These less than scholarly articles raise some interesting questions.

http://www.cracked.com/article_22773_5-important-historical-events-fueled-entirely-by-booze.html

"The drinking started after a meeting led by Samuel Adams at the Old South Church, when a group of men gathered at the house of newspaper publisher and tea-hater Benjamin Edes to discuss what to do about the British ships. Among the participants was a potent "punch" of red wine, rum, and whiskey to facilitate the flow of ideas, served in Edes' family punchbowl, which his son Peter was instructed to keep topped off like the country itself depended on it."

"The punch-drunk patriots boarded the ships and spent hours tossing the tea crates into the harbor, their efforts reportedly slowed by mandatory barf breaks. One Son of Liberty, John Crane, was knocked unconscious by a falling crate and mistaken for dead by his comrades. Thus did they waste additional time trying to figure out where to hide the body, eventually determining that the best place for it was in a pile of wood shavings in a shop near the dock. Given the situation and BAC levels that night, this is admittedly not the worst place Crane could have woken up."

They cite a few sources, but... essentially they're the kind of sources a comedy article would cite.

http://bizzylife.com/2010/11/the-real-story-behind-the-tea-party/

And then this article claims that it was all about rum in the first place:

"Wrong. Perhaps you are smarter than a fifth grader, but that is precious little consolation once you realize we were all lied to in the fifth grade. Contrary to popular opinion, the Puritans who founded this nation drank like fish. That is, if fish swam in ethyl alcohol. In those days, people still believed that water was not fit to drink. They thought it was unhealthy. Perhaps they were right at the time. After all, they had open sewers and livestock walked in the streets. So everyone in colonial American drank ale or hard cider for breakfast, rum for lunch and then wine for dinner – that is, if they could afford it and were still sober enough to dine. Based on production levels, estimates suggest that colonial-era Americans drank as much as 8 ounces of pure alcohol per day, per capita.

So, why did those tipsy colonial-era tea-baggers toss their Earl Grey into the harbor? The simple answer is this: They had absolutely no intention of wasting a precious drop of the real reason for their revolt – rum. In point of fact, rum was the central reason for the American Revolution. Our forefathers wanted cheap booze. Period. Everything else in the history books is just propaganda."

This article cites a single book as a source.

A Google search reveals that at least a few people have heard the drunk version of events before.

Any legitimacy to these claims?