BEER CONSUMPTION & OTHER LITTLE ICE AGE PHENOMENA 6

In a 2006 History Channel TV program, food & wine expert Joseph H. Coulombe gave the following statistics:

23 gallons of beer; 1 gallon of hard liquor; and 2 gallons of wine are consumed yearly on average by each adult American.

88% of wine is drunk by 11% of Americans, most on the East or West Coasts.

Various wine, beer, or alcohol producing institutes give the same figures of approximately two gallons of wine and 1 gallon of liquor and from just over 20 gallons of beer, to 21 gallons, to 22 gallons depending upon the year cited and the particular survey quoted. One survey estimated that 88% of wine is consumed by 16% of Americans.

Wine drinking is increasing in the United States - 231 million cases of wine were consumed in 2001 with an increase of 5½% in 2004. The projected increased total wine consumption by 2010 is 300 million cases.

IN 1997 adult Americans consumed an average of 22 gallons of beer, 23 ½ gallons of coffee, 53 gallons of soft drinks, and 2 gallons of wine. The French consumed an average of 64 liters (17 gallons) of wine while Germans drank an average of 120 liters (30 gallons) of beer.

Beer accounts for approx. 88% of all alcohol consumed in the United States – 11 times as much beer is consumed as wine.


Now to the reasons America is primarily a beer drinking nation:

The period called The Little Ice Age occurred from the early 14th to the middle of the 19th centuries. It was universally, especially in the northern hemisphere, but not uniformly cold decade after decade and century after century. Instead it was on average colder than the centuries preceding and following it with some years, including consecutive ones, of bone chilling cold followed by a few temperate years. Still there were long periods of cold and often wet weather such that starting in the 14th century, vineyards in Northern Europe died to the extent that grains were substituted to brew beer and distill hard alcohol. By the time of large immigration of Europeans to America in the 17th and 18th centuries Northern Europeans had been brewing beer and distilling liquor instead of making wine for two centuries. Thus they took their beer drinking culture and beer and alcohol making techniques with them to America. And during this embryonic habit forming period on the new continent overwhelmingly most of the immigrants were from Northern Europe – England, Scotland, Ireland, Germany, Holland, Poland, and Sweden, primarily. Some, but relatively few, came from the wine drinking Mediterranean Basin.

Although not a few of the Founding Fathers (possibly even the Founding Mothers) enjoyed drinking imported wine, Thomas Jefferson brewed beer at Monticello and George Washington was the largest distiller of rye whiskey in the Colonies.

There were many other historical events which were caused or enhanced by the Little Ice Age. Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Russia in the fall of 1812 with a force of circa 600,000. The winter was so severe that by the time he retreated his army was reduced to 130,000 due mostly to starvation and disease. Temperatures dropped to the minus 30’s ºF where snow crystals floated in the air instead of falling to the ground due to the high density of the cold air. It was described by one of the officers as a surrealistic world. There are accounts of soldiers cutting off meat from the flanks of the wagon pulling horses. The horse’s skins were frozen and they were so numb that they did not feel it. The blood from the wounds froze so quickly there was little blood loss. In 2006 the U.S. congress passed a law prohibiting the slaughter of horses in this country for the export of horse meat. Two of these plants are near here in North Texas. I don’t know how the slicing off of pieces of meat from live working horses would be perceived today, but I suppose allowances should be made for starving soldiers.

When Napoleon’s severely depleted army entered Vilnius, Lithuania it was reduced to approximately 40,000. In 2001 a mass grave in Vilnius was discovered containing 3000 skeletons which were determined to be almost two hundred years old - all from Napoleon’s army. Starvation, typhus, and gangrene were the main causes of the death of thousands of soldiers in the city. Only 3000 to 4000 of the original 600,000 man army eventually made it back to France. One of those who made it back was Napoleon himself. On June 18, 1815 the Duke of Wellington settled Napoleon’s hash, so to speak, at the Battle of Waterloo in Belgium.

In the year 1815, when James Madison was president of the United States and Indiana admitted as the 19th state, the single most powerful volcanic eruption ever recorded occurred on April 18th at Mt. Tambora on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa. Mt. Tambora was a 13,000 ft. extinct volcano until that fateful day when 4200 ft. of the top blew off throwing 36 cubic miles of ash, sulfur gas, and debris into the atmosphere to a height of 15 ½ miles. Immediate fatalities were 70,000 people on that and adjacent islands with the total going to 90,000 not long after. This eruption put 100 times more ash in the atmosphere than the 9000 ft. Mt. St. Helens eruption in Washington State in 1980 and had four times the energy as Krakatoa in 1883. Worldwide climate was affected for years.

That winter Hungary had brown colored snow and in Puglia (a region in southern Italy) where it seldom snows, the snow was red tinted. Of course these were caused by the volcanic eruption that spring thousands of miles away.

The New World did not escape the debilitating effects of the Little Ice Age. During what was called the Year Without a Summer in June 1816 in New England there were 5 consecutive days of snow. There was also snow during July and August; in fact 75% of the corn crop was ruined by the cold temperatures and excessive moisture. There were reports of birds falling out of the sky dead due to the cold. Finally many New Englanders had enough of the continuing cold and inclement weather and they greatly accelerated the country’s westward migration. They did not realize their problems originated half a world away.

Also in the summer of 1816 the British poets Percy Bysshe Shelly and Lord Byron along with Shelly’s 19 year old wife Mary Shelly vacationed along Lake Geneva in Switzerland. The weather was so wet and cold that they stayed indoors most of the time and decided to see who could write the most terrifying and gripping tale. Mary Shelly won with her novel of Frankenstein.

The Black Death which hit Europe in 1347 to 1351 was spread by rats carrying fleas infected with bubonic plague (Yersinia pestis bacillus). At least 25 million, 1/3 of the European population, died during this period. This high fatality rate was greatly enhanced by the population being left in a weakened state owing to crop failures brought on by the cold and wet weather at the start of the Little Ice Age.

There is a famous painting of George Washington crossing the Delaware River on the way to the Battle of Trenton, New Jersey on Christmas night of 1776 by artist Emanuel Luetze. This painting shows the river choked full of blocks of ice. Unlike some renditions of historical events this it is an accurate depiction of the weather conditions at that time. Today the Delaware River seldom if ever freezes, but then the world was in the grip of the Little Ice Age.

The Medieval Climate Optimum aka the Medieval Warm Period occurred from the 10th to the 14th centuries and was 4º - 7º F warmer than previously. During this period wine grapes were grown in profusion as far north as southern Britain. It was also when the Vikings settled in Greenland. Today Greenland and Iceland should more accurately have their names reversed. Iceland has the advantage of being centered over a volcanic “hot spot” and therefore has many hot water geysers to promote thermal heating.

However, around 1000 A.D. when the Vikings immigrated to Greenland it was properly named. The Vikings subsisted on a diet of 80% land grazing animals (mostly sheep, some cattle) and 20% cod from the sea. After the advent of the Little Ice Age in the 14th century and as the climate grew progressively colder there was a change in the Viking’s diet to 20% land animals and 80% fish as the sheep and cattle died out from a lack of grass. Eventually even the temperature sensitive cod stopped coming to the North Atlantic. The Vikings, unlike the Inuit natives, were unable to adapt to the changing climate and coupled with their essential barter with Northern Europe being interrupted by impassable pack ice they simply died out. The Vikings in Greenland were done in by The Little Ice Age.

What then caused The Little Ice Age? First off, the last glaciation period which ended about 12,000 years ago was a more extreme period of cold where there was an average drop in temperature of 9 ºF. The Little Ice Age had an estimated average temperature of 4º - 5º F cooler than today. This does not seem like much, but is enough to cause major climate changes. There have also been periods of glaciation with even much colder temperatures going back millions of years where glaciers covered the mid section of America as far south as Indiana, Illinois, and Ohio and in Northern Europe.

The short answer to what caused The Little Ice Age is that nobody knows. Naturally there are a number of theories. One is that, for reasons not understood, the sun undergoes periodic episodes of changing energy output. There is a phenomenon called the Maunder Minimum which was a period of low sun spot activity between 1645 and 1715 that correlates with the sun’s low energy output. Another is that there was an unusually active period of volcanism (an average of five per century vs. normally one or less) during The Little Ice Age which blocked heat from the sun. Still another is the Thermohaline Circulation or Mid-Atlantic Conveyor Belt Theory. This theory holds that currents carry water from the tropical regions northward transferring heat to northern latitudes. These waters cool as they reach northern latitudes becoming denser and therefore sink, effectively forming a conveyor belt of the warmer water of the Gulf Stream flowing northward at the surface and cooler water below traveling southward as equilibrium tends to distribute the northern and equatorial water levels. During the relative warm period preceding The Little Ice Age the northern glaciers melted and with the mixing of less dense fresh water from the glaciers the near surface waters did not sink thereby shutting down the conveyor effect. Without the heat transfer from the tropics to the northern latitudes The Little Ice Age was initiated. Perhaps there was a combination of these effects, but whatever it was, neither The Little Ice Age nor the preceding warm period were due to individual or industrial pollution.