The New Yorker: The Critics: Books

Little has changed. People still drink all day long in London.

The New Yorker: The Critics: Books: "A typical day�s drinking for Samuel Pepys in early Restoration London might go like this. At about ten o�clock, he would have his �morning draft��usually �small� (or weak) beer, but sometimes regular beer or even wine. Cakes might be eaten with the draft, but dinner was the day�s main meal, then taken at noon, and, at least on some occasions, this was washed down with wine�possibly watered, given the volumes that Pepys records knocking back. During the rest of the working day, more wine might be consumed: Rhenish wine (sometimes sugared); �sack� (sherry or Spanish white wine); claret (red Bordeaux); �Florence� wine; �burnt� or �mulled� wine; wine flavored with wormwood. He might also have further drafts of beer (traditionally hopped) or ale (traditionally unhopped, and specified as Margate, Lambeth, China, or Hull). Like most seventeenth-century Londoners, Pepys drank little or no water. Beer and ale were scarcely thought of as intoxicants; you would have had to drink vast quantities of small beer to become �foxed� or �fuddled,� and, because the water available to Londoners was so foul, mildly alcoholic beverages were safer"