Ok, so let’s have it. What’s the most American thing I can drink this weekend? It’s beer, right? It’s gotta be beer.
That’s a good place to start. Drinking beer is, after all, a great American pastime. What is baseball without beer? But the U.S. Is actually in 14th place when it comes to beer consumption per capita, and second (to China) when it comes to total, overall amount of beer consumed. China’s beating us by more than 75 percent in that category. Rough. Also worth considering that beer has been around for 11,000 years longer than the United States. So beer, though frequently delicious, is not a terribly American thing to drink.
Ok, so what about whiskey? We love whiskey.
We do love whiskey! But so do French folks— their annual whiskey intake is 2.15 litres per person, beating ours (1.41 liters) by quite a bit. And India consumes fully half of the world’s whiskey every year. And—at least according to some internationally recognized blind panelists—the best-tasting whiskey apparently comes from Japan these days.
**No, not whisky-whiskey. The American stuff! Bourbon. **Bourbon was invented here, and it can only be made in that one little county in Kentucky!
First of all, that Bourbon County factoid is bullshit. It is illegal to make liquor in Bourbon County. But yes: Bourbon—whiskey made from corn, aged in new oak barrels—is an American invention and it has to be made right here in America. But the name _Bourbon, _contrary to myth, likely has the same origin as the county in Kentucky and the street in New Orleans: the royal family of France. After Louis XVI and his army bailed us out of the Revolutionary War, naming things after the Bourbons on France was a popular way to pay homage. (Historians suspect it was not lost on whiskey sellers then that stamping a French name on their barrels might make customers think it was imported brandy.) So whiskey is a very American drink that pays respect to an executed French monarch.
Also, quite ridiculously, Australia consumes more American-made whiskey than America does. So that’s embarrassing.
Okay, fine, so what is it? Fireball? Please don’t tell me it’s Fireball.
It’s not Fireball. Don’t drink Fireball. America’s national drink is probably rum. America was basically founded on the strength of the rum trade—for more than a hundred years before the Revolutionary War, the British were using our East Coast port cities as centers for rum distillation. The British Navy would ship up sugarcane from the Caribbean, where it’d be distilled into rum at distilleries near the docks. This was a huge industry—the industry, actually, on which colonial New England first became prosperous. George Washington served rum at his inauguration. It wasn’t until the war of 1812—when the Brits set up blockades around the Caribbean, limiting our ability to import sugarcane—that American distilleries began to focus on domestic crops, eventually making whiskey (particularly bourbon and rye) the distillate of choice.
I’m not totally sold on this. Seems like Bourbon is pretty damn American.
You know what? You’re right. Drink bourbon this weekend. We can beat those Aussies yet.
