The variety of liquids that we drink today were not all available to the people of the 1700s. Water, a very common liquid that we take for granted today, would have been obtained from either streams or hand dug wells, both of which would not have been totally free of disease-causing micro-organisms. Those micro-organisms were the source of diseases such as diarrhea and 'the flux', or dysentery. At the present time, we, who live in industrialized societies, wonder that such diseases are still common in third-world countries, but they can often be traced to impure water supplies. Pennsylvania in the 1700s was not so different than the third-world countries of today in regard to the cleanliness of water. In fact, one food historian stated that the colonists in North America would have had a "built-in resistance to water" because of centuries of learning that many diseases were brought on by drinking water that was less than clean. Milk, another common liquid in our diet at the present time, was primarily used for making butter and cheese. The milk that was drank would not have been pasteurized, a technique to sterilize the milk using heat, therefore diseases borne in unclean water were also found in unclean milk. Pasteurization was not used to 'clean' raw milk until Louis Pasteur developed the process in the mid-1800s. Carbonated 'soft' drinks and powdered fruit flavored drinks were not available until the 1900s.
The primary liquids that were swallowed as refreshment or nourishment by the people of the 1700s were cider, alcoholic liquors, tea, coffee and cocoa. Of these drinks, tea, coffee and cocoa might have been the least common. They required a lot of preparation each time that they were to be drank since tea was only available in dry, loose form and coffee was not very palatable when simply boiled in water; it needed to be percolated to be properly enjoyed. Despite having originated in the western hemisphere, cocoa was not drank in the English colonies of North America until about the 1760s. Cocoa, which had been drunk ceremonially, as a sort of sacred homage to their gods by the Olmec civilization as long ago as three thousand years, and later by the Maya, Toltec and Aztec priesthood, had been introduced into Europe by the Spanish invaders in the 16th Century. The bitter drink that the Spanish conquistadors carried to their kings and queens became refined and, as chocolate, spread throughout Europe for a century and a half before being carried to North America. The first cocoa / chocolate manufacturing company was established in Massachusetts in 1765. It simply wasn't drank widespread. Also neither tea, coffee or cocoa kept well in bottles or wooden kegs because they didn't ferment like other liquids.
Cider, pressed from apples, and its sister drink, peary, made from pears, were very popular in early Pennsylvania. According to a food historian, as apple orchards sprang up through New England and southward into Pennsylvania: "cider intake of the colonists rapidly reached gargantuan proportions" Cider was widely available for consumption in autumn, and during that season would have been very fresh and sweet tasting. As time passed, though, the cider, which was commonly stored in wooden barrels, fermented into hard cider. Hard cider, the alcoholic content of which could vary between 3 and 12 percent, was a common beverage for the whole family. In fact, practically all of the alcoholic drinks downed in the 1700s were drank by both men, women and children. Cider provided a number of vitamins that people otherwise would not have gotten in their usual diet. The Germans generally ate a breakfast which included cider or beer thickened with flour to make a sort of pancake. Apples were also used to make apple brandy and a liquor called applejack. Cider, but sometimes ale, was the basis of a kind of punch drank during the Christmas holiday called wassail. The name derives from the Middle English Waes Haeil, that translates as 'good health' or 'health to you.' Wassail was basically a hot mulled (i.e. heated) punch with the addition of sugar and spices including cinnamon, nutmeg and ginger.
Alcoholic liquors made up a large portion of the drinks available to people in the 1700s. Wine was common because a variety of fruits were readily obtainable from which wine was made. Wine was easy to make. You simply pressed the juice out of the fruit and added a little yeast to get the fermentation process started. The people of the 1700s did not glorify their wines; the age of the oenophile, or wine connoisseur had not arrived. Wines were made from just about anything available from grapes to blackberries, to currants, to dandelions, to rose hips to honey. Mead, a type of wine made from honey fermented in water, was as common as fruit wines. Beer and ale were brewed from cereal grains, such as barley, and allowed to ferment with yeast. They differed in the respect that hops added to the grains, produced beer with a slightly bitter taste. Ale, while fermented from the same cereal grains, was more fruity flavored and slightly sweet. Beer and ale were brewed primarily by the German and Swiss immigrants. Whiskey, likewise made from grains, was distilled rather than fermented. Whiskey was a drink made primarily by the Scots and Ulster Scots who settled throughout the hilly region of south-central Pennsylvania.
Rum, distilled from molasses, was perhaps the most imbibed alcoholic drink in the English Colonies in the 1700s. There are some historians who would argue that it was not necessarily the Tea Act of 1773 that goaded colonists to seek their liberty from Great Britain, but rather the forty-years earlier Sugar and Molasses Act of 1733 and its replacement, the Sugar Act of 1764. Both Acts imposed stiff taxes on sugar and molasses from anywhere other than the British West Indies in the Caribbean.
The thing that differentiates the consumption of alcoholic beverages at the present day as compared to the 1700s is that people drank alcoholic beverages in the 1700s because fresh liquids were not as readily available. Today most alcohol consumption is for the purpose of getting drunk. Despite the fact that the majority of the drinks consumed by the colonists of the 1700s were capable of causing intoxication, there were very few instances of public drunkenness. One possible reason for that seemingly unusual situation was that people spread their intake over the entire day rather than binging all at one time. People binged on holidays and at events such as weddings and funeral wakes which were often observed in someone's house. The act of getting drunk was not directly associated with taverns at that time. Taverns offered, to the traveler, a place to rest and get something to eat in addition to something to drink: much like the present-day restaurant. In an age when the average distance to be traveled in one day equaled just fifteen to twenty miles ~ a distance that we, today, might cover in just fifteen to twenty minutes ~ a horse drawn wagon was tiring for both the horses and the riders. The tavern offered a welcome rest after all the bumpy jostling of the wagon ride. Anyone who did get drunk at a tavern was probably the exception rather than the rule.
