlemen of the Town,” said founding father — and, later, beer namesake — Samuel Adams, “will endeavor to bring our own [strong] beer into fashion again . . . so that we may no longer be beholden to Foreigners for a Credible Liquor.”
For all their legendary disagreements, the founding fathers supported the industry’s revival. Thomas Jefferson, who once promoted beer and wine as alternatives to “the poison of whiskey,” became a brewer in retirement. Benjamin Franklin — who is rumored to have once said, “Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy” — spoke of its importance, as did others.
“Congressman James Madison led the charge,” writes Huckelbridge, “when he ‘moved to lay an impost of eight cents on all beer imported . . . as to induce the manufacture to take deep root in every state in the Union.’ A few years later, Broadway muse — and, at the time, our first Treasury Secretary — Alexander Hamilton said, “It is desirable…that the whole consumption [of malt liquors] should be supplied by ourselves.”
Over the years, beer has seen its popularity in the US ebb and flow, to an extent. While never falling completely out of favor, its sales have dipped at times — 1820 saw the first, as Americans took to whiskey en masse.
German immigration throughout the 1800s — over 1.35 million Germans emigrated here from 1840 to 1860 — altered America’s beer-drinking habits, as Germans preferred light, refreshing lagers to the more complex ales and stouts of the early settlers.
Many settled west, in what was known as “The German Triangle” of Cincinnati, Milwaukee and St. Louis. It was here that the American beer industry as we know it today took root.
By 1855, German immigrants Jacob Best, Friedrich Muller and August Krug had founded the small breweries that would become, respectively, Pabst, Miller, and Schlitz. By the late 1800s, the brewing complex of Adolphus Busch (Budweiser) would “take up a full 70 acres of St. Louis waterfront.” Together, these brands would dominate America’s beer landscape through the next century and beyond, though their offerings at the time were darker, richer and more complex versions of their current selves.
Then, as now, Busch’s Budweiser created strongly branded, attention-getting ads. In 1896, the company, by then known as Anheuser-Busch, bought the rights to a painting called “Custer’s Last Fight.” They then hired an artist to paint “a smaller, modified version, which featured even more violence and faux gallantry than the original, printed the Anheuser-Busch name across the bottom, and distributed some 150,000 copies to every tavern that sold Budweiser.
“The campaign proved so successful,” writes Huckelbridge, “that 50 years later, an estimated 1 million copies had been printed, and the picture had become, according to one historian, ‘viewed by a greater number of the lower-browed members of society — and by fewer art critics — than any other picture in American history.’ ”
Other companies followed suit as best they could — sponsoring taverns that only carried their brands and placing their logos on ashtrays, mugs and whatever else they could — and modern beer branding and marketing was born.
As their brands became household names, the company’s founders acted like the mega-rich barons they were. In 1889, Frederick Pabst opened “his own Pabst beach resort . . . capable of entertaining as much as 10,000 visitors in a single day,” and later, an amusement park in Milwaukee called Pabst Park. A few years later, Schiltz, then the biggest beer brand in the world, opened Schiltz Park to compete.
Busch, though, was the wealthiest and most extravagant, earning $2 million a year, when the average annual salary was in the hundreds of dollars, and spending much of it on personal comfort. “He dressed to the nines in richly tailored European finery, and he sported a lavish goatee attended to by his personal manservant and butler,” writes Huckelbridge.
By 1911, the US had overtaken Germany to become the largest beer producing nation in the world, with an output of 63 million barrels. Prohibition halted this growth, as some brewers found alternate revenue sources — Anheuser-Busch sold ice cream, and “Schiltz, Miller and Pabst turned to cheese, chocolate and other confections” — while many others closed for good.
By the time the 13-year alcohol ban was repealed in 1933, public tastes had changed.
“An entire generation of drinkers had come of age at a time when beer was essentially nonexistent and sugary cocktails and soft drinks were all the rage,” Huckelbridge writes. As a result of this and the hard economic times, the returning beers set the stage for the mass-produced (and cheaper to manufacture) beers we know today — “a sweeter, more watery and less flavorful version of the original American pale lager.”
These are the beers that now dominate the US market, even if the companies that make them are no longer American. As of 2013, Anheuser-Busch, now a subsidiary of the Belgian/Brazilian company Anheuser-Busch InBev, had six of the top 10 best-selling brands in the country — Bud Light is No. 1 — while MillerCoors, owned by the English SABMiller, has two of the top five.
But for those who prefer the richer, more intriguing tastes of ales and porters past, the last few decades have brought good news.
Thanks to innovators like Fritz Maytag, a descendant of the washing-machine company founders, whose Anchor Brewing Company — “arguably the first craft brewery,” writes Huckelbridge — took off in the ’70s and the 1978 lifting of a Prohibition-era ban on homemade beer, craft beers have exploded in offerings and popularity in the US.
The craft brewers’ trade organization Brewers Association reports that craft beer now represents 12 percent of the US market share for beers, with over 4,200 craft breweries operating nationwide.
While the beers, the people who make them and the way we prefer to drink them have changed, America’s love affair with beer is as passionate today as it was when the first settlers arrived here on the Mayflower.
“Take a glance at the drinking habits of the early colonial period or the Industrial Revolution,” Huckelbridge writes, “and one simple and undeniable fact emerges: America is a nation of beer drinkers. We always have been, to varying degrees, and we most likely always will be.”