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• Position: What's New? - Steven Grasse's "Colonial Spirits: A Toast to Our Drunken History" - Book review

Boozy maverick Steven Grasse has written Colonial Spirits: A Toast to Our Drunken History, a playful yet educational look at the real ways that our Founding Fathers drank--which they did ... a lot.

"Spirits can be many things: a transcendental search, the embodiment of inspiration, a ghost in the closet, a bottle of booze. We see the spirit of America as all of the above. Before democracy, there were spirits, and from spirits we created taverns, and it was in those taverns that we laid out the blueprint for a new kind of country, with a new kind of ideology, not ruled by kings and queens but by men and women. In other words, we got drunk and invented America," says the author, whose influence has made Hendrick's gin, Art in the Age spirits, Narragansett beer, Sailor Jerry rum, and Tamworth Distillery darlings of the contemporary cocktail movement.

In the last few years, cocktail lovers and history buffs alike have been awash in a tide of books about the history of American mixology, but the cocktail as we know it today only came about around the time of the Industrial Revolution. So, what did the first Americans drink? Grasse takes a deep and illuminating dive into the question--and what he finds are the very roots of American ingenuity, born of necessity.

Across its pages, the book offers a peek into the barrooms and battlefields of the Revolution...