America’s esteemed founding father, Thomas Jefferson, was a polymath like no other. As an author, he wrote the Declaration of Independence, as an architect, he designed the Monticello, as a politician, he became the President. These achievements are so grand that they often overshadow his other achievements–some of which are quite boozy. As it turns out, Jefferson’s life and career touches time and time again on alcohol. Besides being a founding father, he was an unparalleled connoisseur of wines, a locally-renowned brewer of beers, and a public advocate for spirits. In building his agrarian democracy, Jefferson always saw the utility and beauty in creating fermented beverages from crops.
Much like the colonists themselves, wine was imported from Europe to America. European grape vines did not grow in colonial vineyards due to a variety of yet-to-be-discovered pests and diseases native to the New World. The local grapes that did thrive in these climes could produce wine, but the resulting vintage was often disparaged as foxy or even undrinkable. The average British colonist could not afford luxury imports. Accordingly, wine was reserved for the elite classes of colonial society. Jefferson, surely representative of the elite taste for imported wines, was also a strong proponent for the foundation of a domestic wine industry in America.
In fact, the dream of an American wine industry was most loudly voiced by Thomas Jefferson. The third president is commonly esteemed as America’s first oenophile. He ordered fine wines straight from vineyards in the French countryside and advised presidents Washington, Madison, and Monroe on wine purchases during their time in the White House.
In his early years, it is likely that Jefferson would have consumed heavy wines like port, sherry, or Madeira like any well-to-do colonist. After spending 5 years in France from 1784-1789, the diplomat developed a passion for the nuances of the liquid. French wines would become his favorites.
During his placement in Europe, Jefferson toured vineyards, observed viticultural techniques, and made business connections in wine-producing regions in Bordeaux, Burgundy, and Rhone, as well as Italy and Germany. He got to know the wines of Bordeaux so well that he managed to distinguish them to the same degree as the Bordeaux Wine Official Classification which would not be decided upon until 1855. His favorites are still considered some of the greatest wines in the world, including champagne, Hermitage, St. Georges d’Orques, and Rochegude.
Back in the States, Jefferson regularly purchased wine directly from European wine-makers. While most Americans bought their wine in barrels, Jefferson had them shipped in bottles to avoid tampering. By most accounts he spent at least one fifth of his annual salary on his wine habit. Perhaps because of his personal expenditures, he also became a proponent for cutting excise tax on wines, believing wine to be beneficial to the public and thus ill-deserving of tax.
His taste for the drink pervaded his idealistic dreams for the young country he had helped to found. Always focused on agricultural bounty, he imagines an American continent filled with vineyards.
He happily took the first steps in realizing this dream himself. He recruited Italian winemaker Philipo Mazzei to run the vineyards at his Monticello estate. While this endeavor ultimately failed due to environmental obstacles, Jefferson’s vision for American vineyards would eventually be realized.
In both his connoisseurship of Old World wines and his vision for viticulture in the New World, Jefferson was unparalleled by any of his contemporaries and even predicted the paths that global wines would take over the next 2 centuries.
Beer was perhaps the most common beverage across colonial America. The earliest meeting halls for America’s founding communities–inchoate hubs of early local democracy–were in fact community taverns where conversation would flow almost as freely as beer. Jefferson would have drunk light beers regularly as a staple in the early American diet.
The President’s personal pursuit of beer began domestically. His wife, Martha, made beer for household consumption. The couple began to cultivate a small crop of hops in the Monticello gardens in 1794.
About a decade later, while serving as President, Jefferson acquired a practical book on beer production. He purchased Michael Combrune’s The Theory and Practice of Brewing, which he would later lend out to his neighbor, Meriwether. Still a busy public figure, Jefferson’s beer-making would once again be put on hold. Finally, in his retirement, Jefferson requested that Meriwether return the brewing how-to in an 1813 letter. This signified a new undertaking at Monticello, brewing beer!
It was no coincidence that the retired president turned to beer making immediately following the War of 1812. An Englishman well versed in the art of fermenting malt had been stranded nearby following the conclusion of the war. This man, Joseph Miller, worked alongside Jefferson in establishing a small brewery that was increasingly self-sufficient on Monticello’s grounds.
At first, Jefferson’s beer was not an entirely home-grown product. William Meriwether, the book-borrowing neighbor, sold him the malt necessary to make beer. But Miller would go on to train other members of Jefferson’s household staff, including enslaved men, and by 1814, the Monticello brewers were no longer dependent on purchased malt. They malted their own, and may have even learned to make beer from corn. The brewery would eventually be overseen by one of the enslaved men on Jefferson’s estates, Peter Hemings.
While Jefferson oversaw his estate, he would not have been brewing the beer himself. The idea of Jefferson as a home-brewer, a wig-wearing Charles Papazian, belies the reality; it was the staff and slaves of the Monticello estate who made the beer that was so well liked by local Virginians that some asked for the recipe. At the same time, we could consider the point of view of Jefferson’s contemporaries: the quality of the beer at Monticello must have reflected directly on Jefferson’s reputation. So, in some ways, Jefferson was not only a great wine connoisseur, but also an acclaimed brewer!
Unlike George Washington’s Mount Vernon Estate, which operated a for-profit distillery with 5 pot stills, the Monticello did not dabble in the refinement of spirits. Jefferson himself did not drink hard liquor. In fact, he abstained from higher proof wines as well. Nevertheless, he was a large scale consumer of whiskey as he made regular purchases of it to board his hired and enslaved staff. In this act, Jefferson acknowledged the spirits’ position in daily American affairs, particularly as it related to operating a profitable farm. It was from a business and even science perspective that Jefferson interacted most closely with distilled spirits.
In 1804, Thomas Jefferson received a letter from Michael Krafft, a man whom he had never met. Krafft had spent the prior 3 years developing a patented design for a still and running experiments to test out pragmatic factors such as fuel consumption and distillery layout. He wrote to Jefferson, who was president at the time, in order to ask permission that a forthcoming book based on his research be dedicated to the president.
In his letters to President Jefferson, the author explained his intentions. He believed that a dedication to the president (and thus a tacit endorsement from him) would “safeguard against its falling into the general wreck of oblivion which the Discountenance of envy may wish to Consign it.” By this logic, any author might then ask a president for his endorsement, but Krafft’s treatise on distillation was unique. It was the first American work on the subject and was particularly focused on the practical side of distillation rather than the purely scientific. His book would enable American farmers to put distillation into practice, enriching them and helping to develop the early American economy. He dreamt that it might “enable this rising Fabric to vie with the dazzling pageantry of Monarchs, the riches & gems of agriculture, set against the baubles of Heraldry.” For Krafft, practical distillation was a democratic ideal that fit well in Jefferson’s agrarian democracy.
As it turns out, presidents responded to unsolicited letters back in 1804, or at least Jefferson responded to Krafft’s letter. Jefferson endorsed the project. He was a man of science and appreciated the value that proper distillation techniques could have on agricultural output. In his response, Jefferson wrote, “I see too with great satisfaction every example of bending science to the useful purposes of life. hitherto Chemistry has scarcely deigned to look to the occupations of domestic life. When she shall have made intelligible to the ordinary housholder the philosophy of making bread, butter, cheese, soap, beer, cyder, wine, vinegar &c. these daily comforts will keep us ever mindful of our obligations to her.”
When the book, The American Distiller, or, the Theory and Practice of Distilling, was published, Krafft sent Jefferson a copy . The president’s office thanked the author, once again affirming the importance of the work and thus the role of distillation in the largely agrarian economy of early America. The president “owes him particular acknowledgements for the obliging terms in his dedication: but is sensible that the book possesses, in its own merits, the best of all titles to the public esteem.”
Jefferson would eventually sell his personal library to the United States Library of Congress. Krafft’s book along with other books pertaining to the production of beer and wine would become a cornerstone of the nation’s (and the world’s) most impressive collection of knowledge. The final dedication in the preface to the book summed up the patriotic feeling towards distillation held in common by both Krafft and Jefferson: “I was also desirous under your Excellency’s patronage, to recommend the investigation and pursuit of the objects contained in this treatise to the immediate attention of the patriotic and scientific, as opening a vast field to the agriculturalist to transport his superfluous grain in a different form to a market, to which the raw material could never get.”
Krafft’s was the first American treatise on distillation, but after this publication many more would follow. Notable publications that would also color the early years of American distillation would be McHarry’s The Practical Distiller published in 1809 and Hall’s The Distiller published in 1818.
While Jefferson was a temperate man, and even warned against the consumption of strong spirits on a national level, the practical application of distillation appealed to his agricultural mind. In his love of wine, experimentation with beer, and endorsement of hard liquor Jefferson reveals his true appreciations in life: agriculture, science, progress and perhaps a little bit of beauty.
Breen, Eleanor. “Whiskey on the Rocks: Excavating and Interpreting the Archaeological Remains of George Washington’s Distillery.” Society for Historical Archaeology, St. Louis (2004).
“From Thomas Jefferson to Michael Krafft, 29 April 1804,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-43-02-0274. [Original source: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 43, 11 March–30 June 1804, ed. James P. McClure. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017, pp. 334–335.]
“From Thomas Jefferson to Michael Krafft, 21 December 1804,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/99-01-02-0870.
Hill, Laura. “Dining with Thomas Jefferson.” Thomas Jefferson: A Free Mind (2004): 111.
Krafft, Michael August. The American Distiller, or, the Theory and Practice of Distilling. Thomas Dobson, at the Stone House, 1804. Copyright 2013 by the American Antiquarian Society and NewsBank, inc. All Rights Reserved.
Liebmann, Alfred J. “History of distillation.” Journal of Chemical Education 33.4 (1956): 166
“Monticello.” Beer, https://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/beer.
“Monticello.” Whiskey, https://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/whiskey.
Terrell, Ellen. “On the Subject of Bourbon Whiskey: Charring Oak Barrels Was No Accident – It Was Science.” On the Subject of Bourbon Whiskey: Charring Oak Barrels Was No Accident – It Was Science | Inside Adams: Science, Technology & Business, 29 Jan. 2019, https://blogs.loc.gov/inside_adams/2019/01/on-the-subject-of-bourbon-whiskey-charring-oak-barrels-was-no-accident-it-was-science/.
“To Thomas Jefferson from Michael Krafft, 24 April 1804,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-43-02-0252. [Original source: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 43, 11 March–30 June 1804, ed. James P. McClure. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017, pp. 301–302.]
“To Thomas Jefferson from Michael Krafft, 11 May 1804,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-43-02-0311. [Original source: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 43, 11 March–30 June 1804, ed. James P. McClure. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017, p. 412.]
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