In New England drinking habits soon underwent a marked and speedy change. English grains did not thrive well those first years of settlement, and were costly to import, so New Englanders soon drifted from beer-drinking to cider-drinking. The many apple orchards planted first by Endicott and Blackstone in Massachusetts, and Wolcott in Connecticut, and seen in a few decades on every prosperous and thrifty farm, soon gave forth their bountiful yield of juicy fruit. Perhaps this change in drinking habits was indirectly the result of the influence of the New England climate. Cider seemed more fitted for sharp New England air than ale. Cider was soon so cheap and plentiful throughout the colony that all could have their fill. Josselyn said in 1670: “I have had at the tap-houses of Boston an ale-quart of cider spiced and sweetened with sugar for a groat.”
Eagle Tavern and Sign-board, Newton, New Hampshire.
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 began 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.