A substantial attempt was made to establish maize malt as an alternative to that of barley in 1622 John Winthrop Jr presented a paper to the Royal Society on the malting of maize. The result was a certain amount of homespun improvisation of ingredients for both fermenting and flavoring. Imported ingredients for making beer were also expensive and in short supply. Actual deaths were ascribed to the consumption of spoiled beer, but given the anti-pathogenic property of any alcoholic beverage-a blessing in areas where water supplies are dubious-it is most likely that the evidence linking bad beer with fatality was circumstantial. Beer imported from England took up valuable space aboard ships, and often was not fit to drink after voyages lasting months under less than optimal storage conditions. The incentive to produce beer from scratch in the colonies was great. Hops were discovered growing wild, but were neither gathered nor cultivated in either of the English colonies in quantities sufficient to entirely supplant either importation or alternative. It is interesting to note that laws remain active today in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts linking brewing with the cultivation of barley. Malt was generally imported, but in 1640 an address of “Maulsters (maltster’s) Lane” was recorded in Charlestown (now part of Boston). In Massachusetts as in Virginia the self-generated production of beer took time to become established (at least on a scale larger than home or farmhouse brewing), with orders for equipment to be sent from England appearing in the early 1630s, and the licensing of commercial brewers following a few years later. In landing at Plymouth on Cape Cod in December of 1620 instead of along the Hudson River as planned, and purportedly because of dwindling beer supplies, William Bradford’s words have become legendary: “For we could not now take time for further search or consideration, our victuals being much spent, especially our beer …” Finally, in 1629, John Smith reported in England that the colony boasted two brewhouses and produced beer made both of barley malt and malt made from the native corn. In 1609 the Governor and Council of Virginia advertised for brewers to come to the colony, and even into the 1620s a lack of decent beer was decried. Following the exhaustion of supplies of the English beer brought along on the voyage of 1606–7, the Jamestown settlers were reduced to drinking only water and even to trading essential tools with incoming sailors for the beer they held onboard. Just the same, it seems to have taken some time for the settlers in the Virginia colony of Jamestown to produce their own beer. Given a scarcity of evidence by the earliest presumed beer-drinking explorers of the New World, the Norse in the 11th century, and the assumption that Spanish settlements in Florida would likely have centered on the pressing of the local muscadine grapes for such refreshment, we must move first to the English colonies in Virginia and Massachusetts for the dissemination of Old World brewing culture. Native fruits, grapes, or berries might engender the production of wine, but as malt is both portable and stable, the materials for making beer can be brought along for rapid utilization, especially when the colonists themselves are from lands where beer is brewed.

One of the earliest orders of business by colonists to any new land has generally been, once food and shelter have been reasonably secured, the generation of some kind of fermented beverage.

Maryland homebrew laws