The American statesman & scientist Benjamin Franklin once quip'd that beer
is proof that god loves us and wants us to be happy ;-) In reading from the
site url above I'd have to say that most everybody in the 1400/1700's took
the pursuit of happiness as need to quaff a goodly portion of beer as often
as they were able. Some example's are below
CT
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At the end of the 17th century, the weekly allowance for pupils of all ages
at one English school was two bottles a day. Beer was a good deal safer and
more palatable than the available drinking water which was often drawn from
polluted rivers. And beer was also common in the workplace. The American
scientist and statesman, Benjamin Franklin, who lived in London from
1757-1774, recorded the daily beer consumption in a London printing house
which he visited. The employees each had a pint before breakfast, a pint
between breakfast and dinner, a pint at dinner, a pint at six o'clock and a
pint when they finished work.
Ladies-in-waiting at the court of Henry VII were allowed a gallon of beer
for breakfast alone.
The Dean of St Pauls, in the 16th century, is credited with the invention
of bottled ale. Dr Alexander Norwell put ale in a bottle when he went
fishing and left the bottle in the grass. Returning some years later he
found the cork came away with an explosion but the taste and quality of the
ale was still good.
European beer first arrived in America with Christopher Columbus' ships. On
his last voyage to America in 1502, Columbus found the natives of Central
America making a first-rate brew "of maize, resembling English beer". The
Pilgrim Fathers landed at Plymouth Rock, instead of further south as
planned, partly because they were out of beer.
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