Since we're going digital as much as we can here at The Anniston Star, and since I don't have room for all I want to say about beer in my twice-monthly column, Pitcher This, I figure a blog is the natural way to provide my readers all the beer news they can stomach, with no last call.
It's also a way for you readers to fire back at me. Got your own thoughts on a brew I've mentioned? Think I've had a few too many after reading my thoughts on your favorite ale? Add your own comments after any of my posts. And feel free to e-mail at bcunningham@annistonstar.com, anytime.
For starters,
here's my most recent column, published on Independence Day, about the Founding Fathers' love of a good pint. Cheers!
Pitcher This: Red, white and brew
Published: July 4, 2007
It is illustrative of the depths of genius possessed by the founders of our great republic to know that many of those great men thought as much about what they drank as they did about the foundations of government. Now to be fair, not everyone who signed the Declaration of Independence was a master brewer. But the man who wrote it certainly knew more than a little about that "pursuit of happiness," as did many of his compatriots.
Stanley Baron's 1962 book Brewed in America: A History of Beer and Ale in the United States contains exhaustive chapters on the founders and their relationship with beer. It's deeper than you might expect.
Thomas Jefferson, for instance, after penning the words that formed our nation, then serving as its president and retiring to his estate, Monticello, turned his mind to establishing a stronger domestic brewing industry.
Baron details Jefferson's dealings with Captain Joseph Miller, who helped him start a brewery using native malted corn.
Jefferson's aim in brewing beer, Baron says, was to wean Americans off the hard stuff. "I wish to see this beverage [beer] become common," Jefferson wrote to a friend, "instead of the whiskey which kills one third of our citizens and ruins their families."
George Washington had a thing for beer, too, according to Baron. In addition to fighting for a government that took no orders from Britain, he didn't want any porter coming over the Atlantic.
"We have already been too long subject to British prejudices," Washington wrote the Marquis de Lafayette in 1789. "I use no porter or cheese in my family, but such as is made in America."
The first president apparently was fond of porter - a dark brown ale - produced in Philadelphia, the country's first capital.
Another founder, Benjamin Franklin, often is credited with a famous quote calling beer a divine gift. "Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy."
As fun as it is to imagine raising a pint with Franklin - in my estimation the coolest founder by far - it turns out he never said it; or at lest he wasn't talking about beer.
The quote comes from a letter, written in French, by Franklin to an abbot, in 1779, during his time as ambassador to France. Thanks to TheFranklinPapers.org, a digital archive provided by The American Philosophical Society and Yale University, I've read them myself. And thanks to Google's online translation service, I've understood them:
"Here is water which falls from the skies on our vineyards; there, it enters the roots of the vines to be changed into wine; constant proof that God likes us, and that he likes to see us happy."
So Franklin probably preferred wine to beer. Well, he also wanted the wild turkey to be our national bird in place of the bald eagle.
There's no accounting for taste, they say.
