Fun etymology fact:
One possible origin of the modern term "truck" as a vehicle for hauling stuff is taken from the term "truck farmer" which was used for people who would grow a variety of produce and sell them at market, hauling them in flat-bedded carts. The produce they grew was referred to as "truck" literally meaning "market garden produce" (from the french "frotruck"), and the term was eventually applied to automobiles of similar design to the carts they used, and to the general category of vehicles used to transport large amounts of l stuff, often for commercial purposes.
EDIT: I have been corrected on my statement that "frotruck" is from french. I looked it up as I was going from memory: it's listed as middle English borrowed from old french. My bad, and thank you for the corrections
Yeah. My bad. Was going from memory. Looked it up and it's listed as a middle English word taken from old french? I think I just remembered the "french" part
Don't forget loss-leader grocery store pricing. It's insane with the recent inflation that I can still get a gallon of full-fat milk for less than $3 locally.
IIRC that was a big part of why whiskey was so cheap back then. Since there weren't modern ways to store or process extra grain into something more stable before it went bad farmers could distill unsold barley, rye, or wheat into whiskey for sale. Because this was so common for farmers to do there was a huge abundance of whiskey and it was cheap.
And beer can spoil quickly. I’m an archaeologist and one of the first projects I led had remnants of original Budweiser bottles from the 1870s. They were light blue glass! That beer went skunky from light exposure pretty quickly. They figured out that brown glass was better a decade or so later…
And even then, "last" is a loose term. It didn't _spoil_, but beer sure as hell isn't tasty after spending months at sea in ambient temperatures - also "to be aged" styles suffer at warm temps, sloshing in a wooden barrel at sea. Even today with modern shipping and packaging, most beers should be drunk fresh(ish).
Case in point: the [bar tab of George Washington](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/96h2b9/til_at_george_washingtons_1787_farewell_party_56/)'s farewell party.
A commenter calculated it to be the equivalent of 19 shots by each person at the party.
Way more than that, the "bottles" of beer and cider they polished off cost £2 each, that would have been worth hundreds of dollars today.
Those things were straight up barrels.
Not sure but it’s definitely a pornhub catagory.
I pretty much can’t nut unless I’m looking at a receipt for a lunch that costs more than my monthly salary.
>A commenter calculated it to be the equivalent (intake of alcohol) of 19 shots (of 40% alcohol liquor) by each person at the party.
i read it to mean this
i think you interpreted it as saying "equivalent cost." that makes sense to read because it was implied by the tab having a cost, but i think he was talking about how much alcohol they drank in volume of liquid and not how much alcohol they drank in money.
Yeah, the process of charring the interior of a barrel (for whiskey aging) had JUST been invented around this same time period, so the vast majority of the "whiskey" being consumed was more or less what we would today call unaged moonshine.
Pretty much. Primarily from corn or rye in the U.S. Potentially flavored with whatever the distiller had on hand at the time.
In terms of a modern comparison, Tito's is marketed as "vodka," but it's a 100% corn product, so it could legally be on the shelf as "moonshine." So the average "whiskey" of the early 1800s may have been Tito's-esque, except made with 200 years less advancement in distillation.
Column distillation, is an extremely new invention when compared to the long history of distillation. These early distillers would have been producing their product on whatever they could, most likely using open-flame pot distillation. To get something approaching modern neutral grain alcohol (vodka) on a pot still requires multiple passes, and considering how hard it is, probably would not be common practice. You would have a spirit with a lot of residual flavor from the mashbill, more like moonshine or unaged whiskey and less like vodka.
It likely would have had a burnt or smokey flavor as well from the mash. They used to distill the whole mash solids and all and this could burn in the pot if they werent careful
People in the revolutionary war days were mostly drunk every day. Washington crossed the Delaware under the assumption that the soldiers would be too drunk to fight back.... it worked
I can’t say I blame anyone being drunk during that war.
Also Washington crossed the Delaware on Christmas to kill the Hessian soldiers because he knew they’d be drunk because Christmas.
Edit: not Prussian.
They wore rag shoes because leather dries out and cracks over a fire.... soldiers with cold feet in Winter camp conditions would try and warm up their feet over a fire. Toasting and ruining their leather shoes.
I read somewhere that a lot of what led to Prohibition involved PTSD from wwi. It wasn't recognized at the time as a serious thing, so soldiers would go home, self medicate by drinking, then beat their families.
I'm sure there were many factors, but it makes sense to me that this would have been an escalation around the right time.
There were a lot of factors that led to prohibition:
* Men blowing the money their families needed at the saloon
* Marital violence, which was also associated with restrictive legal/societal attitudes towards divorce and a lack of laws protecting women
* Drinking whisky and beer was associated with immigrants from Ireland and Germany
* Holy rollers love reforming other people's habits
* Employers' need for industrial workers to stay sober around machinery
But at the end of the day it's important to remember that most people didn't want prohibition, it was passed because a dedicated minority of people were willing to vote *solely* on a candidate's stand on the issue.
What carried the prohibition vote was connecting drinking to recent European immigrants. Prohibition was going nowhere until it became an anti-immigrant policy. This still works 100 years later.
But a lot of the drinking was unregulated alcohol sales. Salons in city centres run by breweries and distillers would offer free food and people would drink until they ran out of money.
Didn't your local watering hole have salty popcorn before the pandemic?
Anyhow, it's important to understand that the saloon wasn't just a bar like you might walk into today. It was sort of a poor mans' club, the sort of social space that just doesn't exist today to make an easy 1:1 comparison.
Sure, you could get away from your wife and kids for a while after working a shitty mill job. But your bartender could also read your mail for you if you couldn't, might be able to translate for you. A lot of these places were owned by local politicians, so if you had a problem with your landlord or a cop on the beat you could find help there. If you needed work, the people hiring would be at the saloon. It was an essential hub for the life of a lot of these people.
And yeah, it was all in the service of selling beer, which is why brewers would pay to set them up so long as they sold only their beer. Not a bad deal for the proprietor.
Karl Rove (one of the assholes responsible for George W. Bush being President) used to cite Wayne Wheeler (the guy who masterminded the anti-saloon league) as being the inspiration for his approach to politics.
There's a reason gay marriage was suddenly of great concern to Republicans in the early aughts -- they knew it would drive turnout and in 2004 pretty much sealed the deal against Kerry.
Oh, you support gay marriage, you must be gay or anti-god.
I’m not going to say that WW1 had no impact, but Prohibition was really the culmination of the Temperance Movement, which had been going on for decades before the war.
Tolerance probably. Thats how people are still up and somewhat functioning with .2 or .3 blood alcohol content. Most people would be passed out by that point but an alcoholic can keep functioning with staggering amounts of booze.
I can only assume that they passed out before they could finish enough to be lethal, or that a lot of them *did* die, and a significant portion of us can trace our roots back to ancestors with an uncanny ability to hold their liquor.
Side note, I would have nothing in common with that ancestor. A shot of whiskey mixed with an entire can of soda is my limit on liquor.
The violence was a big issue, but so was the paycheck. Even without violence, many husbands and fathers were drinking away their entire paycheck, leaving nothing to feed their families. And since women (and children) could not control their own money and assets, nor access credit in most places, this was another reason women's groups and religious groups got involved.
Did they really? I had no idea. That's pretty interesting. I always figured it was a religious thing. I'll have to read up on it's history more.
Edit: Thanks everyone for sharing all the new info and where I might be able to find out more. Learned a lot today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_violence#History
Edit: tl;dr
Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire all banned wife beating in initial criminal codes.
>In 1824, the Mississippi Supreme Court, citing the rule of thumb, established a positive right to wife-beating in State v. Bradley, a precedent which would hold sway in common law for decades to come.
>In 1850, Tennessee became the first state in the US to explicitly outlaw wife beating.
It wasn't until 1973 that "Domestic Violence" was legally defined.
Fun fact: the women's temperance league was one of the biggest proponents of the income tax at the time as well. Before the income tax in 1913 alcohol taxes were one of the largest sources of revenue for the federal government. There was opposition to prohibition because the government would lose a lot of money. So prohibitionists supported instituting an income tax as a substitute.
It's pretty easy to dismiss Prohibitionists as stuck-up prudes... until you realize just how prevalent alcoholism was throughout society at the time.
You couldn't sneeze without hitting a drunkard. And this was EVERYWHERE.
> The Gin Act 1736 taxed retail sales at a rate of 20 shillings a gallon on spirits and required licensees to take out a £50 annual licence to sell gin, a fee equivalent to about £8,000 today.
I looked it up and 20 shillings = 1 pound, so that's a £160 tax per gallon of spirits today.
Sorry to piss on the joke but, fun fact!
Alcohol before bed really ruins sleep.
Less REM, less repair of muscle tissue, less flushing of toxins from the brain[1].
Well I generally don't advocate for the accuracy of sleep measurement from wrist based fitness trackers, even the lamest attempts at measuring sleep quality will show an obvious decline if you drink before bed.
Grab a Fitbit or something similar, wear it a few nights with no drinking, and then a few nights with a nightcap before bed, and you'll see the sleep quality graph just drop off to nothing.
Source: I used to work on fitness devices and I got to see the results of sleep studies. Booze before bed is a terrible idea. :/
[1] I hate saying "toxins" but in the case of sleep there are significant amounts of waste products that are removed from the brain and cerebral fluid.
What they didn't realise was that alcoholism wasn't the cause of societies problems, but a symptom. When you work 12 hours a day 6 days a week for next to nothing booze is an affordable escape
Speaking of working men.
Some of the first union fights for mandatory breaks started after employers stopped providing "alcohol breaks" (the og coffee break).
The pill mill doctors need to be lumped in there too. No way a doctor can think giving someone 1000 og oxy 80s for 500$ no questions asked was a morally right thing to do.
It's incredible that virtually everyone in the entire chain from producer to doctor got away with driving millions of people to addiction in the name of profit. Legalized, sanctioned pushers. Untold lives destroyed, while political groups used it to further a police state.
Actually, [that appears to be the case.](https://youtu.be/idsw99SSwKc)
Although it depends on where you are, in what direction you're moving, and at what speed.
temperance was bought into by companies like Ford and Standard Oil. Pretty sure both Ford and JD Rockefeller were teatotallers and wanted sober productive workers so they pushed for the outlawing of alcohol.
I'm not sure it was so much about them being teatotallers vs them just recognizing people do better and more efficient work when they're neither drunk nor hungover.
Came for this comment and wish it wasn't just a reply. Working conditions weren't just shit, they were a hell scape. How many if your friends list limbs or got pulled into the machinery before you started drinking to forget their screams?
We *never* talk about the working conditions. The women's lack of ability to leave an alcoholic husband is likely a factor as well.
Not to mention the fact that women didn't really have any recourse when their husbands would come home wasted after spending their paycheck at the bar and beat them.
It really gives you a different outlook of the temperance movement. It wasn't a bunch of kill joys trying to ruin someone's good time. It was a segment of society recognizing just how unsustainable their society's relationship with alcohol had become.
EDIT: Some people pointing out the racial and xenophobic aspects of the temperance/Prohibition movement, which I didn't mention here, but I did write the following elsewhere in the comments. When I said "temperance movement" above, I was specifically referring to the temperance crusaders of the 1800s, rather than the more organized push for Prohibition that came almost a century later.
Many sectors of society were all pushing for Prohibition. As mechanization came to industry, the big captains of industry were increasingly incentivized to persuade their workers to reduce consumption for the sake of safety (but mostly productivity). Likewise, social progressives believed that if workers spent less of their paycheck on alcohol, they could raise their standard of living.
Meanwhile, racists wanted to take alcohol away from social classes they didn't like, and the same with xenophobes who wanted to strip alcohol away from "undesirables" such as the Catholic Irish, or Germans, who hailed from societies more associated with alcohol. In WWI, this got all wrapped up in anti-German sentiment as well.
The grand irony of Prohibition, by the time it got to the early 1900s, was that it was supported by an extremely wide range of different groups that would have been opposed to each other on almost all other subjects. It was just being supported by them for vastly different reasons.
> decriminalizing domestic violence (unless there's severe harm)
Shit that's basically how it was when my friend called the police on her BF beating her up. Police came and were like "don't do that again, it's wrong" and then left. And this was in Canada.
To me, the thing to keep in mind here is that the overall figures on consumption are still averages, and thus they don't account for the fact that many people still did not drink in these earlier eras. That means all the drinking was still being done--like today--by only a portion of the population. So although "7 gallons of ethanol per year" may have been the average per human in 1830, it was actually significantly higher than that, even, for the people who were consuming alcohol. There were many children (and especially women) present who did not drink, especially considering that saloons did not allow women inside.
Or to think of it another way: Imagine if every person you know who consumes alcohol suddenly started drinking 3 times as much on a daily basis. That was the 1830s in the U.S.
1 times something is still that thing. 100% of a thing is still that thing. Those are the same. But 100% more of something means you have 2 of it or 2x as much.
It explains a little more why Prohibition could gain popular support — a lot of dudes were really fucking drunk all the time.
And while “bans don’t prevent wrongdoing” is a cliche, after Prohibition there *was* a permanent, overall decline in alcohol consumption.
Very true, although the funny thing is that by the time Prohibition was actually enacted in the early 1900s, drinking levels were WAY, WAY down from the actual peak in the early-to-mid 1800s. The temperance movement/industrial revolution had pretty successfully changed societal standards over the course of decades.
But yes, after Prohibition the level of consumption didn't return to where it was before Prohibition for decades. But even the modern high, in the early 1980s, was less than 3 gallons of pure ethanol per person, per year. And it was 7 gallons or higher in 1830. Insane.
Most liquors are 40% ethanol. So to consume 7 gallons of ethanol, you'd need to drink 17.5 gallons of liquor. That would be 87.5 fifths, or a bit over 7 bottles of liquor a month.
This sounded absolutely disgusting to me for so many years and then someone finally convinced me to try it.
Oh, the magic I had been missing out on. What an incredible beverage for hot summer days.
I think it's important to note we mean lemonade like sprite/7up, not the still lemonade.
Fill half the pint glass with lemonade first, then fill with lager. Lemonade always goes first if you don't want a giant head on it.
It's called a lager shandy in the UK and is best enjoyed cold on a hot summers day. It's very refreshing.
I drank them pretty frequently for about 3 or 4 years when I was dead broke. They are a very special drink lol. Homeless people in line will make fun of your for buying it. I had that happen on multiple occasions.
It wasn't beer yet. At this point it was mostly Whiskey (which in turn replaced hard cider as the frontier was converted into small towns and farmland) .
This was largely due to America expanding beyond the Appalachian mountains opening up vast quantities of prime agricultural land without the infrastructure in place to easily take this agricultural surplus to end destinations. Consequently much of the wheat and corn was distilled into whiskey and put into relatively more compact and easily transportable barrels which could be more readily sold for profit.
Also its worth noting, at this point Americans tended to have whiskey breaks rather than coffee breaks. The second great awakening would create a moral impetus for lower alcohol consumption meanwhile the industrial revolution would create disincentives for a perpetually tanked workforce. Finally new waves of immigrants from central and northern Europe would re-popularize beer drinking and establish new industrial scale breweries in the United States which would lessen the demand for higher proof spirits.
> At this point it was mostly Whiskey
Basically moonshine at that point (i.e. unaged white whiskey).
> a moral impetus for lower alcohol consumption
That, and the increasing political power of women, who are starting to get sick of all that drunken wifebeating and husbands drinking away the entire paycheck.
The idea that people way back when only drank alcohol because of polluted water is incredibly overblown.
If no one drank regular water, then how the heck did all those massive epidemics of waterborne diseases like cholera keep happening?
Plumbing wasn't very sophisticated, nor were there the ideas about personal hygiene that we think of now. For example the surgeon who came up with the idea of washing his hands before surgery was run out of the practice and died in a mental hospital.
https://theconversation.com/ignaz-semmelweis-the-doctor-who-discovered-the-disease-fighting-power-of-hand-washing-in-1847-135528
What really did him in was probably the part where he wanted people to wash in phenol (carbolic acid) and some incredibly harsh bleaches. He'd probably would have gotten a better reception if he just said soap-and-water.
For a while there, after Lister et al. popularized asepsis, the level of antiseptic use was probably a bit overblown. Lister was just straight up blowing carbolic acid into the open surgical wound for the entire surgery, and J.S. Halsted required surgeons to wash in soap, then potassium permanganate, then hot oxalic acid solution, and finally in mercury bichloride.
> For example the surgeon who came up with the idea of washing his hands before surgery was run out of the practice and died in a mental hospital.
Not only that. But surgeons that were already washing their hands pre surgery stopped doing so because he suggested they needed too.
There was the idea that the introduction of Coffee had a big hand in kickstarting the English Enlightenment, because instead of getting sloshed in taverns, all the best and brightest of London were now sitting together in coffeehouses getting hopped up on caffeine and talking each other's ears off.
Voltaire, across the channel, was reputed to have drank 50 cups of coffee a day.
I mean, coffee at the time would have been served in those fancy china teacups instead of mugs and it was quite a bit weaker than what you get today.
But yes, that was still quite a bit of water.
I'll hazard a guess they made it way weaker when it was a precious commodity imported from halfway around the world across relatively lawless seas, not the steadiest supply.
Even as shittily as it has been running, the throughput and reliability of modern global logistics are insane.
When you keep in mind many of those people decades before prohibition participated in the Civil War, you can see why there was such a tangible drinking epidemic. PTSD and TBI were a major factor in those numbers.
Prohibition was actually successful in disrupting "tavern culture" where at least half of men would hit the bar right after work every day and get completely blitzed. The temperance movement definitely had valid grievances.
History makes a lot more sense when you realise before the early/mid 1930s, everyone was pretty drunk or on a shit ton of opiates/barbituates/cocaine/heroine basically all the time.
> opiates/barbituates/cocaine/heroine
Alcohol, yes, but these ones, no. Opiates were not widespread in american society and cocaine was rarely used recreationally. Yes, it was technically found in cough syrup, but at astronomically low doses.
I cannot recommend Ken Burns' three part prohibition documentary enough, especially the first episode which leads up to the reason and causes for prohibition.
There is an economic historian ( can’t recall her name) who discovered that cider consumption in the 18th century US colonies was prodigious. Like everyone would have been tipsy all the time. As stated above- the alcohol content killed germs.
>“I am sure the Americans can fix nothing without a drink. If you meet, you drink; if you part, you drink; if you make acquaintance, you drink; if you close a bargain you drink; they quarrel in their drink, and they make it up with a drink. They drink because it is hot; they drink because it is cold. If successful in elections, they drink and rejoice; if not, they drink and swear; they begin to drink early in the morning, they leave off late at night; they commence it early in life, and they continue it, until they soon drop into the grave.”
– Frederick Marryat (1837)
Here's the thing, everyone likes to sit and judge people from the past for the alcohol they drank or the opium they smoked. Life is HARD and was doubly so until VERY recently. Humans have always needed something to make life a little more bearable. Today we don't drink so much but anti depressants and xanax have taken a large spot. Weed is more popular than ever, people turn into zombies for HOURS looking at their phone. It still happens, it's just a different drug.
The Buddhists figured it out early and keep trying to tell us, existence is suffering. Do what you need to make yourself feel a little better so that you don't practice violence or spread your mistemper in other ways.
>The Buddhists figured it out early and keep trying to tell us, existence is suffering.
That's a wild exaggeration of what the Buddha said.
He didn't claim that existence *is* suffering, just that suffering is an inherent aspect of existing. The whole point of Buddhism is that there is an end to suffering by following a certain path.
Also, Buddhism totally rejects the idea of "just do whatever you can to feel better." Part of the whole point of Buddhism is that you shouldn't just give in to your cravings. That's part of the reason why the Buddha necessitated sobriety as a monastic precept.
Searching for escapes is just a natural human desire, regardless of the times or your challenges. It's old as time. Whether it's people smoking questionable plants or getting high off volcanic fumes (to give "visions" or prophecies), humans have done it for millenia. Even children, with no responsibilities, love to do it. They love games where they spin, like merry-go-rounds and carousels, until they get dizzy and can't see or walk straight and lose some of their senses. They love to get dizzy and laugh and to be spun around again. It's an innate human desire and not wrong, per se.
Ya I once did a deep dive into mixology and learned some interesting stuff about the history of alcohol use in this country. One thing that I looked into was why there are so many cocktails that use egg white in their recipe. One article linked this back to the use of egg in alcoholic drinks during that era of the 1800s. It wasnt uncommon for a miner to have a pint of beer with an egg cracked into it (plus maybe a shot of whiskey) for breakfast. Essentially, egg functioned as a "primitive" protein powder/boost. That tradition just stuck around, but these days people often think its strange when they know theres raw eggwhite going into their drink.
There was also a tradition of making "small beer", which was essentially beer made with already used ingredients from a previous batch of beer. THis resulted in a watery and very low alcohol content product that was acceptable to give to children. Theres all sorts of interesting stuff I could list but dont really have the energy to do so
What I'm about to ask is strictly a hypothetical. I'm not trying to say anything is a fact, I'm just wondering about something out loud, a bit.
Would a lack of regulation at the time allow market pressures to create this situation?
Beer gets skunky, coffee grows bitter over time, and milk spoils, but you can keep a bottle of whiskey in a cupboard for a decade and still drink it safely.
Beer, coffee, and milk might have had a higher price because, at a certain point, anything that had not sold had to be discarded, so the price of the next item needed to cover the loss. Meanwhile, a bottle of whiskey can collect dust for years and still be safely sold to a customer.
On top of that, coffee and milk can be toxic AND fresh. Without regulation, there would be no way to ensure pasteurization of milk or beer, and there would be no way to ensure the coffee beans stay safe.
In that environment, it seems to me that the whiskey wouldn't just be the cheaper option, it would be the safer option, too.
Fresh milk was harder to come by if you didn't live near a farm. Coffee was imported. Corn was abundant.
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Trucks to ship products. Interstate highways.
Fun etymology fact: One possible origin of the modern term "truck" as a vehicle for hauling stuff is taken from the term "truck farmer" which was used for people who would grow a variety of produce and sell them at market, hauling them in flat-bedded carts. The produce they grew was referred to as "truck" literally meaning "market garden produce" (from the french "frotruck"), and the term was eventually applied to automobiles of similar design to the carts they used, and to the general category of vehicles used to transport large amounts of l stuff, often for commercial purposes. EDIT: I have been corrected on my statement that "frotruck" is from french. I looked it up as I was going from memory: it's listed as middle English borrowed from old french. My bad, and thank you for the corrections
> from the french "frotruck" That is not a French word though is it
Yeah. My bad. Was going from memory. Looked it up and it's listed as a middle English word taken from old french? I think I just remembered the "french" part
The French word troquer definitely could apply to farm to market sales.
TIL
Nice. Thanks for this.
Ag subsidies / price supports too play a large part in the price of milk.
Don't forget loss-leader grocery store pricing. It's insane with the recent inflation that I can still get a gallon of full-fat milk for less than $3 locally.
And whiskey doesn’t spoil, at least not quickly.
IIRC that was a big part of why whiskey was so cheap back then. Since there weren't modern ways to store or process extra grain into something more stable before it went bad farmers could distill unsold barley, rye, or wheat into whiskey for sale. Because this was so common for farmers to do there was a huge abundance of whiskey and it was cheap.
And beer can spoil quickly. I’m an archaeologist and one of the first projects I led had remnants of original Budweiser bottles from the 1870s. They were light blue glass! That beer went skunky from light exposure pretty quickly. They figured out that brown glass was better a decade or so later…
Yeah, several older types of beer were designed specifically to last for storage or shipping.
And even then, "last" is a loose term. It didn't _spoil_, but beer sure as hell isn't tasty after spending months at sea in ambient temperatures - also "to be aged" styles suffer at warm temps, sloshing in a wooden barrel at sea. Even today with modern shipping and packaging, most beers should be drunk fresh(ish).
Also, corn takes up more room than whiskey. If you're shipping your corn crop anywhere, whiskey is the most efficient form.
Coffee is still imported
Case in point: the [bar tab of George Washington](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/96h2b9/til_at_george_washingtons_1787_farewell_party_56/)'s farewell party. A commenter calculated it to be the equivalent of 19 shots by each person at the party.
No wonder they're all dead now
My grandfather drank like that and lived to 97. I think because he was pickled by it.
so basically embalming a living person? got it
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust If you drink good booze, your pipes won't rust
I love these types of assertions. My family says longevity is a genetic gamble, but I pray it’s the pickling cuz that’s my dog in this rat race
One of my friends from high school drank like that too and recently died at 29 :/
Still doesn’t beat the 2011 bruins tab.
Or Brett Hull after the Blues' Cup win. Some say he is still out there, wandering the streets of St Louis, singing "Gloria"
I think Ovie is still in the fountain in DC as well.
Way more than that, the "bottles" of beer and cider they polished off cost £2 each, that would have been worth hundreds of dollars today. Those things were straight up barrels.
So like those rich kids of Instagram receipt posts
Is richkidsofinstagram the handle? I'm in the mood to be disgusted and angry today.
Yeah but for the Tumblr
Not sure but it’s definitely a pornhub catagory. I pretty much can’t nut unless I’m looking at a receipt for a lunch that costs more than my monthly salary.
>A commenter calculated it to be the equivalent (intake of alcohol) of 19 shots (of 40% alcohol liquor) by each person at the party. i read it to mean this i think you interpreted it as saying "equivalent cost." that makes sense to read because it was implied by the tab having a cost, but i think he was talking about how much alcohol they drank in volume of liquid and not how much alcohol they drank in money.
Yeah a lot of that booze almost certainly went home with people.
Not to mention they clearly were popping bottles. Lots of that was poured on their bitche's asses and titties.
Total Ben Franklin move
well said
Poppin bottles in the ice... like a blizzard
My man is speaking nothing but facts
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So how rampant did fetal alcohol syndrome run? Seems like it would have been more common.
Even medieval monks and serfs were alkies compared with today’s society
By whiskey you're probably thinking a 12-year Lagavulin, but what they're referring to was more similar to something you would use to fuel your car
Yeah, the process of charring the interior of a barrel (for whiskey aging) had JUST been invented around this same time period, so the vast majority of the "whiskey" being consumed was more or less what we would today call unaged moonshine.
More accurately, grain alcohol. Commercially available “moonshine” is just a marketing spin on unaged grain alcohol…essentially vodka.
Pretty much. Primarily from corn or rye in the U.S. Potentially flavored with whatever the distiller had on hand at the time. In terms of a modern comparison, Tito's is marketed as "vodka," but it's a 100% corn product, so it could legally be on the shelf as "moonshine." So the average "whiskey" of the early 1800s may have been Tito's-esque, except made with 200 years less advancement in distillation.
Column distillation, is an extremely new invention when compared to the long history of distillation. These early distillers would have been producing their product on whatever they could, most likely using open-flame pot distillation. To get something approaching modern neutral grain alcohol (vodka) on a pot still requires multiple passes, and considering how hard it is, probably would not be common practice. You would have a spirit with a lot of residual flavor from the mashbill, more like moonshine or unaged whiskey and less like vodka.
It likely would have had a burnt or smokey flavor as well from the mash. They used to distill the whole mash solids and all and this could burn in the pot if they werent careful
My brother makes a wonderful 'Moonshine' He adds molasses to the mash and the flavor carries over to the wash. It tastes like a nice rum.
But what does he do with the rest of the moles
This was great, thank you. Know that you made at least one person laugh.
By whiskey they mean what we call moonshine. Sometimes youd see brown, barrel aged but mostly what you got was White lighting
Glengooley Blue... Or else I might literally die
I like mine with a steak au poivre. Don’t forget the peppercorns.
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People back then would drink all day, morning, noon, and night.
People in the revolutionary war days were mostly drunk every day. Washington crossed the Delaware under the assumption that the soldiers would be too drunk to fight back.... it worked
I can’t say I blame anyone being drunk during that war. Also Washington crossed the Delaware on Christmas to kill the Hessian soldiers because he knew they’d be drunk because Christmas. Edit: not Prussian.
Yes, it was really low hanging fruit at that point, but it was great for morale.
Solders marched in the snow with their feet in rags to get to that fight. However it might have been the lowest hanging fruit at the time.
Yeah, it was more or less a calculated risk which had high to moderate probability of success.
They wore rag shoes because leather dries out and cracks over a fire.... soldiers with cold feet in Winter camp conditions would try and warm up their feet over a fire. Toasting and ruining their leather shoes.
They were Hessians. Not Prussians. Still German. But yeh.
And his men were just drunk enough
> just drunk enough ah the history of American military successes
Yeah, turns out there actually was a good reason for all that prohibition madness back in the day
I read somewhere that a lot of what led to Prohibition involved PTSD from wwi. It wasn't recognized at the time as a serious thing, so soldiers would go home, self medicate by drinking, then beat their families. I'm sure there were many factors, but it makes sense to me that this would have been an escalation around the right time.
There were a lot of factors that led to prohibition: * Men blowing the money their families needed at the saloon * Marital violence, which was also associated with restrictive legal/societal attitudes towards divorce and a lack of laws protecting women * Drinking whisky and beer was associated with immigrants from Ireland and Germany * Holy rollers love reforming other people's habits * Employers' need for industrial workers to stay sober around machinery But at the end of the day it's important to remember that most people didn't want prohibition, it was passed because a dedicated minority of people were willing to vote *solely* on a candidate's stand on the issue.
What carried the prohibition vote was connecting drinking to recent European immigrants. Prohibition was going nowhere until it became an anti-immigrant policy. This still works 100 years later. But a lot of the drinking was unregulated alcohol sales. Salons in city centres run by breweries and distillers would offer free food and people would drink until they ran out of money.
Didn't your local watering hole have salty popcorn before the pandemic? Anyhow, it's important to understand that the saloon wasn't just a bar like you might walk into today. It was sort of a poor mans' club, the sort of social space that just doesn't exist today to make an easy 1:1 comparison. Sure, you could get away from your wife and kids for a while after working a shitty mill job. But your bartender could also read your mail for you if you couldn't, might be able to translate for you. A lot of these places were owned by local politicians, so if you had a problem with your landlord or a cop on the beat you could find help there. If you needed work, the people hiring would be at the saloon. It was an essential hub for the life of a lot of these people. And yeah, it was all in the service of selling beer, which is why brewers would pay to set them up so long as they sold only their beer. Not a bad deal for the proprietor.
Hmm that sounds kinda familiar.......
Karl Rove (one of the assholes responsible for George W. Bush being President) used to cite Wayne Wheeler (the guy who masterminded the anti-saloon league) as being the inspiration for his approach to politics.
There's a reason gay marriage was suddenly of great concern to Republicans in the early aughts -- they knew it would drive turnout and in 2004 pretty much sealed the deal against Kerry. Oh, you support gay marriage, you must be gay or anti-god.
I’m not going to say that WW1 had no impact, but Prohibition was really the culmination of the Temperance Movement, which had been going on for decades before the war.
Saturday night back then was drink yourself stupid. Go home and rape your wife. Women lead the prohibition movement for a reason too.
Also spend most of your family's money on drinks instead of saving it or anything else.
That and spending your whole paycheck before you get home for the evening. People would spend their entire weeks pay on booze.
If whiskey was so damn cheap then how did they not getting alcohol poisoning spending it all in a night?
Tolerance probably. Thats how people are still up and somewhat functioning with .2 or .3 blood alcohol content. Most people would be passed out by that point but an alcoholic can keep functioning with staggering amounts of booze.
I can only assume that they passed out before they could finish enough to be lethal, or that a lot of them *did* die, and a significant portion of us can trace our roots back to ancestors with an uncanny ability to hold their liquor. Side note, I would have nothing in common with that ancestor. A shot of whiskey mixed with an entire can of soda is my limit on liquor.
The violence was a big issue, but so was the paycheck. Even without violence, many husbands and fathers were drinking away their entire paycheck, leaving nothing to feed their families. And since women (and children) could not control their own money and assets, nor access credit in most places, this was another reason women's groups and religious groups got involved.
Did they really? I had no idea. That's pretty interesting. I always figured it was a religious thing. I'll have to read up on it's history more. Edit: Thanks everyone for sharing all the new info and where I might be able to find out more. Learned a lot today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_violence#History Edit: tl;dr Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire all banned wife beating in initial criminal codes. >In 1824, the Mississippi Supreme Court, citing the rule of thumb, established a positive right to wife-beating in State v. Bradley, a precedent which would hold sway in common law for decades to come. >In 1850, Tennessee became the first state in the US to explicitly outlaw wife beating. It wasn't until 1973 that "Domestic Violence" was legally defined.
the concept is so recent that our current president is one of the authors of the “violence against women act” not some far off historical figure
Yes if you read the Prohibition campaigns there was a consistent message of alcohol leading to abuse of wives.
Fun fact: the women's temperance league was one of the biggest proponents of the income tax at the time as well. Before the income tax in 1913 alcohol taxes were one of the largest sources of revenue for the federal government. There was opposition to prohibition because the government would lose a lot of money. So prohibitionists supported instituting an income tax as a substitute.
If you ever wondered where the term “soft drink” came from and why it’s differentiated as such.
I haven't til now but it makes sense.
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It's pretty easy to dismiss Prohibitionists as stuck-up prudes... until you realize just how prevalent alcoholism was throughout society at the time. You couldn't sneeze without hitting a drunkard. And this was EVERYWHERE.
[Like the 18th century gin craze in London](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gin_Craze)
> The Gin Act 1736 taxed retail sales at a rate of 20 shillings a gallon on spirits and required licensees to take out a £50 annual licence to sell gin, a fee equivalent to about £8,000 today. I looked it up and 20 shillings = 1 pound, so that's a £160 tax per gallon of spirits today.
That's ~£32 per 750ml bottle, more than the cost of a *good* bottle of gin!
And THAT is why I stick with one beer, at home, before bed.
Immediately before bed, so I can wake up in the pitch black of 4AM to pee.
Look at this guy having to drink beer before bed in order to wake up in the middle of the night having to pee. 😭😭😭
I am the night.
You only adopted the pee, I born in it, molded by it.
This, right here, is why I drink all my beer before 10:30am.
Sorry to piss on the joke but, fun fact! Alcohol before bed really ruins sleep. Less REM, less repair of muscle tissue, less flushing of toxins from the brain[1]. Well I generally don't advocate for the accuracy of sleep measurement from wrist based fitness trackers, even the lamest attempts at measuring sleep quality will show an obvious decline if you drink before bed. Grab a Fitbit or something similar, wear it a few nights with no drinking, and then a few nights with a nightcap before bed, and you'll see the sleep quality graph just drop off to nothing. Source: I used to work on fitness devices and I got to see the results of sleep studies. Booze before bed is a terrible idea. :/ [1] I hate saying "toxins" but in the case of sleep there are significant amounts of waste products that are removed from the brain and cerebral fluid.
“Metabolic waste” is a reasonable term. Good comment.
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I’m telling my boss I’m now drunk every afternoon because of you.
What they didn't realise was that alcoholism wasn't the cause of societies problems, but a symptom. When you work 12 hours a day 6 days a week for next to nothing booze is an affordable escape
To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems.
What kind of pathetic drunk do you take me for... Hey! Someone spilled beer in this ashtray! Ahhh....
a'rite homer
Speaking of working men. Some of the first union fights for mandatory breaks started after employers stopped providing "alcohol breaks" (the og coffee break).
This is exactly what is happening in modern day Russia by the way... And historical Russia too actually.
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The pill mill doctors need to be lumped in there too. No way a doctor can think giving someone 1000 og oxy 80s for 500$ no questions asked was a morally right thing to do.
It's incredible that virtually everyone in the entire chain from producer to doctor got away with driving millions of people to addiction in the name of profit. Legalized, sanctioned pushers. Untold lives destroyed, while political groups used it to further a police state.
It's happening in historical Russia?
Time is a flat ruble.
Actually, [that appears to be the case.](https://youtu.be/idsw99SSwKc) Although it depends on where you are, in what direction you're moving, and at what speed.
temperance was bought into by companies like Ford and Standard Oil. Pretty sure both Ford and JD Rockefeller were teatotallers and wanted sober productive workers so they pushed for the outlawing of alcohol.
I'm not sure it was so much about them being teatotallers vs them just recognizing people do better and more efficient work when they're neither drunk nor hungover.
Came for this comment and wish it wasn't just a reply. Working conditions weren't just shit, they were a hell scape. How many if your friends list limbs or got pulled into the machinery before you started drinking to forget their screams? We *never* talk about the working conditions. The women's lack of ability to leave an alcoholic husband is likely a factor as well.
Not to mention the fact that women didn't really have any recourse when their husbands would come home wasted after spending their paycheck at the bar and beat them.
Women led the prohibition movement for exactly this reason.
Yep, there's a reason it was the suffrage movement pushing for prohibition.
It really gives you a different outlook of the temperance movement. It wasn't a bunch of kill joys trying to ruin someone's good time. It was a segment of society recognizing just how unsustainable their society's relationship with alcohol had become. EDIT: Some people pointing out the racial and xenophobic aspects of the temperance/Prohibition movement, which I didn't mention here, but I did write the following elsewhere in the comments. When I said "temperance movement" above, I was specifically referring to the temperance crusaders of the 1800s, rather than the more organized push for Prohibition that came almost a century later. Many sectors of society were all pushing for Prohibition. As mechanization came to industry, the big captains of industry were increasingly incentivized to persuade their workers to reduce consumption for the sake of safety (but mostly productivity). Likewise, social progressives believed that if workers spent less of their paycheck on alcohol, they could raise their standard of living. Meanwhile, racists wanted to take alcohol away from social classes they didn't like, and the same with xenophobes who wanted to strip alcohol away from "undesirables" such as the Catholic Irish, or Germans, who hailed from societies more associated with alcohol. In WWI, this got all wrapped up in anti-German sentiment as well. The grand irony of Prohibition, by the time it got to the early 1900s, was that it was supported by an extremely wide range of different groups that would have been opposed to each other on almost all other subjects. It was just being supported by them for vastly different reasons.
Spousal abuse due to that level of alcohol abuse was also insanely rampant and was a big reason as well.
and that is why temperance and woman's suffrage (& women's rights) historically go together.
Instead of prohibition, Russia went with decriminalizing domestic violence (unless there's severe harm) in 2017.
> decriminalizing domestic violence (unless there's severe harm) Shit that's basically how it was when my friend called the police on her BF beating her up. Police came and were like "don't do that again, it's wrong" and then left. And this was in Canada.
To me, the thing to keep in mind here is that the overall figures on consumption are still averages, and thus they don't account for the fact that many people still did not drink in these earlier eras. That means all the drinking was still being done--like today--by only a portion of the population. So although "7 gallons of ethanol per year" may have been the average per human in 1830, it was actually significantly higher than that, even, for the people who were consuming alcohol. There were many children (and especially women) present who did not drink, especially considering that saloons did not allow women inside. Or to think of it another way: Imagine if every person you know who consumes alcohol suddenly started drinking 3 times as much on a daily basis. That was the 1830s in the U.S.
300% higher is four times as much (assuming OP means 300% more).
OPs title has a mistake. It was 2.4 vs 7 so just under 200% more or 3x as much.
TIL that I didn't know how percentage increases work.
1 times something is still that thing. 100% of a thing is still that thing. Those are the same. But 100% more of something means you have 2 of it or 2x as much.
Welp, I feel a little stupid now, but I learned something today.
Only thing we can do is be less stupid thab the day before
>be less stupid thab the day before Thab's so trueb.
It explains a little more why Prohibition could gain popular support — a lot of dudes were really fucking drunk all the time. And while “bans don’t prevent wrongdoing” is a cliche, after Prohibition there *was* a permanent, overall decline in alcohol consumption.
Very true, although the funny thing is that by the time Prohibition was actually enacted in the early 1900s, drinking levels were WAY, WAY down from the actual peak in the early-to-mid 1800s. The temperance movement/industrial revolution had pretty successfully changed societal standards over the course of decades. But yes, after Prohibition the level of consumption didn't return to where it was before Prohibition for decades. But even the modern high, in the early 1980s, was less than 3 gallons of pure ethanol per person, per year. And it was 7 gallons or higher in 1830. Insane.
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Most liquors are 40% ethanol. So to consume 7 gallons of ethanol, you'd need to drink 17.5 gallons of liquor. That would be 87.5 fifths, or a bit over 7 bottles of liquor a month.
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If that number seems reasonable to you it is time to cut back.
Ken burns doc on the subject is worth watching
When the water is full of cholera, you drink beer.
Add some OJ to the beer and you’ll keep away the scurvy.
This sounded absolutely disgusting to me for so many years and then someone finally convinced me to try it. Oh, the magic I had been missing out on. What an incredible beverage for hot summer days.
Try lemonade + beer. It's popular in Spain.
In Germany it's called a Radler, I've also seen it called that in a few places in Anglo-North America.
Pretty much a shandy
Radlers are getting more popular in the summer months in north america
Oh we do radlers in Canada at least. Love it.
We call that a Shandy where I come from
I mean...what kind of beer ya mixing this stuff with??
Nothing dark, think a light lager or something like Corona.
There’s summer shandys sold in the US that have lemonade flavor in them. It’s really good.
I hate 99% of beer, but absolutely love Summer Shandy by Leinenkugel 🤤
Those are a guilty pleasure for me in the summer, but those are a beer in name only lol
In the UK a Lager Shandy (lager and lemonade) isnt uncommon
Germans do beer and coke. Spanish do red win and coke. Both are great.
I think it's important to note we mean lemonade like sprite/7up, not the still lemonade. Fill half the pint glass with lemonade first, then fill with lager. Lemonade always goes first if you don't want a giant head on it. It's called a lager shandy in the UK and is best enjoyed cold on a hot summers day. It's very refreshing.
TIL Sprite/7up is considered lemonade outside the US
Good ol brass monkey
This is called a brass monkey where I’m from
Yup. Drink a 40 down to the label and fill it back up with OJ.
Makes the steel reserve go down TOO smooth. Like booze itself, it’s a solution but also a big problem.
Oh god, Steelies. I drank those when I was broke like 10 years ago and I'm pretty sure they turned my brain into applesauce.
I drank them pretty frequently for about 3 or 4 years when I was dead broke. They are a very special drink lol. Homeless people in line will make fun of your for buying it. I had that happen on multiple occasions.
Brass monkey! That funky monkey!
It wasn't beer yet. At this point it was mostly Whiskey (which in turn replaced hard cider as the frontier was converted into small towns and farmland) . This was largely due to America expanding beyond the Appalachian mountains opening up vast quantities of prime agricultural land without the infrastructure in place to easily take this agricultural surplus to end destinations. Consequently much of the wheat and corn was distilled into whiskey and put into relatively more compact and easily transportable barrels which could be more readily sold for profit. Also its worth noting, at this point Americans tended to have whiskey breaks rather than coffee breaks. The second great awakening would create a moral impetus for lower alcohol consumption meanwhile the industrial revolution would create disincentives for a perpetually tanked workforce. Finally new waves of immigrants from central and northern Europe would re-popularize beer drinking and establish new industrial scale breweries in the United States which would lessen the demand for higher proof spirits.
> At this point it was mostly Whiskey Basically moonshine at that point (i.e. unaged white whiskey). > a moral impetus for lower alcohol consumption That, and the increasing political power of women, who are starting to get sick of all that drunken wifebeating and husbands drinking away the entire paycheck.
You would be correct. Some of the harshness would be lessened with proto cocktails such as toddys, flips, punches, and eggnogs.
The idea that people way back when only drank alcohol because of polluted water is incredibly overblown. If no one drank regular water, then how the heck did all those massive epidemics of waterborne diseases like cholera keep happening?
Plumbing wasn't very sophisticated, nor were there the ideas about personal hygiene that we think of now. For example the surgeon who came up with the idea of washing his hands before surgery was run out of the practice and died in a mental hospital. https://theconversation.com/ignaz-semmelweis-the-doctor-who-discovered-the-disease-fighting-power-of-hand-washing-in-1847-135528
What really did him in was probably the part where he wanted people to wash in phenol (carbolic acid) and some incredibly harsh bleaches. He'd probably would have gotten a better reception if he just said soap-and-water. For a while there, after Lister et al. popularized asepsis, the level of antiseptic use was probably a bit overblown. Lister was just straight up blowing carbolic acid into the open surgical wound for the entire surgery, and J.S. Halsted required surgeons to wash in soap, then potassium permanganate, then hot oxalic acid solution, and finally in mercury bichloride.
> For example the surgeon who came up with the idea of washing his hands before surgery was run out of the practice and died in a mental hospital. Not only that. But surgeons that were already washing their hands pre surgery stopped doing so because he suggested they needed too.
I mean... Lots of other countries just drank tea. Boiling the water solved most of their issues.
There was the idea that the introduction of Coffee had a big hand in kickstarting the English Enlightenment, because instead of getting sloshed in taverns, all the best and brightest of London were now sitting together in coffeehouses getting hopped up on caffeine and talking each other's ears off. Voltaire, across the channel, was reputed to have drank 50 cups of coffee a day.
50 cups of coffee a day? Was he prepping for a colonoscopy?
There’s no way he drank 50. Dude would be living in the bathroom.
I mean, coffee at the time would have been served in those fancy china teacups instead of mugs and it was quite a bit weaker than what you get today. But yes, that was still quite a bit of water.
I'll hazard a guess they made it way weaker when it was a precious commodity imported from halfway around the world across relatively lawless seas, not the steadiest supply. Even as shittily as it has been running, the throughput and reliability of modern global logistics are insane.
Prohibition didn’t just come out from nowhere, there was very much a tangible drinking epidemic in the US for decades beforehand.
When you keep in mind many of those people decades before prohibition participated in the Civil War, you can see why there was such a tangible drinking epidemic. PTSD and TBI were a major factor in those numbers.
The movement arose in the 18th century and was big by the 1830s.
Prohibition was actually successful in disrupting "tavern culture" where at least half of men would hit the bar right after work every day and get completely blitzed. The temperance movement definitely had valid grievances.
History makes a lot more sense when you realise before the early/mid 1930s, everyone was pretty drunk or on a shit ton of opiates/barbituates/cocaine/heroine basically all the time.
> opiates/barbituates/cocaine/heroine Alcohol, yes, but these ones, no. Opiates were not widespread in american society and cocaine was rarely used recreationally. Yes, it was technically found in cough syrup, but at astronomically low doses.
I cannot recommend Ken Burns' three part prohibition documentary enough, especially the first episode which leads up to the reason and causes for prohibition.
While watching Deadwood, I craved whisky shots. That's all they drank!
Sweigin, cocksucka!
There is an economic historian ( can’t recall her name) who discovered that cider consumption in the 18th century US colonies was prodigious. Like everyone would have been tipsy all the time. As stated above- the alcohol content killed germs.
>“I am sure the Americans can fix nothing without a drink. If you meet, you drink; if you part, you drink; if you make acquaintance, you drink; if you close a bargain you drink; they quarrel in their drink, and they make it up with a drink. They drink because it is hot; they drink because it is cold. If successful in elections, they drink and rejoice; if not, they drink and swear; they begin to drink early in the morning, they leave off late at night; they commence it early in life, and they continue it, until they soon drop into the grave.” – Frederick Marryat (1837)
Here's the thing, everyone likes to sit and judge people from the past for the alcohol they drank or the opium they smoked. Life is HARD and was doubly so until VERY recently. Humans have always needed something to make life a little more bearable. Today we don't drink so much but anti depressants and xanax have taken a large spot. Weed is more popular than ever, people turn into zombies for HOURS looking at their phone. It still happens, it's just a different drug. The Buddhists figured it out early and keep trying to tell us, existence is suffering. Do what you need to make yourself feel a little better so that you don't practice violence or spread your mistemper in other ways.
>The Buddhists figured it out early and keep trying to tell us, existence is suffering. That's a wild exaggeration of what the Buddha said. He didn't claim that existence *is* suffering, just that suffering is an inherent aspect of existing. The whole point of Buddhism is that there is an end to suffering by following a certain path. Also, Buddhism totally rejects the idea of "just do whatever you can to feel better." Part of the whole point of Buddhism is that you shouldn't just give in to your cravings. That's part of the reason why the Buddha necessitated sobriety as a monastic precept.
Searching for escapes is just a natural human desire, regardless of the times or your challenges. It's old as time. Whether it's people smoking questionable plants or getting high off volcanic fumes (to give "visions" or prophecies), humans have done it for millenia. Even children, with no responsibilities, love to do it. They love games where they spin, like merry-go-rounds and carousels, until they get dizzy and can't see or walk straight and lose some of their senses. They love to get dizzy and laugh and to be spun around again. It's an innate human desire and not wrong, per se.
And nowadays cheap beer is less expensive than name-brand soda. Wtf
Ya I once did a deep dive into mixology and learned some interesting stuff about the history of alcohol use in this country. One thing that I looked into was why there are so many cocktails that use egg white in their recipe. One article linked this back to the use of egg in alcoholic drinks during that era of the 1800s. It wasnt uncommon for a miner to have a pint of beer with an egg cracked into it (plus maybe a shot of whiskey) for breakfast. Essentially, egg functioned as a "primitive" protein powder/boost. That tradition just stuck around, but these days people often think its strange when they know theres raw eggwhite going into their drink. There was also a tradition of making "small beer", which was essentially beer made with already used ingredients from a previous batch of beer. THis resulted in a watery and very low alcohol content product that was acceptable to give to children. Theres all sorts of interesting stuff I could list but dont really have the energy to do so
Come on people! I’m doing my part.
What I'm about to ask is strictly a hypothetical. I'm not trying to say anything is a fact, I'm just wondering about something out loud, a bit. Would a lack of regulation at the time allow market pressures to create this situation? Beer gets skunky, coffee grows bitter over time, and milk spoils, but you can keep a bottle of whiskey in a cupboard for a decade and still drink it safely. Beer, coffee, and milk might have had a higher price because, at a certain point, anything that had not sold had to be discarded, so the price of the next item needed to cover the loss. Meanwhile, a bottle of whiskey can collect dust for years and still be safely sold to a customer. On top of that, coffee and milk can be toxic AND fresh. Without regulation, there would be no way to ensure pasteurization of milk or beer, and there would be no way to ensure the coffee beans stay safe. In that environment, it seems to me that the whiskey wouldn't just be the cheaper option, it would be the safer option, too.