Charleston Alcohol Traditions

 Charleston Alcohol Traditionsⁱ

i Charleston Alcohol Traditions

French wines might be the most famous, but due to the political and economic conditions of colonial South Carolina, we imported a huge quantity of drink from Portugal and the Portuguese-controlled territories of Madeira and the Canary Islands. Madeira wine, which is actually a red wine fortified with a bit of a stronger spirit like brandy, and its cousins—port, sack, and sherry—were extremely common in early South Carolina. Unlike their dainty French counterparts, these fortified wines held up well in our hot southern climate, and our close trading partnership with Portugal made them much more plentiful. . . .

Beer and wine are both fermented beverages, but alcoholic spirits, on the other hand, are distilled. That is, spirits are made by separating and concentrating the alcohol produced from a fermented mash. The result is a stronger, more intoxicating drink, and the colonists of early South Carolina couldn’t get enough of it. As with brewing, a handful of investors tried their hands at setting up distilleries in and around early Charleston, but none lasted very long. There was simply too much good, reasonably-priced liquor flowing in from our trading partners in the West Indies, in England, and even in the northern colonies.

By far, the most common spirit available in early South Carolina was rum, which is distilled from the juice of sugar cane plants. The islands of Barbados and Jamaica, among others, were almost entirely devoted to the cultivation of sugarcane and rum, so we established a convenient reciprocal trade with them. South Carolina exported huge quantities of firewood and lumber for making things like stills and barrels, and the islands sent us barrels of refined sugar and distilled rum.

If you delve into the newspapers of colonial Charleston, you’ll see that we imported a fair amount of what was called “northward rum.” This was mostly the product of Rhode Island, a colony that flourished by importing raw sugar from Barbados and then distilling and exporting a vast amount of cheap rum. Thanks to this rum trade, and their cooler climate, Newport, Rhode Island developed strong economic and social connections with Charleston, and these connections lasted well beyond the Civil War.

Besides rum, there were other distilled spirits flowing into the port of colonial Charleston. Brandy, made from distilled fruit juices, was quite common and came from a variety of sources. Gin, also called “Geneva” in our early newspapers, was also readily available, coming to us from England and Holland. As far as distilled drinks go, gin was the new kid on the block in the early 1700s. It was easy to make, cheap, and the first liquor to be mass-produced. All of these qualities made gin the scourge of English society in the early 1700s, when the concept of alcoholism first appeared in our society.