America's early history is mass drinking. Rum was 'invented' in Barbados in ~1650, but beer, wine, and brandy have been drunk in the Caribbean and Americas sinc

America's early history is mass drinking. Rum was 'invented' in Barbados in ~1650, but beer, wine, and brandy have been drunk in the Caribbean and Americas since it was first touched by colonizers. Wayne Curtis reported that in the 1600/1700s the average person aged 15 years old and up drank 6 gallons of pure alcohol a year, equal to 75 fifths of 80 proof rum a year, or roughly 5 shots per day. Continental european emissaries who would visit towns in the new world would be shocked at the drunkenness of just countless near dead bodies laying in the streets, and from this British, and sometimes Irish, indentured workers got the reputation for being insane drunkards. He posited that the main driver of heavy drinking was misery - in the colonies and early corporation towns back then, when the weather went bad and there was no work, you drank until things improved. Not too different from today imo.