Yankee Brew News Archive

Drinking by the Rules: A New England Tradition

Originally Published: 07/94

By: Kerry J. Byrne

Talk to anyone trying to move ahead with a product or idea in the beer industry. It's likely you'll be met by a chorus of moans and groans directed at the government; federal, state and local.

"We've been waiting about eight months now for BATF approval," is a complaint heard time and again.

Chalk such things up to red tape, you might say. But there are other instances where government control has defied logic. The case of Yakima Brewing being forced to discontinue an entire product line (Yakima Cider) because they wanted to print nutritional information on their Cider label bordered on the inexplicable. Of course, the ultimate in irrational (and failed) government attempts at controlling the beer industry was Prohibition.

These attempts to control society's drinking habits are hardly something new, however. In colonial days, too, the laws ranged from the fascist to the absurd. While most of us have images of colonial taverns alive with drunken festivities, the laws of the day paint quite a different picture.

In 1693 the General Court of the Province of Massachusetts Bay called for innholders and taverners to provide "suitable provisions for...entertainment of strangers and travellers," but it made nary a suggestion as to how this was to be done. The problem of providing entertainment was compounded by law of the previous year stating "no taverner, inn-keeper, ale-house keeper or victualler, shall have...any dice, cards, tables, bowls, shuffleboard, billiards, coyts, cales, legats, or any other implements used in gaming." It is ironic that in the colonial precursor to the state that now touts electronic barroom betting (Keno, anyone?) as a key to financial stability, even the most rudimentary games were outlawed.

Without games, to what could taverners turn for entertainment? Perhaps music and dancing, activities which even today draw many to their favorite watering hole.

These sins of the flesh and soul must have flourished in the following two decades, because the government saw fit to suppress them as well: "No singing, fiddling, piping or any other musick, dancing or revelling shall be suffered or exercised in any tavern or other publick licensed house, on penalty of ten shillings" declared the General Court in 1712. Apparently these shindigs offended just the right (read: powerful) people in Massachusetts.

If these same people needed a place of their own in which to knock back a few while conducting business, it was easily provided for by the monied folks who controlled the colony's governing body. When, in 1704, Nicholas Boon took over a coffee-house in Boston, the Court, in almost comic terms, granted him a license to sell "coffee, tea, chocolate, beer, ale, cyder, mead, mum and other such drinks...several gentlemen and merchants finding such a house needful near the post-office."

Long bull sessions conducted with pewter mugs in hand were also a thing of imagination - or done illegally. "Every person...tipling or drinking or otherwise misordering him - or herself, or [drinking] above the space of one hour...shall forfeit and pay the sum of three shillings and four pence, or be set in the stocks not exceeding four hours time," dictated the Court 301 years ago.

Surprisingly, this edict implies women were known customers in the taverns of the day. It also says that they were subject to the same punishments as men. Any element of egalitarianism was squashed in an earlier section of the bill, however, which said no innholder "shall suffer any apprentice, servant or negro to sit drinking in his or her house." At least in terms of drinking in Massachusetts taverns, racial and social equality had not caught up with sexual equality.

Laws of the day made it plain that taverns and inns were the almost exclusive domain of travelers in need of libation and sustenance. The same law which barred "apprentices, servants and negros" from drinking in taverns also dismissed the notion of the legal 'local', frequented by friends and neighbors of the town taverner: innholders shall not "suffer any inhabitants of such town where he dwells, or coming thither from any other town, to sit drinking or tipling in his or her house...or to continue there, above the space of one hour."

With these attempts at stifling the enjoyment of alcoholic beverages, one might wonder how any drinking ever got done. Common sense would say that it's doubtful that many of these laws were strictly adhered to by the people of Massachusetts. What are the odds that men preparing to overthrow the Crown would pay close attention to its oppressive tavern laws? When the men of Sudbury where preparing to fight the British at Lexington and Concord they gathered at the Red Horse Inn, later immortalized in poem as Longfellow's Wayside Inn. It is also well known that the men who led the American Revolution gathered at public houses, Boston's legendary Bunch of Grapes and the Green Dragon among them, to plot the fate of the colonies. (An interesting note: In 1705, when Green Dragon keeper John Carey was unable to meet his "arrears of excise" of about twelve pounds, the General Court said he could pay off the "said sum in beer for the countrey's use." )

Other known lawbreakers included farmer-turned-Revolutionary-War-hero-turned-rebel Daniel Shays. Shays was known to have spent time at Oliver Clapp's tavern (it was said that Clapp's "wife brewed a passable beer") in Amherst and was a frequenter of William Conkey's tavern, only a half mile from his home in Pelham. It is doubtful that Shays and his cronies polished off the last of their ale and departed their friend Conkey's public house after only one hour had passed.

Let it be soothing to the struggling businessmen of today to note that they are not the only generation to suffer the slings and arrows of governmental irrationality. Since Europeans first set foot on our soil the powers-that-be have seen fit to do all it can to stifle the enjoyment of one's favorite drink.