History of Alcohol in America

Cider

All the colonists drank cider, old and young, and in all places,--funerals, weddings, ordainings, vestry-meetings, church-raisings, etc. Infants in arms drank mulled hard cider at night, a beverage which would kill a modern babe. It was supplied to students at Harvard and Yale colleges at dinner and bever, being passed in two quart tankards from hand to hand down the commons table. Old men began the day with a quart or more of hard cider before breakfast. Delicate women drank hard cider. All laborers in the field drank it in great draughts that were often liberally fortified with drams of New England rum. The apple crop was so wholly devoted to the manufacture of cider that in the days of temperance reform at the beginning of this century, Washingtonian zealots cut down great orchards of full-bearing trees, not conceiving any adequate use of the fruit for any purpose save cider-making.

A friend--envious and emulous of the detective work so minutely described by Conan Doyle--was driving last summer on an old New England road entirely unfamiliar to him. He suddenly turned to the stage-driver by his side and, pointing to a house alongside the road, said, "The man who lives there is a drunkard."--"Why, yes," answered the driver in surprise, "do you know him?"--"No," said the traveller, "I never saw him and don't know his name, but he's a drunkard and his father was before him, and his grandfather."--"It's true," answered the driver, with much astonishment; "how could you tell?"--"Well, there is a large orchard of very old apple trees round that house, while all his neighbors, even when the houses are old, have younger orchards. When the 'Washingtonian or Temperance Movement' reached this town, the owner of this place was too confirmed a drunkard to reform and cut down his apple trees as his neighbors did, and he kept on at his hard cider and cider brandy, and his son and grandson grew up to be drunkards after him." Later inquiry in the town proved the truth of the amateur detective's guesswork.

Cider was tediously made at first by pounding the apples in wooden mortars; the pomace was afterward pressed in baskets. Then rude mills with a spring board and heavy maul crushed the apples in a hollowed log. Then presses for cider-making begin to be set up about the year 1650.

Apples were at that time six to eight shillings a bushel; cider 1s. 8d. a gallon--as high-priced as New England rum a century later.

Connecticut cider soon became specially famous. Roger Williams in 1660 says John Winthrop's loving letter to him was as grateful as "a cup of your Connecticut cider." By 1679 it was cheap enough, ten shillings a barrel; and in the year 1700, about seven shillings only. It had then replaced beer in nearly all localities in daily diet; yet at the Commencement dinner at Harvard in 1703, four barrels of beer were served and but one of cider, with eighteen gallons of wine.

In 1721 one Massachusetts village of forty families made three thousand barrels of cider, and Judge Joseph Wilder of Lancaster, Massachusetts, made six hundred and sixteen barrels in the year 1728.

Bennett, an English traveller, writing of Boston in the year 1740, says that "the generality of the people with their victuals" drank cider, which was plentiful and good at three shillings a barrel. It took a large amount of cider to supply a family when all drank, and drank freely. Ministers often stored forty barrels of cider for winter use.

By the closing years of the seventeenth century nearly all Virginia plantations had an apple orchard. Colonel Fitzhugh had twenty-five hundred apple trees. So quickly did they mature, that six years after the scions were planted, they bore fruit. Many varieties were common, such as russets, costards, pippins, mains, marigolds, kings, and batchelors. So great was the demand for cider in the South that apple orchards were deemed the most desirable leasing property. Cider never reached a higher price, however, than two shillings and a half in Virginia during the seventeenth century. Thus it could be found in the house of every Maryland and Virginia planter. It was supplied to the local courts during their times of sitting. Many households used it in large quantity instead of beer or metheglin, storing many barrels for everyday use.

At a very early date apple trees were set out in New York, and cultivated with much care and much success. Nowhere else in America, says Dankers, the Labadist traveller, had he seen such fine apples. The names of the Newton pippin, the Kingston spitzenburgh, the Poughkeepsie swaar apple, the red streak, guelderleng, and others of well-known quality, show New York's attention to apple-raising. Kalm, the Swedish naturalist, spoke of the splendid apple orchards which he saw throughout New York in 1749, and told of the use of the horse press in the Hudson Valley for making cider. Cider soon rivalled in domestic use in this province the beer of the Fatherland. It was constantly used during the winter season, and, diluted with water, sweetened and flavored with nutmeg, made a grateful summer drink. Combined with rum, it formed many of the most popular and intoxicating colonial drinks, of which "stone-wall" was the most potent. Cider-royal was made by boiling four barrels of cider into one barrel. P. T. Barnum said cider-spirits was called "gumption."

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