What was advertised in a revolutionary American newspaper 250 years ago today?
“Hare’s American best bottled PORTER.”
Robert Appleby apparently specialized in beers brewed locally. Those were the only products that he promoted in an advertisement that ran in the March 19, 1776, edition of the Pennsylvania Evening Post. He opened with “SPRUCE BEER” that he brewed himself “in Chesnut-street, between Second and Third streets, two doors from the White-horse tavern” in Philadelphia. Even if prospective customers were not already familiar with his beer, they could certainly find him once they were in the vicinity of the tavern. Flavored with spruce needles or buds, this popular beverage helped in preventing scurvy. Appleby sold his spruce beer in bottles, charging three shillings a dozen, or kegs as small as five gallons. For the convenience of his customers, he offered delivery “to any part of the city.”
He also distributed beer that he did not brew, “Hare’s American best bottled PORTER.” That beverage already had quite a reputation in Philadelphia. Over the past several months, several tavernkeepers placed advertisements to alert prospective patrons when they planned to “open a TAP of Mr. HARE’s best AMERICAN DRAUGHT PORTER,” often associating drinking a brew brewed in the colony (and gathering together to do so) with support for the American cause. Patrick Meade, for instance, declared that he “expects the Associators of Freedom will encouragement to the American Porter it deserves,” and Joseph Price called on “all the SONS of AMERICAN LIBERTY” to drink it at his tavern at “the sign of the Bull and Dog.”
In addition to his spruce beer and the most famous beer brewed in the city at the time, Appleby also sold “Philadelphia bottled BEER and CYDER, by the grose or dozen,” pledging that “None will be sent out but what is exceeding fine.” Elsewhere in the same issue, Robert Bell placed competing advertisements for his third edition of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense and James Chalmers’s Plain Truth, a response that depicted the “scheme of INDEPENDANCE” as “ruinous, delusive, and impracticable.” Whether or not they purchased those pamphlets, the readers who consumed Appleby’s spruce beer and Hare’s porter likely had animated conversations as they discussed current events.