Everybody has their favorite beer, cocktail, or mixed drink. We all know our tastes in alcoholic beverages. But not so long ago Americans drank whatever was available at the time. So how did we get from bland colonial ale to today’s hoppy IPAs and hipster cocktails? This unique journey through history starts with the pilgrims aboard the Mayflower and continues until the end of prohibition.

Mayflower and expensive imported wine

Drinking beer dates back to some of the first European settlers in the New World. And while it doesn’t go along with the stereotype the Puritans were voracious beer drinkers. When the pilgrims set sail on the Mayflower they packed the ship with more beer than drinking water. Pilgrims including the children drank about a quart of beer each day of the journey. However, beer didn’t have as high of an alcohol content as today’s beer. The Puritans preferred their fermented drink to the most likely contaminated water. This ale was so important to the pilgrims a beer shortage is believed to be what got them to land on Plymouth Rock instead of continuing south. With their beer supply dwindling the sailors sent the pilgrims out to find water.

When Europeans moved to North America they tried to reproduce European wine. But the native grapes created acidic wine that was impossible to drink. The grapes that the Europeans brought over and tried to harvest failed to grow in the harsher climates of the Eastern Seaboard. As a result for centuries, wine had to be imported from Europe. Thomas Jefferson made quite a name for himself by importing these expensive European wines. As with all imports, the high cost of imported European wines meant that only wealthy Americans could afford to drink them. By 1840 less than 3% of wines consumed by Americans were domestic.

That all changed with the Gold Rush of 1849. When the Gold Rush blew up so did California’s population. Naturally, most of these settlers became miners. But when they had problems finding gold they changed careers. Some of the settlers who gave up chasing gold started growing grapes and founding wineries that popularized California wine. By the 1910s 90% of all wine consumed in the US came from California.

The Founding Fathers and Whiskey Rebellion

While beer was the standard drink among the settlers the Founding Fathers preferred rum. Rum was important among the elite founders. For years sugar refineries dumped millions of gallons of molasses into the sea. Until they realized molasses could be made into rum. Hundreds of thousands of gallons soon poured into North America. By the time of the American Revolution, each citizen downed an annual average of 4 gallons of rum. Today Americans on average only drink 2.33 gallons of alcohol each year.

In 1794 George Washington sent Secretary of The Treasury Alexander Hamilton to Western Pennsylvania to make sure whiskey distillers paid their taxes. Hamilton led a group of 13,000 militiamen who squashed the whiskey rebellion. Pennsylvanians refused to pay these tax collectors even tarring and feathering one of them. The whiskey tax was so unpopular that some of these distillers threatened to declare independence from the US. During America’s early years, whiskey slowly started to replace rum as the go-to distilled alcohol. This is because the revolution slowed imported molasses and the new import duties raised prices everywhere. Luckily for the Americans, the surplus of corn from the Midwest made the production of whiskey dirt cheap. In the 1820s it only cost 25 cents a gallon to make whiskey. Plus whiskey was marketed as a patriotic drink because it didn’t rely on imports.

The Tarantula Juice and the 19th-century drinks

Old West Saloons served a powerful alcoholic drink to the Sierra Nevada called Tarantula Juice. A ghastly concoction of gin mixed with diluted strychnine. The name Tarantula alluded to more than the drink’s bite, which causes muscle spasms. Bartenders would take Carson Valley Gin which was a grain alcohol made from turpentine, oil of vitriol, rosin, and essence of laurel, and mix it with diluted strychnine, prussic acid, and tobacco oil. Because strychnine is an alkaloid Tarantula Juice probably produced an effect similar to meth. The erratic bursts of energy coupled with heavy alcohol consumption almost always resulted in violence. Most saloons served up Tarantula Juice in two tumblers warning drinkers to hold on to the second until the muscle spasms set in. The second dose of juice would end the shakes.

The late 19th century has been called the Golden Age of cocktails. New mixed drinks like the martini and the Manhattan were first invented by bartenders and Americans across the country grew to love and appreciate the art of creating exotic cocktails. Daiquiri was invented by Jennings Cox in the 1890s. The recipe included Bacardi rum, lemon juice, and sugar. The cocktail became so popular it soon became the drink of choice for Ernest Hemingway and John F. Kennedy. In the late 1800s Jerry Thomas, author of the first bartender’s guide also turned cocktails into an entertaining spectacle. Thomas invented the Blue Blazer a flaming cocktail that he allegedly made with a white rat sitting on his shoulders.

Sailors and German immigration

It’s been documented that British sailors were known to drink as much as 10 pints of beer a day. But the warmer temperatures in the tropics spoiled their beer so the enterprising seamen turned to punch. Made from distilled spirits, fruit juice, and sugar with spices like nutmeg or cinnamon often added for flavor. This punch quickly became the most popular drink for sailors and eventually a favorite for colonial Americans on land. The best part about this punch unlike other alcoholic beverages of the day is citrus juice helps protect against scurvy and packs them with the calories needed to survive another day.

When more than a million Germans landed on American soil during the second half of the 19th century they brought a cold drinkable lager that gradually replaced the English ales. And the Germans didn’t just introduce new brewing methods. They even brought over new types of brewing yeast to create their beers. Breweries thrived across the country. Until Prohibition put many small brewers out of business for good.

Chicago World Fair and the Prohibition

Distilling agave dates back centuries. But tequila didn’t become popular in America until the late 19th century. In 1893 during the Chicago Worlds Fair wealthy Mexican families introduced tequila to a new market. Tequila proved so popular that bootleggers smuggled it across the Mexican border during Prohibition. The smugglers packed as many as 50 bottles of it per donkey to cross the border at night. Today Mexico exports around 70% of its tequila with about 80% of those exports shipped off to the US.

The Prohibition went into effect on January 17th, 1920 but Americans kept drinking anyway. People simply turned to underground. So Moonshine became a part of the American drinking culture for generations. Though the Prohibition Bureau seized unlawful stills that didn’t stop moonshiners. Homemade alcohol also known as Hooch was made of horrific ingredients like rat corpses and rotten meat to imitate the flavor of barrel-aged alcohol. Americans mixed their Hooch with anything that might take the edge off.

American colonists enjoyed cider. It was one of their most popular drinks. It was so popular in Massachusetts the majority of its citizens older than 15 drank on average 34 gallons of cider and beer a year. John Adams even declared cider a healthy beverage. Many also claimed cider prevented fever, laryngitis, rheumatism, and colic. Unfortunately, ciders glory days ended at Prohibition. During the drinking ban teetotalers burned apple orchards to the ground to ensure their fruit wouldn’t become cider. It took decades for hard cider to recover. Particularly because some cider apples went extinct. On March 22nd, 1933 President Roosevelt signed the Cullen Harrison Act into law. Legalizing beer with an alcohol content of 3.2 % and wine with a similarly low alcohol content. And soon after that the drinking ban was lifted and the Prohibition was finally over. We all hope that it doesn’t happen again.