Brewers beware. Common belief holds that beer was consumed in pre-scientific times because tainted water caused sickness. Yes, during a 19th century cholera outbreak, the doctor John Snow noted that those who drank water became sick while those who drank beer did not. Today, we generally assume that fermented drinks help to kill pathogens due to their low pH, content of alcohol, and lack of oxygen. But, the truth is more complicated. Scrutiny from more recent scholarship suggests that nasty bacteria like food-poisoning Bacillus cereus and the notorious E. Coli can survive in alcoholic beverages like beer. Most of these pathogens do die off during fermentation, but Kim et al have shown that some can survive for long periods of time.
We can debate the scientific merit of anti-pathogenic beer, but we won’t be doing anything original. The health myths of beer have long been on the forefront of food safety. In fact, an American lawsuit from the 1830s discussed the intersection of food safety and beer well before the USDA was founded in 1862 by President Lincoln, later to become the Bureau of Chemistry in 1901 and finally the Food and Drug Administration in 1906. This suit, New York’s Taylor vs Delavan, was ahead of its time in its focus on food safety, and we can thank the Temperance Movement for that.
Some consider the Massachusetts Act Against Selling Unwholesome Provision of 1785 to be the first American food safety law, controlling what substitutes could be baked into bread. Yet, real food safety pioneering did not occur until the early 1900s, when Upton Sinclair famously wrote about the unsanitary conditions in the Chicago meat-packing industry. So, when a New York Temperance Society published a scathing report on Albany’s brewing industry 70 years prior, its accusation of uncleanliness hit a public otherwise unexposed to the talk.
Albany, the capital of New York state, had been brewing beer for a wider audience during the 1820s, 30s, and 40s. The city was located on both the Hudson River and Erie Canal, a prime position for shipping its brew down to the more populous areas around New York City where water was increasingly rancid. The lucrative market attracted considerable business interest. A wake of social ripples followed as well.
In February of 1835, the chairman of the Executive Committee of the New-York State Temperance Society, Edward Delavan, published in the Evening Journal a report that accused the growing brewing contingency of using noxious water in the malting process of beer-making. This is the step when brewers soak barley with water to encourage it to sprout, converting the grain’s starches into fermentable sugar. Delavan alleged, “that no attention was ever paid to cleanliness; the water was often taken from puddles in which were dead animals. When the water was low in the pools, holes were sometimes made, in which the pail was sunk; and [the waterboy] had seen the sides of it come in contact with dead animals in a state of putridity; has seen water carried to the malt houses nearly as thick as cream with filth; saw last winter, water passing on carts coming from the direction of the same filthy ponds, and taken to the malt houses.” His claim was that the water sprinkled on the grain for malting was a blatant threat to public health.
About this accusation, the brewers were not happy. One man in particular, John Taylor, took issue with the publication of the claims. He said it was libel and injurious to his reputation and business. The brewer Taylor took the temperance advocate Delavan to court.
The prosecution countered the dirty water claims, “This libel, this false and scurrilous article, which Mr. Delavan saw proper, through the medium of the public press, to publish against Mr. Taylor, was one that was calculated to hold him up to the scorn, the contempt, the hatred of every honest man; to bring his business into disrepute: indeed, to utterly ruin him, so far as brewing beer or making malt was concerned; to show him up to the public as entirely reckless of the means of manufacturing the article he vended.” The court would have to settle whether the claims were true.
As the court case went underway, it became clear that there was a pond in Albany that was quite dirty. Witness upon witness attested to the fact that locals used the pond as a dumping ground for deceased animals, horses and hogs, cats and dogs. The same pond was also in the immediate vicinity of certain establishments including a slaughterhouse, a glue factory, and a potter’s cemetery that emitted unsavory discharges. Some neighbors used the pond’s water for washing, but it was unfit to drink. The question remained if brewers were drawing from this source for malting.
One cartman, who hauled water for the brewers, testified that shoveling malt was a disgusting job that involved a great stench. He also testified that he had seen a dead cat in buckets of water being drawn for the malting process at Taylor’s facility. He had worked as a cartman for the malting houses when he was only 12 and did not question the use of such filthy water.
Why was this “most offensive, impure, and disgusting water” drawn from such a source? The court case suggests two explanations. The first is the cost: “How much did it cost to draw this [dirty] water? Six cents a hogshead. What would it have cost to have drawn the water from the river? Four shillings was the usual price for drawing a hogshead of water from the dock to the hill.” The contaminated pond was closer, and thus cheaper. Second, it was not necessarily known that dirty water was bad for the malting process. The water did not go directly into beer after all, it was absorbed by the seeds encouraging them to germinate. The trial suggests that the Encyclopedia Americana stated it was common practice in London to use dirty water from the Thames for malting. One witness testified that the Encyclopedia is considered a reliable authority. This case predates much of modern scientific knowledge regarding microbes, but dead cats are visible to the naked eye. The gratuitousness of the filth made the case believable and relevant to an otherwise ignorant audience.
The water was the focus of the trial, not the beer, but outside of the trial, beer was the true motivator. The defendant, Mr. Delavan, was an outspoken advocate for temperance and revealed his bias against beer in a pamphlet he circulated after the trial concluded. “Were I a beer drinker, even now, I would as soon drink Mr. Taylor’s beer as that of any other maker. I view the filthy water, as nauseous as it has been proved to be, as a mere circumstance in comparison with other qualities in all beer. Unlike all other intoxicating drinks used for a common beverage, it contains, by means of the hop, a deadly narcotic, an anodyne, with its alcoholic stimulant, and thus distracts, impairs and racks the nervous system, more fatally by means of acting upon it by conflicting and contrary agencies.” To him, the dirty water was a much more potable idea than alcoholic beer itself.
The case implicated Albany’s brewers more broadly–even those who were not proven to have used unclean water. A broadsheet was published shortly after the verdict which satirized the cause of the brewers. The sheet was likely written by a prominent temperance writer of Boston named John Pierpont who is supposed to have written the popular 1844 temperance play, The Drunkard. The satire, a twenty stanza poem titled Lament of the Albany Brewers, sarcastically asks “Are there no bottles for brewer’s tears?” The piece goes on to wonder why filthy things are such a bad addition to beer in the first place? One of the choicest lines alludes to the propinquity of a slaughterhouse to the water source: “Why should not we, who have, from year to year,/Our beer in hogsheads put, put hogs’ heads in our beer?” There is also a reference to the graveyard near the pond:
“Corpses that, living, bloated on our beer,
And died of dropsy, long before your time,
Were it not better that ye give back here
The moisture that converts your clay to slime”
The moral tone of the piece is clear and shows how the case fit into larger conversations about alcohol’s role in America. The Lament revealed its intent to influence with the note: “Liberal discount made to societies or individuals who purchase for gratuitous distribution.” The case turned into a broader campaign against breweries, framing the moral issue of alcohol consumption in the lens of public health.
The use of dirty water was alleged to have occurred during the 1820s. Delavan’s article was published in 1835, and the court heard Taylor’s suit in 1840. After only 1 hour of deliberation, the jury let Delavan off. The brewers, they felt, had used filthy water in their malting process, thus no libel had occurred. It was a blow to the local industry, but reflected changing public sentiment towards stricter regulations on both physical and moral health.
Studies today support the fact that pathogenic bacteria can flourish during the malting process. (Kim et al) While this was not well understood at the time, the alarm raised about unsanitary conditions was progressive. Taylor lost the case, but it hardly mattered to him. By 1852, his brewery interests were so successful, he would build the largest brewery America had ever seen. He must have been a bit more careful ordering his water at such a large scale. Ultimately though, the Lament of the Albany Brewers would return, as temperance advocates succeeded in destroying the industry with Prohibition. Albany’s brewing industry would never again sit at the forefront of American beer.
“A Historical Look at Food Safety.” IFT.org, https://www.ift.org/news-and-publications/blog/2019/september/a-historical-look-at-food-safety.
“A Hoppy History of Beer in Albany, NY: Breweries Then & Now.” Albany.com, https://www.albany.com/history/beer/.
“From the Temperance Recorder. Lament of the Albany Brewers.” Constitution, vol. VI, no. 312, 20 Dec. 1843, p. [1]. Readex: Readex AllSearch, infoweb.newsbank.com/apps/readex/doc?p=ARDX&docref=image/v2%3A1118D16A8F655090%40EANX-112FB7BA26A908A0%402394555-112FB7BA422F6320%400-112FB7BB0C7EEDC8%40From%2Bthe%2BTemperance%2BRecorder.%2BLament%2Bof%2Bthe%2BAlbany%2BBrewers. Accessed 5 Sept. 2022.
Gravina, Craig. “The History of Beer: Albany, New York, Once the Largest Brewing Hub in America.” Hudson Valley Magazine, 27 Nov. 2019, https://hvmag.com/uncategorized/the-history-of-beer-albany-new-york-once-the-largest-brewing-hub-in-america/.
Pierpont, John. Lament of the Albany brewers. After the verdict in the libel case Taylor vs. Delavan. Boston] Published by Whipple & Damrell, 9 Cornhill, Boston. Two dollars per hundred. Liberal discount made to societies or individuals who purchase for gratuitous distribution, 1840. Readex: Readex AllSearch, infoweb.newsbank.com/apps/readex/doc?p=ARDX&docref=image/v2%3A10D2F64C960591AE%40EAIX-10F4540174334800%40-10DF32D84EF7B5F8%400. Accessed 5 Sept. 2022.
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