Hi everyone, In the past year I've become pretty invested in the hobby of cocktail making, and as such I've come across a few books that include some relevant history along with their recipes, with some more contemporary than others. For instance, Jeff Berry's work covers the evolution of rum drinks up through the rise and fall of the tiki bar, and David Wondrich's Punch!, which I'm currently reading, discusses the creation and culture surrounding punches.
As I've been reading them I've become pretty interested in that particular slice of history, particularly as it shows a bit of day to day life. So I was wondering if you folks knew of any good sources that cover either the history of a kind of drink, or the history of "drinking culture" in a particular time?
Between the books I've read I feel that post prohibition I've covered fairly well. I'm particularly interested in, the age of exploration up through colonial and post revolutionary America, but I'd still love to see examples that fall outside of that.
I'm going to put a plug in for one of my mentors, William Rorabaugh's first book, "The Alcoholic Republic." It is a little bit dated today, but its a marvelous read. Bill's book is all about a part of the early 19th century when grain farming spread into the old northwest and the upper south but the appalachian mountains made it prohibitively expensive to bring grain to eastern markets. The solution was to make the grain into liquor which was far easier to ship. The book show that the price in liquor went down tremendously and working class Americans in the NE upped their drinking and this led to the birth of an upper class temperance movement. If you want to see how a national drinking binge is formed, this is the book for you...