What was advertised in a revolutionary American newspaper 250 years ago today?
“Different kinds of beer, as usual, equal in quality to any in this city.”
Francis Wade was back in business and he wanted the public to know it! In late October 1776, the brewer began running advertisements in the Pennsylvania Evening Post that both acknowledged that his “absence for some time past obliged him to shut up his brewery” in Philadelphia and announced that he “has began to brew for the season.” In early November, he inserted the same advertisement in the Pennsylvania Gazette in his effort to increase his market penetration by reaching more prospective customers.
Wade did not explain his absence, nor did he give directions to his brewery. Perhaps he assumed that “his former customers and others that are disposed to make trial of his beer” knew where to find him. For several months in late 1774 and early 1775, he ran advertisements that directed “his old country customers” to his new location at the corner of Fourth and Race Streets. Perhaps Wade believed that his brewery became such a familiar location once he established himself there that he did not need to elaborate on his location, despite his recent absence and suspension of production.
Now that Wade’s brewery was operating again, he hoped that his former clientele and new customers would purchase the “different kinds of beer” offered there. He pledged that all of them were “equal in quality to any in this city,” putting him in competition with other brewers that included Robert Hare and his Best American Draught Porter. He claimed that customers could expect such quality “as usual,” suggesting that he believed his beer already earned that reputation and he wanted consumers to recall that was the case. Even if he exaggerated, Wade stood to benefit from such puffery. Prospective customers who had never tried his beer, he may have reasoned, might find such assertions convincing when they contemplated “mak[ing] trial of his beer” in their own homes or serving it in their taverns.