History of Alcohol: From Ancient Brews to Modern Cocktails: 30 Facts

The bar tab of a 1787 farewell party for George Washington is still intact. “According to the bill… [The Founding Fathers] drank 54 bottles of Madeira, 60 bottles of claret, 8 of whiskey, 22 of porter, 8 of hard cider, 12 of beer, and 7 bowls of alcoholic punch”. The party had 55 attendees.

2. In 1759, Arthur Guinness, the founder of Guinness beer leased an old unused brewery for £45 per year for 9,000 years.

3. A theme park (Išgyvenimo Drama) in Lithuania recreates life as a USSR citizen. Visitors have their belongings confiscated, wear gas masks, experience interrogation, and must learn the Soviet anthem. Their reward is a shot of vodka.

4. Carlsberg beer used to have a Swastika (as a symbol of purity) in its logo. They removed it in 1940 after the Nazi's appropriated it.

5. Beer Labels in the United States are approved or rejected by a single bureaucrat, Kent "Battle" Martin, who has been called the "Beer Bottle Dictator".

Mountain Dew was created to be used as a mixer for Whiskey and the name was slang for Moonshine.

7. The Rock (Dwayne Johnson) used tequila to get his voice ready before singing in Moana.

8. If you or your pet have accidentally consumed antifreeze, vodka can be used as an antidote.

9. When Teddy Roosevelt was a young child, doctors prescribed him whiskey and cigars to relieve his severe asthma.

10. Before Champagne became popular, fizz in wine was considered a bad thing and benedictine monk Dom Perignon worked to eliminate it. Wines from Champagne had a tendency to fizz because early frosts often led to incomplete fermentation during the manufacturing process.

Alcohol is prohibited in the British Parliament with one exception: the chancellor can drink while delivering the annual budget statement.

12. The Ancient Babylonians took their beer so seriously, if a brewer was found to be watering down his beer, he'd either be drowned in the barrel or forced to keep drinking it till he died.

13. Dr. Soren Sorensen (Danish chemist) developed the pH scale in order to test the acidity of beer to ultimately make better beer.

14. In 2011, a biology professor named Raul Cano extracted yeast from a 45 million-year-old insect trapped in amber and brewed beer from it.

15. Pennsylvania still charges its citizens an 18% tax on alcohol to pay for damages of the 1936 Johnstown flood.

One reason menus list a very expensive wine or specialty food item is to make everything else on the menu seem more reasonable, causing diners to spend more than they normally would.

17. A feral pig in Australia stole 18 beers from a campsite, got drunk, and then tried to fight a cow.

18. 10,000 light years away from Earth, there is a huge cloud of alcohol (Sagittarius B). It is 1000 times larger than the diameter of our solar system and contains enough alcohol to fill 400 trillion trillion pints. To drink all of it, everyone on Earth would have to drink 300,000 pints each day for 1 billion years.

19. During prohibition, Congress had their own bootlegger (George Cassiday) so senators and congressmen could still drink alcohol.

20. The Austrian wine market collapsed in 1985 when it was discovered that winemakers were adding antifreeze to artificially sweeten the wine.

When George Washington first ran for the Virginia House of Burgesses, he supplied 164 gallons of alcohol to only 396 voters so that they would like him. Washington won.

22. Russia banned the sale of vodka during World War I. The government immediately lost a third of its income.

23. A Texas A&M study invited people to taste wines labeled "France," "California," and "Texas," and while nearly all ranked the French as best, in fact, all three were the same Texan wine.

24. In 1974, the Cleveland Indians had a $0.10 Beer Night. Cleveland had to forfeit the game when their drunk fans started a riot during the 9th inning. Players had to attack fans with baseball bats to protect themselves.

25. Pythagoras invented a practical joke cup that would spill wine all over a person if they filled their cup too much.