Many of us are probably familiar with modern toasting rituals where we listen to a speech, raise a glass of champagne/wine/orange juice, and take a dignified little sip.

This was not so in medieval and early modern Europe.

As the spiraling catalogue of toast recipients in "In taberna quando sumus" (13th century) suggests, toasting to people's health was a competitive activity in late medieval and early modern drinking culture. No one wanted to be the last one unable to think of someone's health to toast. One 16th century theologian described the one-upsmanship of toasting as an "utterly holy and religious contract."

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, this practice was subject to some of the most ineffective laws on record. Imperial edits from the pen of the Holy Roman Emperor himself (well, himselves) in 1530, 1548, and 1559 all sought to outlaw the practice of toasting to healths.

The natural result of these proclamations, according to Augsburg civic records, was the spread of one more health to add to the rounds of toasting: "Here's to the edict!"

It's probably a well-known bit of trivia but the American Founding Fathers were notoriously free with the drink. The most famous list is from a 55-person party for George Washington in 1787: "54 bottles of Madeira, 60 bottles of claret, 8 of whiskey, 22 of porter, 8 of hard cider, 12 of beer, and 7 bowls of alcoholic punch". They also broke (and were charged for) a bunch of bar glassware.

But what I want to point out is that there's no rum on the list of drinks. Before the Revolution, the average American colonist drank 4 gallons of rum every year. However, rum at the time was produced primarily in the British colonies in the West Indies. A combination of high tariffs and patriotism meant that the consumption of rum plummeted after the Revolution. Not that that stopped Americans from drinking. Consumption of that good American drink - corn whiskey - increased dramatically. Between 1800 and 1830, Americans drank roughly 5 gallons of distilled liquor per capita per year.

Erratic supplies and higher prices for rum had encouraged a shift to beer, cider, and whiskey, but rum also suffered from rising nationalism. Imported molasses and rum were symbols of colonialism and reminders that America was not economically self-sufficient. Whereas the colonists once had been proud of obtaining such commodities from the British Empire, independent Americans now believed that having to import those items signified an economic weakness that could lead to political subjugation. To sell foodstuffs or other articles to the West Indies was desirable because it was profitable; to buy rum from those same islands was foolish and unpatriotic because it was harmful to American distillers and their workmen. “I reckon every horse exported and returned in rum,” wrote one American, “as so much property lost to the general interest.”

[...]

Rum distillers faced an unpleasant situation; before the Revolution rum had been the universal beverage, and whiskey had been rare, so rare in 1774 that one author who used the word felt obliged to define it for his readers; but by 1790 rum accounted for only two-thirds of all the hard liquor consumed, and whiskey had become so popular that, along with domestic fruit brandy, it accounted for the remaining one-third.

Rorabaugh, W.J. (1979-11-01). The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition

(Edit: Added source)

I am really surprised this question has not come up yet or isn’t in the FAQ even: Which pope can we blame the most for Coca Cola?

We have three main candidates - Leon XIII, Pius X and Benedict XV. All three of which provided testimonials for another coca-laced drink that was a direct inspiration to John Pemberton - Vin Mariani or in the English speaking countries, Mariani Wine.

Vin Mariani was a product which was created in the 1870s and consisted mainly of (only the finest!) Bordeaux wine and extract of coca leaves. Wines of coca were not strangers in the pharmacopoeias of many countries and in fact, various medicinal wines were one of the few cases in which the temperance movements kind of squinted their no fun, anti-booze eyes (then there were the patent medicines on which I wrote before and the trick there was always to simply not say that it had a substantial amount of alcohol and/or opium in it. In that way you got teatotaller ladies that died of cirrhosis of the liver).

Well, if it was not the coca or the wine that made Vin Mariani special, then what was it? It was of course, the Mariani. Angelo Mariani should not only be remembered as producer of a fine and popular drink, but as one of the biggest geniuses of advertising. While testimonials were a common practice as far as patent medicines go, Mariani has to be the first one to really step up the celebrity endorsement game. He utilized technique used in all sorts of advertising situations today and I shall call it “free shit guilt”. Sending out few free bottles of Vin Mariani to important people along with a letter playing on the recipient’s ego and humble request - just write back few sentences about what you thought about my product, madame/monsieur!

At first, the drink was purely medicinal. The basic concoction according to an apocryphal story was cooked up when an actress came into pharmacy where Mariani worked and demanded something to cure her depression. Wine, coca, boom! The actress was delighted and demanded several bottles. With this medicinal context, the most heavily advertised to people were at first physicians and they also provided a lot of the testimonials. Soon enough though, Vin Mariani became a famous tonic, enjoyed for its taste as well as the supposed health effects (the suggested dose was around 3 glasses a day, in the U.S usually drunk as a cocktail along with vermouth, bitters and a twist of lemon).

With the larger popularity (an international one) came testimonials from all kinds of celebrities, including William Mckinley, Thomas Edison, Emile Zola etc...In fact, Mariani had basically a little separate industry going, producing more then ten volumes of Album Mariani, where the endorsements were printed alongside biographies of the famous people. He also produced his own medical journal specifically to promote virtues of coca. It’s not quite the same, but imagine “Pepsi presents Journal of Nutritional Value of Loads of Sugar”. Mariani in fact WAS a very respected for his knowledge of coca - William Golden Mortimer starts his important scholarly work upon the matter Coca, the Divine plant of the Incas with dedication to Mariani.

So what killed the drink? Cocaine (as opium and heroin) simply came under the fire of the public opinion for causing psychological addiction “cocainism” and even though raw coca is not as potent, it became a public enemy, forcing many manufacturers of various coca wines to switch to other substances. However, there is something in coca leaves which gives the drink not only the stimulant properties, but also a specific taste. So when others went for essentially Crystal Wine of Coca or New Coke Wine, Mariani sticked to what he knew and used extract without the cocaine. And so did John Pemberton btw. Coca Cola is cocaine-free since 1903, but it still has (supposedly) coca in it. However, keeping his drink legal and of the roughly same taste seemed not to help and after 1910 (Mariani himself died in 1914) the drink slowly disappeared. I have read that it’s supposed to come back near the end of the last year, but did not hunt it down yet.

David Smith: Hail Mariani: The Transformation of Vin Mariani From Medicine to Food in American Culture, 1886-1910. in Social History of Alcohol and Drugs, Volume 23, No 1 (Fall 2008)

William H. Helfand: Vin Mariani in Pharmacy in History Vol. 22, No. 1 (1980), pp. 11-19

Steven B. Karch - A Brief History of Cocaine, Second Edition (CRC Press, 2005)

Paul Gootenberg - Cocaine: Global Histories (Routledge, 1999)

There are extensive historiographical discussions of the nature of creolization. That is the transformation from a culture of the home country or area to a new molded culture in the new world. Often this debate centers on the retention (or lack there of) of African cultural norms brought by slaves to the plantations (See, eg. Morgan, "Cultural Implications of the Atlantic Slave Trade" Slavery & Abolition, (1997), 122-145). However, there was also cultural exchanges, reforms and innovations among the European settlers in the new world colonies. And as Sid Mintz and others have argued, one of the central elements of culture is food and drink, and the English in the Caribbean were no different (Mintz, Sweetness and Power).

In 1686, Jamaica had been a part of the English empire for only thirty years. The island's sugar economy was taking off, but the island was still more of a backwater than places like Virginia, Massachusetts or Barbados. The European population grew quickly in the first decade after the conquest, increasing from 3,400 in 1660 to over 8,000 in 1670. Thereafter the European population plateaued and never exceeded 10,000 until 1760. Although the image of the West Indian planter was one of an absentee landlord, that idea doesn't fit in the early decades of colonization - people sailing for Jamaica went to live, and often die in Jamaica. In sailing for Jamaica, Englishmen (and some women) tried to bring their Englishness with them, and that meant (among other things) beer. Beer was a staple in England, and the English sailing for Jamaica brought tuns filled with beer on their voyages. In 1686, ships brought in 160,000 gallons of beer to the island (My calculation based on the works of McCusker, and Jamaican port records, CO 142/13). That meant that 18 gallons of beer was imported for every European man, woman, and child (Obviously the stats on this are lower if Africans and Afro-Jamaicans are included to about 4.75 gallons per person).

The problem with beer in the Caribbean is that it did not keep well. Beer imported was almost always accompanied by passengers aboard the ships - people had bought the beer in England and were bringing it to sell and for themselves. Soon after arriving, they discovered that the beer was not nearly as refreshing as it had been in England, in part because there were no cellars or methods of keeping the beer cooler than the surrounding hot temperatures. What people discovered and enjoyed far more than beer, was wine and rum. Far more ships came to Jamaica carrying Madeira wine than beer (only 23 ships came with beer out of over 300 ships). Madeira wine mixed with pineapple was the drink of the elites, along with brandy; lesser Europeans drank rum punch (Jamaica in 1687: The Taylor Manuscript, ed. Buisseret).

There were other foodstuffs that represented the change from Englishness to a more Creole culture, but alcohol is easier to track in the sources because the wine and beer had to be imported. There may have been a small brewing business in Jamaica, but the pretensions of Englishness associated with beer evaporated with the heat. English men and women took to rum and Madeira wine mixed with tropical fruits withing a year of arriving on the island. While Europeans clung to stubborn habits of English clothing and architecture, they were much more accepting of the transition to an alcohol culture built around high proofs and bright fruits.

My favorite bit of trivia is that the Early Formative Capacha culture of Mexico's Pacific coast may have had distilled alcohol. Zizumbo-Villarreal et al. (2009) showed in their paper that the stirrup vessels that are so common to the Capacha culture could have been used to distill alcohol above 20% alcohol by volume after a single distillation. The question remains, however, whether such a process leaves behind residue that can be tested and whether actual Capacha vessels have this residue. It's somewhat exciting to think that one Native group had distillation before the arrival of Europeans even if the practice did not continue to Contact.

Previous posts where I talked about this, 1, 2

I mentioned this once in answering another question, but Emanuel Leutze's famous painting of Washington Crossing the Delaware has quite a booze-soaked history. Painting in Düsseldorf, Germany (then Prussia) in 1850-1, Leutze was undoubtedly aware of the local brew, called altbier. It's not super-common in the United States, but it's a tasty brew indeed. Anyway, Leutze always kept a tapped keg in his studio while he and his colleagues and students were working on the painting, and fellow American limner Worthington Whittredge, who served as the model for Washington's body in the painting, relates that the libations flowed liberally at all times. Indeed, the process of standing in the model boat was so stressful for Whittredge that he claims to have nearly expired:

I stood for two hours without moving, in order that the cloak of the Washington could be painted at a single sitting, thus enabling Leutze to catch the folds of the cloak as they were first arranged. Clad in Washington’s full uniform, heavy chapeau and all, spy-glass in one hand and the other on my knee, I was nearly dead when the operation was over. They poured champagne down my throat and I lived through it.

The painter Eastman Johnson, who produced a smaller copy of the famous work for the use of an engraver, notes that the alcohol seems to have fueled a particularly festive/insane behavior, as well:

To give a more decided tone to the place three canon were recently brot. & a battery constructed with the stars & stripes waiving on one side & the black & white of Prussia on the other—Nothing could exceed the enjoyment produced by the sound of the entire battery, so that almost every one that enters is recd. with three guns, & accordingly up to the present time there has been a pretty uninterrupted cannonade—The fun has been increased by shooting with bullets also, & the wall are fearfully scarred with this continued bombardment—

So, yeah. Perhaps the most famous American painting was produced by a bunch of drunks who liked playing with guns. It's enough to make you stand tall and spontaneously recite the Pledge of Allegiance, it is.

Traditionally, vodka was 38% ABV, since it was easy to measure this quantity. When heated and ignited, exactly half of the liquid would burn away. When more precise methods of measuring alcohol percentage were invented, it was upped to 40% ABV to make taxation easier.

This is actually relevant to something I'm researching, which y'all may enjoy:

Drinking habits vary with the individual, of course. So does the effect. Some stagger and weave, some get thick tongued, some get quarrelsome, some maudlin, some hilarious. When I can’t walk a straight line I can’t walk at all, but the effect of liquor hinges largely on my natural feelings. If I’m depressed when I start drinking, I grow savagely melancholy. If I feel good, I grow hilarious in a restrained way. Sometimes I can drink anything and like it, and sometimes I wouldn’t drink with the king of England out of a golden goblet. My favorite drink is good beer, which is a startling departure from the ways of my ancestors. My great uncles, for instance, of my most purely Irish family branch, despised any sort of drink except raw whiskey spiced with cayenne pepper. The only one of my recent masculine ancestors I can think of who didn’t drink was my grandfather William Benjamin Howard. When I see some sappy youngster sneering at some one for not drinking, as if abstinence were unmanly, I think of my grandfather, who stood six feet two in his socks, and weighed two hundred pounds, was a pioneer, a ’49er, and a soldier, and who never drank. The others of the family, Ervins, Henrys, and the like, drank regularly but never got drunk.

I was twenty years old before I ever got really soused. I was working at a lousy job of soda-jerking in a drug-store during an oil-boom, seven days out of the week, from about nine or ten in the morning to — usually — long after midnight. Jerking soda doesn’t sound like hard work, but any kind of work is hard in an oil-boom town. I was doing the work of two or three men, because my employers were too stingy to hire any more help. It was rush, rush, rush, mighty near all the time, with a gang of roughnecks howling for service and crazy to throw their money away on any and everything. I’ve smashed baggage and dug ditches, but I was never so tired in my life as I used to get behind that soda fountain. If you ever read London’s Martin Eden you remember how Martin used to get drunk on Sunday to forget the toil of the week. Well, I didn’t work as furiously as Martin did, but I didn’t get that day off, like he did. I worked harder Sunday than any day, except Saturday.

I began boozing on Sundays, not to forget my misery or anything, but just because I had to have something to put new snap and energy in my fagged out nerves and jaded muscles. As a general rule, everybody in the joint would get fairly well soused — that made us even with the customers, because most of them were drunk as lords. After I got out of the drugstore I was a teetotaler — I believe you spell it that way — for a long time.

• Robert E. Howard to August Derleth, Oct 1933, Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard 3.138-139