Why Water Gave Non-Alcoholic Drinks a Terrible Reputation
Why did it take . . *checks watch* until the 2020s for the zero proof movement to gain steam in America?
One reason, among many: Blame water.
It’s not entirely water’s fault, to be sure.
But water, at the time of the founding of the American colonies, had a worse reputation than whisky. With good reason: Drinking bad water was credited with the massive failure of the Jamestown colony, which was founded in 1607 as a sober community.
As I write in my book, “’Zero Proof: 90 Non-Alcoholic Recipes for Mindful Drinking”, early settlers did not set up a brew house when they landed, which meant they didn't have the technology to kill microorganisms. (The idea of boiling water to make it safe was still some decades away.) Settlers lived off river water, which had a high level of salt content, and gave themselves salt poisoning, among many other issues. So began a decline that led to mass starvation and death.
When Plymouth’s settlers arrived to set up their own colony in 1620, they made sure to set up a brewhouse nearly right away. A brew house, famously, was one of the very first structures that the Plymouth settlers built, with a public house that became the center of social, political and civic life. These early gestures begin the weaving of drinking with socializing in America, a practice that continues to this day.
For colonial settlers, fermenting beer, which was part of the first Thanksgiving meal, was a way to make water drinkable. For many decades, and even centuries later, people knew one thing: Drinking beer and liquor was, in some ways, safer than drinking water. Towns and cities in both the colonies and in Europe were beset with cholera outbreaks, for example, that originated at public wells and town pumps.
The advent of piped water helped lift water’s reputation. (Incidentally, the Roman Empire had mastered safe piped water in buildings and cities, but that technology was lost for centuries after the Empire’s fall.) By the colonial era, urban myths as well as documented illnesses linked to water, meant that drinking water (and tangentially, most non-alcoholic drinks) was viewed with suspicion, not entirely without reason.
By the late 1800’s, the popularity of sparkling mineral waters in America as well as Europe started to ease public fears. Cities such as Philadelphia added piped water to buildings at the start of the 1900s. But water was still sketchy enough that newspapers would often publish tips and advice on how to drink water.
A typical article from 1903, for example, tells readers about the best time to drink water (upon rising, before means and half an hour before sleeping). “Not more than two glasses of water or other liquid should be taken at meal time, and practically no water should be drunk when soup is served,” an article published on Sept. 9, 1903 in South Carolina’s Lancaster Enterprise said. “Water may be taken at the close of a meal, but if many glasses are drunk with meals, disorders of digestion may follow, in fact, the desire to drink copiously at meal time is often an evidence of indigestion.”
Public comfort with drinking water helped fuel the early temperance movements of the 1800s, which sought to make non-alcoholic drinking more socially acceptable. Many hurdles later, including surviving the vast unpopularity of Prohibition, the non-alcoholic drinking space is perhaps at long last, shaking off centuries of bad press. It’s been an uphill battle to be sure, but one reason it’s taken so long, besides the lack of quality options, was a built-in resistance to the non-drinker that goes back to before America was America.
