By Kenneth G. Pringle

George Washington wasn't just the father of his country. He also helped give birth to its liquor industry.

Washington's distillery at Mount Vernon, Va., was one of America's largest, producing more than 10,000 gallons of rye and corn whiskey in 1799. He sold it by the barrel as part of a postpresidency retirement scheme.

"Two hundred gallons of Whiskey will be ready," Washington wrote to a nephew, "and the sooner it is taken the better, as the demand for this article (in these parts) is brisk."

Demand for alcohol was brisk throughout the young nation, and it remains so today -- even if our annual average consumption of around 2.3 gallons of absolute alcohol pales next to the 7.1 gallons quaffed in 1830.

We drink less for many reasons, among them ready access to safe drinking water. But age-old concerns about alcohol's dangers, to both body and soul, followed drinking to the New World. Modern science has made the risks clear, most recently in a report from the Surgeon General that ties alcohol consumption to cancer.

This has taken a toll on U.S. liquor sales, which fell 1% last year to $112 billion, punishing the shares of brewers, distillers, and vintners. More people than ever express concern about drinking's health hazards.

Yet, there are no calls for renewing prohibition. From New Year's bubbly to beers at the ballgame and rum drinks at the beach, liquor remains central to our celebrations.

As ever in America, it's always 5 o'clock somewhere.

"By 1770, Americans consumed alcohol, mostly in the form of rum and cider, routinely with every meal," wrote the historian W.J. Rorabaugh, author of The Alcoholic Republic. "Many people began the day with an 'eye opener' and closed it with a nightcap."

During the Colonial period, most alcohol was imported. Washington was partial to Madeira wine and English porter. After the Revolution, America became a nation of small brewers and distillers; cultivating the grape proved more challenging.

Alcohol became such big business that, in 1794, the government's attempt to tax it triggered a Whiskey Rebellion by Pennsylvania farmers.

Washington rode at the head of 13,000 federal troops to put down the rebellion, enforcing the government's right to collect taxes. There were personal ramifications: In 1798, Washington paid a tax of $332 on 616 gallons produced at Mount Vernon.

Washington died before 1799 was out and didn't live to see the U.S. liquor industry grow beyond its humble beginnings.

Buffalo Trace Distillery of Frankfurt, Ky., now owned by Sazerac, claims to be the U.S.'s oldest continuously operating distillery, dating to 1805. Jim Beam of Clermont, Ky., purchased by Suntory, traces its history to 1795.

In the 1810s, a struggling farmer named Thomas Lincoln picked up odd jobs at a distillery in Knob Creek, Ky. Later his son Abraham, on his way to becoming America's 16th president, owned a grocery store that sold liquor, perhaps for on-site consumption.

Lincoln himself was a teetotaler, but not so the Union soldiers who fought the Civil War. They took a liking to a light, refreshing beer introduced by German immigrants, and they demanded more of this lager when they got home. This fueled the rise of the first large-scale brewers, including Anheuser-Busch (1852), Schlitz (1849), and Pabst (1844).

As America industrialized, so did the liquor business. Pabst became the first brewer to sell more than 100 million barrels in 1893. Four years later, founder Frederick Pabst was denying a secret pact with No. 2 brewer Schlitz "I know nothing of such a trust," he told The Wall Street Journal on Sept. 8, 1897.

In 1899, some 60 Bluegrass State interests banded together to form the Kentucky Distillers & Warehouse Co. -- which the Journal dubbed "Big Whisky" and blamed for a "boom in prices."

Big Whisky and Beer also ran saloons -- bastions of drunkenness, gambling, and prostitution that survived through government kickbacks. Political machines like New York's Tammany Hall used the saloons as tools to control the vote.

It was the saloons that turned the temperance movement -- which advocated individual abstinence -- into a push for prohibition, the banning of liquor sales.

"I broke up three of these dives," Carrie Amerlia Nation said of her June 7, 1900, brick-throwing rampage against Kiowa, Kan., saloons, "to prove that the man who rents his house is a partner also with the man who sells."

Not many people joined the 53-year-old Mrs. Nation in physical destruction, but millions joined the Anti-Saloon League.

"Its foe wasn't the drink in the bottle or the drunk who drank it, but the drink traffic: powerful business interests -- protected by a government reliant on liquor taxes," Mark Lawrence Schrad writes in Smashing the Liquor Machine: A Global History of Prohibition.

The 18th Amendment passed in 1919, making Prohibition the law. Nobody was fully satisfied. Drinking fell at first, perhaps to a third of previous levels. But it climbed again as sophisticated criminal organizations arose to supply illegal hootch.

"Prohibition has...established in our great cities five speakeasies where there was formerly one saloon," Clarence Barron wrote in this magazine on April 4, 1927. "In Detroit the proportion is conservatively estimated at 10 to one."

After the onset of the Great Depression in 1929, the high cost of the Prohibition fight couldn't be borne. Plus, everyone just needed a drink. On Dec. 5, 1933, the 21st Amendment was ratified, officially ending Prohibition.

"You Can Drink!" the New York Daily News announced the next day.

Americans have been drinking ever since, even if most no longer begin their days with an "eye opener." That's progress. Cheers!

Write to editors@barrons.com

This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

February 22, 2025 04:00 ET (09:00 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.