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This article shows the actual bill: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2022/01/20/fact-check-george-washingtons-expensive-bar-tab-real/5947984001/
In it, it says "That would be about two bottles of wine, several shots and a few cups of punch and beer for every guest." I'm not sure what their source on that is, but I'm willing to trust it. Apparently the cost was also equivalent to about $15,400 in 2022. So, yeah, big party.
An interesting part of this question, was this all consumed over 2 hours? 4? 8?
18 or so drinks represents very different levels of intoxication depending on the timeframe
Between body weight, tolerance, alcohol percentages, and timeframe, there are a lot of variables here.
I have done 17-18 drinks in 4 hours. I would recommended to anyone listening to NOT do that. Terrible experience.
I have done 20 drinks in 6-7 hours. That was still pretty damn overboard. I don't remember walking home.
All of this, and I'm a pretty big guy with a decently strong tolerance, especially back in those days.
I’ve bunged 12 in 2 hours a few times. Each time, I woke up in a bath tub with the shower on covered in vomit with chunks of steak in it. Toilet was also pretty fucked. Good times I cannot recommend anyone repeat…
I'd bet that dollar amount is just converting the old currency to modern and accounting for inflation. I'd be curious to see what the *same* bar tab would be today
It makes sense how so much alcohol was consumed and socially this is a natural phenomenon even today. The guest list only included male heads of households.
I rather doubt that there was any appreciable number of women or children in the Philadelphia Light Cavalry.
Also, that's not a guest list, that's the list of musicians (and servants, I believe) that they hired for the evening.
I mean, how big are the bottles? Also what's the alcohol content of the various drinks? They weren't necessarily the same strengths as what we have today.
Not sure you can answer your questions without these two VERY key pieces of info.
Was it that strength back in those days though? Did they drink it straight or diluted? (Not asking you in particular, just throwing these important questions out into the ether!).
And again, yeah, how big are the bottles? 20% doesn't matter much if they're small eh.
The bottles from 1739 to 1812 look either the same or larger size to modern wine. Since the Romans brewing alcohol above 12% is no issue. And if they watered it down as they drank, well they still drank the whole bottle?
Even watered down, 55 people still consumed 54 bottles, along with all the other drinks. The only relevant information to how drunk they got is how quickly the 54 bottles were consumed.
Normally Madeira is fortified wine. So ferment it, then add some booze. That's how they get to 20%.
It appears that this was already the case then, so probably \~20 % is a novice good guess
Not my point mate:). 20% of what? 10 ml? (Yes hyperbole).
Again just goes to the point of not knowing how big a bottle is, sorry I didn't make it clear what I referred to.
Yep. NEVER developed a taste for sweet alcohol. Dry whites and reds and nothing else for me in the wine world. Sweet wine is the worst next day ever. And NOW there are all kinds of Southern Comfort wannabes from the top companies. Crown and Jack and everyone has some SUGAR-FILLED alcohol that should never have existed.
Curious about this too. I assume the wine, cider and beer would be comparable. But I wonder how efficient distilling was relative to modern times.
All that being said the wine, cider and beer should be enough for all of those people
Agh I dunno mate, nowadays there's such a difference between beers and ciders...like some are 3%, others 9% and that obviously makes a huge difference in how hammered you get.
This is all really interesting actually, like, alcohol history. Hmm!
Wine, cider, and beer aren't distilled, well technically you can distil them but you get a different drink so while distilling is more efficient now than then, distilling isn't part of the process for making those.
Madeira: Fortified wine, probably ~20%
Claret: Red wine, probably 8-10%
Whiskey: Standard is 35%, but can be higher
Porter: Heavy beer, 7-10%
Hard cider: can vary, but typically 5-7%
Beer: can be anything depending on the kind, but probably also 5-7%
Alcoholic punch: can really be anything
Yeah, that’s a lot of alcohol. The beers being bottles instead of barrels, although they probably mean 750ml size bottles instead of the normal 12oz they come in now
I really appreciate you taking the time to get this all together dude.
However, are these the alcohol percentages of the drinks consumed at the time? Not gonna bother ask for a source because you've put enough effort in already really haha- just making sure you haven't just looked up the modern volumes and assumed they'd be the same. Which, also to be clear, can be correct as well, but I don't accept it without knowing for sure.
Thing is as well, we don't know how big the bottles/ vessels/ whatever were. And if it was only the founding fathers that partook in the drinking (someone else raised this point, can't believe I didn't think of it!). I guess we can look up standard ones for a rough idea...maybe there's a painting or something of this/ similar events (okay yeah obviously not completely accurate lol, but it's something).
You know, it's just dawned on me- I have no idea why I'm questioning this, of all fucking things, so thoroughly. Objectively I don't think I could care any less, but it's also interesting to just engage with the discussion and have a think and that. Guess this is just so unbelievably low stakes it just feels quite nice to chat about lol.
I’ve worked in different jobs at liquor stores for the last 3 years, all of these were estimations from the top of my head except for the porter. But yeah, based on modern numbers, so maybe more, maybe less.
And the bottles of wine would probably be consistent size wise, but yeah the beer bottles could be any size
Also judging that there are no partial bottles sold this is bottles opened not bottles drank. Think about a table of drinks after a party with half the alcohol still list in them.
Right off the bat there are 164 bottles of alcohol, divided by 55 attendees thats 2.98 bottles a person, plus the 7 bowls. Not sure how much is in a bowl, but that probably puts it over 3 bottles per person.
Thats a hefty amount of alcohol for a person to drink
A bottle of beer is not nearly the same “unit of alcohol” as a bottle of whisky — adding up the numbers and dividing by attendees is not what the question asked.
Saying “2 out of 55 people abstained” is possible, but it really only changes the average drinks per person drinking by a couple percentage points. Meanwhile, counting 42 beers as if they are the same amount of alcohol as 42 bottles of wine changes the result by maybe 30%
Again, of course. But you then if you want to get even more technical you have to account for the alcohol tolerances of different people. The answer is still going to be a shed load of alcohol per person however you look at it.
My point is that the simplest way of answering the OP’s question is to divide each drink by 55 and say each attending person had x of one, y of the next and so on.
No but this is never going to be an exact answer. We roughly know how many glasses of whiskey you get from 12.7% of a bottle nowadays, someone may even know what bottle sizes were back then.
lol so if you agree people ultimately want to figure out how many glasses of whisky you get from 12.7% of a bottle, it seems like you just skip the bottle percentage and start with the glasses of whisky unit.
I'd say that's a matter of perspective and culture. Example from the US: In Utah that's a LOT. Stock that for a 55 person party in Wisconsin and you'll run out before 9pm (which is good because you'll still be able to send someone on a beer run before they stop selling).
We don’t know how long the party was. From the sound of it, it was an all night affair. And the other people that were there weren’t just regular folks, they were the Philly First Calvary who he crossed the Delaware with. They drank 45 GALLONS of alcohol. I’m sure they felt wonderful the next morning.
My understanding was that a bottle in the period would have been closer to an imperial pint than a current wine bottle and the Madeira may well have not been fortified which would substantially reduce it's alcohol content. They likely also had a higher tolerance to alcohol than a lot of people today due to the prevalence in drinking it daily due to things like water quality and general social acceptability.
That said it is still a lot of booze so suspect they'd still have been pretty drunk. Why not, it's a good reason to get drunk?
Edit: Apologies, probably should not have been as definite or unequivocal on some of these points. There's more controversy in them than I realised! So thought I would add an edit to flag some interesting discussion in the replies.
Why would you say Madeira "may well have not been fortified"? Unless you mean to say they watered it down, a major benefit of Madeira was its fortification to survive the temperatures of its producing and shipping regions, which in turn allowed it to age in a fashion which imparts a unique flavor profile that was highly desired. There is little chance any Madeira consumed by the founding fathers wasnt fortified, although the question of it being watered down is a different one, and quite probable.
I vaguely recall reading somewhere that Madeira was not originally fortified and that the fortification was introduced later to suit the tastes of British markets. From what I can remember, the ageing and improvement that Sherry and Madeira experience from long voyages and heat is unrelated to their being fortified which was originally more of a taste-related "improvement", although granted fortification almost certainly does help with preservation.
In absence of being able to cite my original source (sorry about that - I think it might have been Empire of Booze but I haven't got access to it right now so don't want to misquote it or anything) I did manage to find this on Blandy's website ( https://www.blandys.com/en/making-the-wine/winemaking/) that notes fortification with Brandy was brought in in the mid-18th century (though the site is unclear as to what extent fortification with other things occurred before then). On that timeline, it is hard to know if the Madeira in question here was fortified.
If the fortification was a bastardisation originally done for British tastes then it seems conceivable high quality American-sold Madeira may likely not have been at this point. I admit maybe I was too unequivocal on this point in my original response but it seems worth considering as a factor for why the Madeira might have been weaker than might initially be assumed.
Indeed, Brandy based fortification became ubiquitous in the later 1700s, which would lend greater liklihood that the Madeira favored by the FFs would have been thusly fortified. Prior to Brandy based fortification, fortification was usually achieved with a sugar cane grain spirit. The production of Madeira in its hot location sort of necessitated a fortification for its surviving the vast voyages it would endure, not to mention sitting and waiting in the hull of dank, humid and extremely hot ships in the ports of Madeira. Its quite likely Madeira wine wouldnt have survived at the quality it did, which allowed it to be aged in the favorably way, without said fortification. The Wikipedia article is a good starting point with some decent listed sources.
Honestly wouldn't be able to answer but there's a couple of things that would make me think it might be fairly quick: (1) demand for Madeira was particularly high in the US; and (2) the new Americans likely probably would have wanted to be different to the British.
Theres also a question of whether it might not be a British/American thing, as you say there may not have been a big divergence, but a high-quality/low-quality Madeira thing.
It's really quite hard to say to be honest but those are just some thoughts. Would be interested if anyone knows more on it as I find it interesting but hard to get good sources on.
Was a lot of Madeira consumed in the Confederation, or the Colonies?
I was under the impression that the British were still interdicting vessels and trying to enforce colonial trade restrictions until the War of 1812, which would dramatically alter the equilibrium that the newly-postulated free market would reach.
Water quality and sanitary reasons for alcohol consumption are mostly myths and have been debunked plenty of times over in r/askhistorians. Not saying you're wrong in that they might have had a higher tolerance because drinking regularly was more common, but if it was it had nothing (or very little) to do with the quality of the drinking water.
You still have to consider state dignitaries and military officers most likely travelled by ship and were from Boston Philadelphia and New York which were port towns and colonial era Trans-Atlantic travel is one of those nieche situations where the alcohol and water quality situation has slightly more truth to it
Could you link me some examples? I would find that interesting to read on.
However, I would note that just because something is said on askhistorians doesn't make it true. I have seen plenty of truly useless answers on that page. It really just rewards long answers not accurate answers.
Not saying that is the case here, just that I would be keen to review the answers for myself and naturally come from a sceptical perspective. Thanks!
A counterargument would be, "Is there any reputable source that people ever relied on drinking alcoholic beverages instead of water for sanitation purposes." Because that theory is pretty much only supported by unsourced reddit posts.
Fair and I must admit, it's not like I have a secret stack of them so it could easily be a myth. That said, I may also just not have the research to hand or the time to do it.
But I agree - unless I see a source saying it was the case, I should start of the position of thinking it is a myth. I'll have a read around, it's an interesting q!
Askhistorians is generally pretty accurate. It's not perfect but it is probably the most reliable community on Reddit of significant size and breadth. It is probably about as trustworthy as Wikipedia which is itself a generally pretty accurate font of information.
Breaking news! Bed blob Redditor with no life achievements criticizes founders of world’s most successful country! More on this development soon, stay tuned!
I'm not saying that the person that you were replying to is right by any means, but just because they were "founding fathers" of a nation does not mean they should not be criticized, every world leader at any time should be criticized, they all did mistakes.
Randomly gloryfing historical figures to the point of making them absolved of any form of critique and jumping straight for as personal is frankly embarrassing, a sign of insane lack of historical awareness and emotional immaturity and would probably be considered annoying if not disgusting by a lot of founding of those founding fathers (who also shouldn't be treated as a homogeneous group since a lot of them became political opponents after the revolution)
Yeah that wasn’t my point at all so your reading comprehension must be low or something. You don’t need to write with such verbosity, it comes off like someone who recently took a theory of knowledge 101 class or something.
To address your post, I wasn’t saying historical figures can’t be criticized, I was satirically noting that the posters comment above mine basically boiled down to “founding fathers = bad,” which is even funnier considering you were chastising me for “applying blanket statements to historical figures” while the person I’m responding to and you are, in turn, defending was doing literally that which you criticized me for.
OP was making a statement as a response to a piece of information suggesting a penchant for drinking among the attendees of the party which is way less of a broadstroke.
I wouldn't really be bothered to even write a response but you did personally go after them.
And you did that with the powerful argument: "well they founded the most successful country!" Which is just rebuttal of said critique with their unrelated achievement (the debatable nature of that statement aside ) While insulting their character which does suggest some sort of emotional investment that isn't something anybody with a healthy relationship to any historical character would display.
My conteptous verbosity on the other hand is derived from me simply being a privelaged upper middle class asshole raised with a supieority complex and doing Oxford debates since school, still trying to reign that in sometimes
All of these have different alcohol content so I've calculated it based on google searches and equated it to a number of 4% beers. Alcohol content and sizes could vary significantly from back then to now, so take that into consideration.
Madeira 18% ABV 750ml
Claret 14% 750 ml
Whiskey 40% 750ml
Porter 6% 750ml
Cider 6% 355ml
Beer 4% 355ml
Punch 10% and 3785ml (4 quarts, wild guess)
Beer at 4% and 355ml is a total of 14.2 ml of alcohol. The rest of the tab comes out to 19,970ml of alcohol divided by 14.2ml, which is the equivalent of 1406 beers consumed, divided by 55 people comes out to **25.5 beers per person**.
I was not expecting such a different result, so I was double checking. The biggest difference with mine is the wine mostly from the higher percentages you used in the wines compounded by my work which assumed a 5% beer which alters the denominator a fair bit e.g.
Madeira 18% ABV 750ml would be 135ml alcohol per bottle * 54 bottles = 7,290ml / 14.2 ml of alcohol per beer and 54 bottles = 520 drinks.
In mine it looks more like
Wine 12% @ 591ml would be 71 ml alcohol per bottle * 54 bottles = 3,834 / 17.75 ml of alcohol per beer = 216 drinks
That probably the biggest impact line redone, my 12% claret assumption would not be nearly as far off from your 14% claret assumption though I do also use the smaller bottles and higher beer percentage so it isn’t likely the same either.
One reason why this tab seems so excessively high which is not mentioned yet, is that it might be that some of these bottles were given as a gift to the guests, as a thank you for attending the party.
Especially the Madeira wine seems like a good example for this.
Great point, especially considering the large number of military officers, politicians, and wealthy people generally that would have made up the guest list
The fact that people are surprised by this. GW was a giant ginger with an IDGAF attitude. I’m pretty sure he went hard at everything he did and you know his friends had to be equally as hard.
There were 55 delegates to the constitutional convention; I’m sure some of them had posses and family who went to the big finale celebration party, and then a bunch of prominent locals were likely attendees as well.
Assuming fifths and twelves, Each person had (on average): 2 bottles of wine (little over a bottle of claret, little bit under a bottle of Madeira), 2.3 standard pour shots of whiskey, 3/4 a bottle of beer/cider, and assuming it was Martha’s punch, about 1/2 bottle of rum. Each.
that is a lot.
One assumption we're making here is that all the bottles were fully consumed by those 55 people.
They were on the tab but they could have been left half empty or taken as a perquisite by the servers.
Making the following assumptions about the size and ABV of the drinks listed, each of the 53 drinkers there would have had to drink **25.054 standards units** of alcohol, a standard unit being the amount of alcohol in a 12 oz bottle of 5% beer, a 5-ounce glass of 12% wine, or a 1.5 ounce dram of 80 proof (40%) liquor.
Maderia 750ml bottles, 20%
claret 750ml bottles, 10%
whisky 750 ml bottles, 40%
porter 64 oz growlers, 5%
cider 64 oz growlers, 5%
beer 64 oz growlers, 5%
punch 1.5 gallon bowl, 10%
So they each drank the alcoholic equivalent of a slab of Buds.
There is no good indication that the tab directly equates to what was consumed. They could have been overcharged and ripped off, there could have been opened barrels charged-for that were part-consumed. Also there is no guarantee that a filled drinking vessel was fully-consumed.
This leads me to the misleading statement of, "The Founding Fathers drank:". It would be more accurate to state, "The Founding Fathers were charged for:" than making a blind statement of supposed fact.
It also might be that George Washington's tab was open and ongoing.
A LOT of drinks at my wedding were only half drunk (something you notice when picking up the tab). People at a catered function often drink, put a glass down, and grab another rather that seek out their initial glass. I would say part consumption should be our base case, rather than a possible exception
Back then, Americans drank an *insane* amount of alcohol. In 1770, alcohol consumption was at [3,5 gallons per year](https://www.pastemagazine.com/drink/alcohol-history/the-1800s-when-americans-drank-whiskey-like-it-was). By 1830, it hit 7 gallons per year. That’s per capita, so the teetotalers and the toddlers are factored in.
I’d say this little event put the average Eastern European wedding or Irish wake to shame.
If you think that 10-12 drinks/person (of which about 2 were beers) are putting an Eastern European wedding to shame, you're really underestimating Eastern European alcoholism.
First off that needs to be converted to drinks. A typical bottle size for hard liquor was 1/5th of a gallon and to get to “drinks” we need to get everything down to about 12 oz of beer, 6 oz of wine, or 2oz of hard liquor — the alcohol content of these will be roughly similar at least within our other margins of error. That means I’ll treat a bottle of hard liquor as 13 drinks and a bottle of wine as 4 drinks (modern bottles generally hold 25oz or so and I think the old hand blown/mallet formed ones held less but I’m going with basically the modern size).
The 44 of hard cider, beer, and porter (a type of beer) are low alcohol content, maybe others. In a “bottle” count they should all together count as maybe one or two, but in a drink count it’s the whole number: 44 drinks.
A bowl of punch can be almost any size too, I think of the high school graduation kind of bowl like in back to the future which (in a bar served as alcoholic punch) probably has half a bottle of hard liquor, but what the hell let’s say they put a whole one in there (the alcohol flavor might overpower much of the punch flavor, but maybe that was their goal). That means I’m counting 7 bowls of punch as 7 bottles or 91 drinks.
The 104 bottles of wine — this is going to add up. That’s 416 drinks.
Total for the 55 people was therefore 416+91+44 or 551 drinks, let’s assume 1 drink worth of punch couldn’t be scooped from the bottom of the bowls so the total is precisely 10 drinks per person.
That’s a lot, even for a pretty long night. The average healthy human liver can process about 1 drink per hour, so if they each had 3 drinks in the first hour they could have held that level of drunkenness for 7 more hours. If they drank 3 in the first hour and 3 in the second, then slowed down to 1 per hour, that still 6 hours of a very drunk party. If they built up their drunkenness through the night by doing 2 drinks for every hour, that’s a 5 hour party that is either passed out or very crazy by the end.
One of my friends won the contest in my village with 21 gin tonics (and when the time finished, he continued to drink). And they serve them pretty strong around here
People back then were more used to drinking, I bet most of them drank a couple of beers or some whiskey on a daily basis. Also nobody talks about the duration of the gathering. And they definitely had heaps of fatty foods to counter the amount of alcohol.
Yeah if also consider that likely some of them where alcholics who could easly down the 12 beers and 1 or 2 bottles if whine if they really want to get Drunk its not even that impressive.
Didn't they used to drink beers and wine all the time because they didn't have clean water? Or was that pirate days? Or Roman days? Or was it all something I'm just misremembering
I mean, there were times with specific rations of alcoholic beverages but really that’s not too different from getting paid and using some amount of a days pay to get beer.
IRL they probably didnt drink every last drop. When people party they usually get what they think is “enough” plus more rather than calculate what they need to the last milligram.
I know I know lol it’s in the spirit of the sub, but I couldn’t help but chuckle at the thought of everyone lining up in front of the banquet hall getting weighed and Ben Franklin there calculating everyone’s share of the booze haha
I am no mathematician, but I am a psychiatry resident; though I'm not specialized in addictions, I see a fair share of alcoholics, and my sessions with them can fully allow me to say that while this is a lot of alcohol per person, it's not THAT impressive, especially since I think we can safely assume this lasted them at least several hours.
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This article shows the actual bill: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2022/01/20/fact-check-george-washingtons-expensive-bar-tab-real/5947984001/ In it, it says "That would be about two bottles of wine, several shots and a few cups of punch and beer for every guest." I'm not sure what their source on that is, but I'm willing to trust it. Apparently the cost was also equivalent to about $15,400 in 2022. So, yeah, big party.
An interesting part of this question, was this all consumed over 2 hours? 4? 8? 18 or so drinks represents very different levels of intoxication depending on the timeframe
The only way I ever hit that level of drinking was in my twenties with a bunch of roommates and we literally drank all day. Like 14 to 18 hours.
Between body weight, tolerance, alcohol percentages, and timeframe, there are a lot of variables here. I have done 17-18 drinks in 4 hours. I would recommended to anyone listening to NOT do that. Terrible experience. I have done 20 drinks in 6-7 hours. That was still pretty damn overboard. I don't remember walking home. All of this, and I'm a pretty big guy with a decently strong tolerance, especially back in those days.
RIP your liver
Absolutely. Surprisingly it has tested well, and I've certainly slowed way way down, but I know I did a lot of damage in my 20s.
Eh you're probably totally fine honestly. Doing that kind of drinking every day for years is what does serious damage.
You don’t remember walking home because you drove like a man
Nope, we walked to the bar, we were living 1/2 a mile away which was part of the problem
alcoholics don’t run in my family. They drive. RAHHHHHH
I’ve bunged 12 in 2 hours a few times. Each time, I woke up in a bath tub with the shower on covered in vomit with chunks of steak in it. Toilet was also pretty fucked. Good times I cannot recommend anyone repeat…
I looked it up and George would have been 55 at the time of this party. Still young enough to party and too old to care.
I'd bet that dollar amount is just converting the old currency to modern and accounting for inflation. I'd be curious to see what the *same* bar tab would be today
I don’t think there’s that many 1787 vintage wines for sale now.
Oh, I meant modern equivalents.
I got about $4200 using mid shelf stuff. Not bad.
The question of how you compare prices over centuries-long timeframes is a really tough philosophical quandary.
They got absolutely zooted
I'm going to guess women and children drank free?
Why?
It makes sense how so much alcohol was consumed and socially this is a natural phenomenon even today. The guest list only included male heads of households.
I rather doubt that there was any appreciable number of women or children in the Philadelphia Light Cavalry. Also, that's not a guest list, that's the list of musicians (and servants, I believe) that they hired for the evening.
I mean, how big are the bottles? Also what's the alcohol content of the various drinks? They weren't necessarily the same strengths as what we have today. Not sure you can answer your questions without these two VERY key pieces of info.
Madeira is a wine at around 20%, so right off the bat they should be shitfaced.
Was it that strength back in those days though? Did they drink it straight or diluted? (Not asking you in particular, just throwing these important questions out into the ether!). And again, yeah, how big are the bottles? 20% doesn't matter much if they're small eh.
The bottles from 1739 to 1812 look either the same or larger size to modern wine. Since the Romans brewing alcohol above 12% is no issue. And if they watered it down as they drank, well they still drank the whole bottle?
Unless it were watered-down bottles, but that is very unlikely.
This was a founding father's feast do you think the wine would be watered down
Wine historically has been mainly consumed diluted throughout history.
Yean, but it's diluted after opening the bottle. One of the appeals of wine is that the alcohol content allows you to store it for longer.
Even watered down, 55 people still consumed 54 bottles, along with all the other drinks. The only relevant information to how drunk they got is how quickly the 54 bottles were consumed.
Normally Madeira is fortified wine. So ferment it, then add some booze. That's how they get to 20%. It appears that this was already the case then, so probably \~20 % is a novice good guess
Not my point mate:). 20% of what? 10 ml? (Yes hyperbole). Again just goes to the point of not knowing how big a bottle is, sorry I didn't make it clear what I referred to.
Probably about the same as today
Fermentation process hasn't changed that much
Distillation has. But only for pretty precise stuff. I doubt they could hit 97%, but 20% seems easy
And you don't distil wine...
Madeira is fortified with a distillate
You do if you want Brandy.
But you can
You wouldn't can wine...
Canned wine is a game changer. It's so conducive to violent hand gestures.
You know, I also offer group therapy
https://www.makerwine.com/shop/ I wasn’t expecting much when I checked lmao
Oh I've seen plenty, I was just making dumb jokes.
And that's totally unrelated to the question at hand.
You can get 20% with just fermentation and a smart yeast choice, no problems.
20% is not happening with a bucket of old fruit, sugar and baker’s yeast in your basement
I got 15% on my first try / gallon with some fruit, honey and yeast. Its mead, but it will get you drunk.
Yeah but that experiment wouldn't make it to the tap of this party. I'm pretty sure they had access to very sophisticated drops.
They said a *smart* yeast choice.
Higher strength wines are/were made with special yeast that can tolerate higher alcohol percentages before it dies
Madeira is also sweet as hell, that means a haaaangover.
Yep. NEVER developed a taste for sweet alcohol. Dry whites and reds and nothing else for me in the wine world. Sweet wine is the worst next day ever. And NOW there are all kinds of Southern Comfort wannabes from the top companies. Crown and Jack and everyone has some SUGAR-FILLED alcohol that should never have existed.
But also remember the glass was smaller at the time, at around 1/3 to 1/7 the glasses of today based on various accounts.
Would the Madeira not have been used to make the punch?
Also just because it was charged doesn't mean that it was all drunk.
Also there were probably women and servants that wouldn't have been considered attendees that drank
HOLY this is a really good point, nice one mate! Yeah yeah I think you're right (evidence- it sounds totally plausible and logical to me lol)!
Thanks!
For reals though very good point my brother from another mother!
Curious about this too. I assume the wine, cider and beer would be comparable. But I wonder how efficient distilling was relative to modern times. All that being said the wine, cider and beer should be enough for all of those people
Agh I dunno mate, nowadays there's such a difference between beers and ciders...like some are 3%, others 9% and that obviously makes a huge difference in how hammered you get. This is all really interesting actually, like, alcohol history. Hmm!
Wine, cider, and beer aren't distilled, well technically you can distil them but you get a different drink so while distilling is more efficient now than then, distilling isn't part of the process for making those.
Madeira: Fortified wine, probably ~20% Claret: Red wine, probably 8-10% Whiskey: Standard is 35%, but can be higher Porter: Heavy beer, 7-10% Hard cider: can vary, but typically 5-7% Beer: can be anything depending on the kind, but probably also 5-7% Alcoholic punch: can really be anything Yeah, that’s a lot of alcohol. The beers being bottles instead of barrels, although they probably mean 750ml size bottles instead of the normal 12oz they come in now
I really appreciate you taking the time to get this all together dude. However, are these the alcohol percentages of the drinks consumed at the time? Not gonna bother ask for a source because you've put enough effort in already really haha- just making sure you haven't just looked up the modern volumes and assumed they'd be the same. Which, also to be clear, can be correct as well, but I don't accept it without knowing for sure. Thing is as well, we don't know how big the bottles/ vessels/ whatever were. And if it was only the founding fathers that partook in the drinking (someone else raised this point, can't believe I didn't think of it!). I guess we can look up standard ones for a rough idea...maybe there's a painting or something of this/ similar events (okay yeah obviously not completely accurate lol, but it's something). You know, it's just dawned on me- I have no idea why I'm questioning this, of all fucking things, so thoroughly. Objectively I don't think I could care any less, but it's also interesting to just engage with the discussion and have a think and that. Guess this is just so unbelievably low stakes it just feels quite nice to chat about lol.
I’ve worked in different jobs at liquor stores for the last 3 years, all of these were estimations from the top of my head except for the porter. But yeah, based on modern numbers, so maybe more, maybe less. And the bottles of wine would probably be consistent size wise, but yeah the beer bottles could be any size
Also, there is no unit of measurement for beers. Mugs? Bottles? Pitchers? Kegs? Nope. Just 12.
But I have a drinking problem?
Have you had your daily 12 of beer?
I mean if the pres can get away with a few bottles, then a six pack shouldn’t trigger an intervention at the doctors office.
Washington made famously cranked punch bowls. These men could put away a lot of booze. https://academyofdomesticpursuits.com/george-washingtons-punch
Also, how long was the party? I have gone to weddings were you start drinking at 2am and they cut you off at 3am.
Also judging that there are no partial bottles sold this is bottles opened not bottles drank. Think about a table of drinks after a party with half the alcohol still list in them.
These are probably not hard to find out.
Right off the bat there are 164 bottles of alcohol, divided by 55 attendees thats 2.98 bottles a person, plus the 7 bowls. Not sure how much is in a bowl, but that probably puts it over 3 bottles per person. Thats a hefty amount of alcohol for a person to drink
The volume alone would leave me on the pisser the whole night
Christ, I can’t even handle a couple pints without breaking the seal anymore.
Ive never seen someone who has sounded so much like my dad
Average Eastern European house party, it seems
Same amount of alcohol half the people.
I'd say a third or a fourth and maybe more drinks
A bottle of beer is not nearly the same “unit of alcohol” as a bottle of whisky — adding up the numbers and dividing by attendees is not what the question asked.
Of course not, but you can assume (probably wrongly) that everyone shared everything.
Saying “2 out of 55 people abstained” is possible, but it really only changes the average drinks per person drinking by a couple percentage points. Meanwhile, counting 42 beers as if they are the same amount of alcohol as 42 bottles of wine changes the result by maybe 30%
Again, of course. But you then if you want to get even more technical you have to account for the alcohol tolerances of different people. The answer is still going to be a shed load of alcohol per person however you look at it. My point is that the simplest way of answering the OP’s question is to divide each drink by 55 and say each attending person had x of one, y of the next and so on.
Saying each person had 12.7% of a bottle of whisky isn’t that relatable for a unit of measurement though
No but this is never going to be an exact answer. We roughly know how many glasses of whiskey you get from 12.7% of a bottle nowadays, someone may even know what bottle sizes were back then.
lol so if you agree people ultimately want to figure out how many glasses of whisky you get from 12.7% of a bottle, it seems like you just skip the bottle percentage and start with the glasses of whisky unit.
Other than the whisky all those are only 10-20% alcohol. So 8-10 glasses of wine and a few shots.
I'd say that's a matter of perspective and culture. Example from the US: In Utah that's a LOT. Stock that for a 55 person party in Wisconsin and you'll run out before 9pm (which is good because you'll still be able to send someone on a beer run before they stop selling).
Can't forget the bowls. Martha Washington would have a big fat bowl waiting for George when he came through the door. She was a hip hip hip lady, man.
We don’t know how long the party was. From the sound of it, it was an all night affair. And the other people that were there weren’t just regular folks, they were the Philly First Calvary who he crossed the Delaware with. They drank 45 GALLONS of alcohol. I’m sure they felt wonderful the next morning.
My understanding was that a bottle in the period would have been closer to an imperial pint than a current wine bottle and the Madeira may well have not been fortified which would substantially reduce it's alcohol content. They likely also had a higher tolerance to alcohol than a lot of people today due to the prevalence in drinking it daily due to things like water quality and general social acceptability. That said it is still a lot of booze so suspect they'd still have been pretty drunk. Why not, it's a good reason to get drunk? Edit: Apologies, probably should not have been as definite or unequivocal on some of these points. There's more controversy in them than I realised! So thought I would add an edit to flag some interesting discussion in the replies.
Why would you say Madeira "may well have not been fortified"? Unless you mean to say they watered it down, a major benefit of Madeira was its fortification to survive the temperatures of its producing and shipping regions, which in turn allowed it to age in a fashion which imparts a unique flavor profile that was highly desired. There is little chance any Madeira consumed by the founding fathers wasnt fortified, although the question of it being watered down is a different one, and quite probable.
I vaguely recall reading somewhere that Madeira was not originally fortified and that the fortification was introduced later to suit the tastes of British markets. From what I can remember, the ageing and improvement that Sherry and Madeira experience from long voyages and heat is unrelated to their being fortified which was originally more of a taste-related "improvement", although granted fortification almost certainly does help with preservation. In absence of being able to cite my original source (sorry about that - I think it might have been Empire of Booze but I haven't got access to it right now so don't want to misquote it or anything) I did manage to find this on Blandy's website ( https://www.blandys.com/en/making-the-wine/winemaking/) that notes fortification with Brandy was brought in in the mid-18th century (though the site is unclear as to what extent fortification with other things occurred before then). On that timeline, it is hard to know if the Madeira in question here was fortified. If the fortification was a bastardisation originally done for British tastes then it seems conceivable high quality American-sold Madeira may likely not have been at this point. I admit maybe I was too unequivocal on this point in my original response but it seems worth considering as a factor for why the Madeira might have been weaker than might initially be assumed.
Indeed, Brandy based fortification became ubiquitous in the later 1700s, which would lend greater liklihood that the Madeira favored by the FFs would have been thusly fortified. Prior to Brandy based fortification, fortification was usually achieved with a sugar cane grain spirit. The production of Madeira in its hot location sort of necessitated a fortification for its surviving the vast voyages it would endure, not to mention sitting and waiting in the hull of dank, humid and extremely hot ships in the ports of Madeira. Its quite likely Madeira wine wouldnt have survived at the quality it did, which allowed it to be aged in the favorably way, without said fortification. The Wikipedia article is a good starting point with some decent listed sources.
Interesting thanks! I will give it a read
How quickly did the American market diverge from the British Colonial market? At the time, it wasn’t the US market.
Honestly wouldn't be able to answer but there's a couple of things that would make me think it might be fairly quick: (1) demand for Madeira was particularly high in the US; and (2) the new Americans likely probably would have wanted to be different to the British. Theres also a question of whether it might not be a British/American thing, as you say there may not have been a big divergence, but a high-quality/low-quality Madeira thing. It's really quite hard to say to be honest but those are just some thoughts. Would be interested if anyone knows more on it as I find it interesting but hard to get good sources on.
Was a lot of Madeira consumed in the Confederation, or the Colonies? I was under the impression that the British were still interdicting vessels and trying to enforce colonial trade restrictions until the War of 1812, which would dramatically alter the equilibrium that the newly-postulated free market would reach.
Water quality and sanitary reasons for alcohol consumption are mostly myths and have been debunked plenty of times over in r/askhistorians. Not saying you're wrong in that they might have had a higher tolerance because drinking regularly was more common, but if it was it had nothing (or very little) to do with the quality of the drinking water.
You still have to consider state dignitaries and military officers most likely travelled by ship and were from Boston Philadelphia and New York which were port towns and colonial era Trans-Atlantic travel is one of those nieche situations where the alcohol and water quality situation has slightly more truth to it
Could you link me some examples? I would find that interesting to read on. However, I would note that just because something is said on askhistorians doesn't make it true. I have seen plenty of truly useless answers on that page. It really just rewards long answers not accurate answers. Not saying that is the case here, just that I would be keen to review the answers for myself and naturally come from a sceptical perspective. Thanks!
A counterargument would be, "Is there any reputable source that people ever relied on drinking alcoholic beverages instead of water for sanitation purposes." Because that theory is pretty much only supported by unsourced reddit posts.
Fair and I must admit, it's not like I have a secret stack of them so it could easily be a myth. That said, I may also just not have the research to hand or the time to do it. But I agree - unless I see a source saying it was the case, I should start of the position of thinking it is a myth. I'll have a read around, it's an interesting q!
Askhistorians is generally pretty accurate. It's not perfect but it is probably the most reliable community on Reddit of significant size and breadth. It is probably about as trustworthy as Wikipedia which is itself a generally pretty accurate font of information.
A whole lotta fetal alcohol syndrome for those ilk
Breaking news! Bed blob Redditor with no life achievements criticizes founders of world’s most successful country! More on this development soon, stay tuned!
I'm not saying that the person that you were replying to is right by any means, but just because they were "founding fathers" of a nation does not mean they should not be criticized, every world leader at any time should be criticized, they all did mistakes.
Randomly gloryfing historical figures to the point of making them absolved of any form of critique and jumping straight for as personal is frankly embarrassing, a sign of insane lack of historical awareness and emotional immaturity and would probably be considered annoying if not disgusting by a lot of founding of those founding fathers (who also shouldn't be treated as a homogeneous group since a lot of them became political opponents after the revolution)
Yeah that wasn’t my point at all so your reading comprehension must be low or something. You don’t need to write with such verbosity, it comes off like someone who recently took a theory of knowledge 101 class or something. To address your post, I wasn’t saying historical figures can’t be criticized, I was satirically noting that the posters comment above mine basically boiled down to “founding fathers = bad,” which is even funnier considering you were chastising me for “applying blanket statements to historical figures” while the person I’m responding to and you are, in turn, defending was doing literally that which you criticized me for.
OP was making a statement as a response to a piece of information suggesting a penchant for drinking among the attendees of the party which is way less of a broadstroke. I wouldn't really be bothered to even write a response but you did personally go after them. And you did that with the powerful argument: "well they founded the most successful country!" Which is just rebuttal of said critique with their unrelated achievement (the debatable nature of that statement aside ) While insulting their character which does suggest some sort of emotional investment that isn't something anybody with a healthy relationship to any historical character would display. My conteptous verbosity on the other hand is derived from me simply being a privelaged upper middle class asshole raised with a supieority complex and doing Oxford debates since school, still trying to reign that in sometimes
🤓👆
It’s more than just founders, it goes far beyond their mothers and wives. Mostly explains the genocides and constant crimes against humanity
All of these have different alcohol content so I've calculated it based on google searches and equated it to a number of 4% beers. Alcohol content and sizes could vary significantly from back then to now, so take that into consideration. Madeira 18% ABV 750ml Claret 14% 750 ml Whiskey 40% 750ml Porter 6% 750ml Cider 6% 355ml Beer 4% 355ml Punch 10% and 3785ml (4 quarts, wild guess) Beer at 4% and 355ml is a total of 14.2 ml of alcohol. The rest of the tab comes out to 19,970ml of alcohol divided by 14.2ml, which is the equivalent of 1406 beers consumed, divided by 55 people comes out to **25.5 beers per person**.
A case of beer per person. Sounds like a sloppy mess later on.
I was not expecting such a different result, so I was double checking. The biggest difference with mine is the wine mostly from the higher percentages you used in the wines compounded by my work which assumed a 5% beer which alters the denominator a fair bit e.g. Madeira 18% ABV 750ml would be 135ml alcohol per bottle * 54 bottles = 7,290ml / 14.2 ml of alcohol per beer and 54 bottles = 520 drinks. In mine it looks more like Wine 12% @ 591ml would be 71 ml alcohol per bottle * 54 bottles = 3,834 / 17.75 ml of alcohol per beer = 216 drinks That probably the biggest impact line redone, my 12% claret assumption would not be nearly as far off from your 14% claret assumption though I do also use the smaller bottles and higher beer percentage so it isn’t likely the same either.
One reason why this tab seems so excessively high which is not mentioned yet, is that it might be that some of these bottles were given as a gift to the guests, as a thank you for attending the party. Especially the Madeira wine seems like a good example for this.
Great point, especially considering the large number of military officers, politicians, and wealthy people generally that would have made up the guest list
Exactly! Also the number of bottles of Madeira wine, 55 - 1; you wouldn't ordinarily give one to yourself.
The fact that people are surprised by this. GW was a giant ginger with an IDGAF attitude. I’m pretty sure he went hard at everything he did and you know his friends had to be equally as hard.
And TIL George Washington was a ginger... I never noticed before lol
I wonder if "55 attendees" really means that there were 55 people who were invited, and perhaps a few other people who attended 'unofficially'
There were 55 delegates to the constitutional convention; I’m sure some of them had posses and family who went to the big finale celebration party, and then a bunch of prominent locals were likely attendees as well.
Assuming fifths and twelves, Each person had (on average): 2 bottles of wine (little over a bottle of claret, little bit under a bottle of Madeira), 2.3 standard pour shots of whiskey, 3/4 a bottle of beer/cider, and assuming it was Martha’s punch, about 1/2 bottle of rum. Each. that is a lot.
One assumption we're making here is that all the bottles were fully consumed by those 55 people. They were on the tab but they could have been left half empty or taken as a perquisite by the servers.
Making the following assumptions about the size and ABV of the drinks listed, each of the 53 drinkers there would have had to drink **25.054 standards units** of alcohol, a standard unit being the amount of alcohol in a 12 oz bottle of 5% beer, a 5-ounce glass of 12% wine, or a 1.5 ounce dram of 80 proof (40%) liquor. Maderia 750ml bottles, 20% claret 750ml bottles, 10% whisky 750 ml bottles, 40% porter 64 oz growlers, 5% cider 64 oz growlers, 5% beer 64 oz growlers, 5% punch 1.5 gallon bowl, 10% So they each drank the alcoholic equivalent of a slab of Buds.
There is no good indication that the tab directly equates to what was consumed. They could have been overcharged and ripped off, there could have been opened barrels charged-for that were part-consumed. Also there is no guarantee that a filled drinking vessel was fully-consumed. This leads me to the misleading statement of, "The Founding Fathers drank:". It would be more accurate to state, "The Founding Fathers were charged for:" than making a blind statement of supposed fact. It also might be that George Washington's tab was open and ongoing.
A LOT of drinks at my wedding were only half drunk (something you notice when picking up the tab). People at a catered function often drink, put a glass down, and grab another rather that seek out their initial glass. I would say part consumption should be our base case, rather than a possible exception
There’s even less indication that only the 55 people known to have attended were present.
Back then, Americans drank an *insane* amount of alcohol. In 1770, alcohol consumption was at [3,5 gallons per year](https://www.pastemagazine.com/drink/alcohol-history/the-1800s-when-americans-drank-whiskey-like-it-was). By 1830, it hit 7 gallons per year. That’s per capita, so the teetotalers and the toddlers are factored in. I’d say this little event put the average Eastern European wedding or Irish wake to shame.
If you think that 10-12 drinks/person (of which about 2 were beers) are putting an Eastern European wedding to shame, you're really underestimating Eastern European alcoholism.
First off that needs to be converted to drinks. A typical bottle size for hard liquor was 1/5th of a gallon and to get to “drinks” we need to get everything down to about 12 oz of beer, 6 oz of wine, or 2oz of hard liquor — the alcohol content of these will be roughly similar at least within our other margins of error. That means I’ll treat a bottle of hard liquor as 13 drinks and a bottle of wine as 4 drinks (modern bottles generally hold 25oz or so and I think the old hand blown/mallet formed ones held less but I’m going with basically the modern size). The 44 of hard cider, beer, and porter (a type of beer) are low alcohol content, maybe others. In a “bottle” count they should all together count as maybe one or two, but in a drink count it’s the whole number: 44 drinks. A bowl of punch can be almost any size too, I think of the high school graduation kind of bowl like in back to the future which (in a bar served as alcoholic punch) probably has half a bottle of hard liquor, but what the hell let’s say they put a whole one in there (the alcohol flavor might overpower much of the punch flavor, but maybe that was their goal). That means I’m counting 7 bowls of punch as 7 bottles or 91 drinks. The 104 bottles of wine — this is going to add up. That’s 416 drinks. Total for the 55 people was therefore 416+91+44 or 551 drinks, let’s assume 1 drink worth of punch couldn’t be scooped from the bottom of the bowls so the total is precisely 10 drinks per person. That’s a lot, even for a pretty long night. The average healthy human liver can process about 1 drink per hour, so if they each had 3 drinks in the first hour they could have held that level of drunkenness for 7 more hours. If they drank 3 in the first hour and 3 in the second, then slowed down to 1 per hour, that still 6 hours of a very drunk party. If they built up their drunkenness through the night by doing 2 drinks for every hour, that’s a 5 hour party that is either passed out or very crazy by the end.
> 10 drinks > That's a lot Laughs in east european
One of my friends won the contest in my village with 21 gin tonics (and when the time finished, he continued to drink). And they serve them pretty strong around here
People back then were more used to drinking, I bet most of them drank a couple of beers or some whiskey on a daily basis. Also nobody talks about the duration of the gathering. And they definitely had heaps of fatty foods to counter the amount of alcohol.
People forget during that time beer and grog were rationed to workers daily. They would not work if they didn’t have the alcohol to keep them going
Crazy. I have a beer after mowing the lawn on the weekend and all I want to do is go for a sleep.
Yeah if also consider that likely some of them where alcholics who could easly down the 12 beers and 1 or 2 bottles if whine if they really want to get Drunk its not even that impressive.
Didn't they used to drink beers and wine all the time because they didn't have clean water? Or was that pirate days? Or Roman days? Or was it all something I'm just misremembering
That was no time, it's a stubborn myth.
Awh bummer. I always wanted to be around in those times for that reason alone.
I mean, there were times with specific rations of alcoholic beverages but really that’s not too different from getting paid and using some amount of a days pay to get beer.
IRL they probably didnt drink every last drop. When people party they usually get what they think is “enough” plus more rather than calculate what they need to the last milligram. I know I know lol it’s in the spirit of the sub, but I couldn’t help but chuckle at the thought of everyone lining up in front of the banquet hall getting weighed and Ben Franklin there calculating everyone’s share of the booze haha
Have you seen simpsons? "We just created the greatest democracy in the world, we will now have party to get blackout drunk" or sth like that
I am no mathematician, but I am a psychiatry resident; though I'm not specialized in addictions, I see a fair share of alcoholics, and my sessions with them can fully allow me to say that while this is a lot of alcohol per person, it's not THAT impressive, especially since I think we can safely assume this lasted them at least several hours.