When did hard liquor become affordable

Factual Questions
1

I get the impression hard liquor first became affordable in the mid 19th century. Was this when hard liquor became something almost everyone could afford? What advances led to that, and how much was hard liquor (rum, whiskey, vodka, gin, etc) in today’s dollars back in the 1850s?

Is the Coffey still what led to hard liquors being mass produced?

2

I don’t know about other liquors, but gin became popular in England in the late 17th century. The key development, according to Wikipedia’s article on Gin Craze, was that the monopoly of the London Guild of Distillers was broken in 1690, thereby opening up the market in gin distillation. Its popularity was controversial for decades, as shown, for example, by Hogarth’s prints on Beer Street and Gin Lane (1751).

3

Hard liquors (whiskey, rum, brandy in particular) were a big staple of colonial America’s daily diet, and I don’t think that it was just the rich who were doing the imbibing, often at levels that would make most of today’s moderate drinkers look positively like teetotaler’s in comparison…

4

I was under the impression that although alcohol was common during that period, it was pretty low alcohol content liquor, maybe 2-15% as opposed to the 40% seen in hard liquors.

5

That’s not liquor. Distilled liquor has been around for a thousand years (well, almost), and has been an industrial product for about 400 years. Displays of public drunkenness were common enough by the mid-17th century for rum and whiskey to be the target of legislation.

6

Home distilling was a cottage industry long before the Revolution. Rum, made from molasses from the West Indies, was a staple of the Triangular Trade routes. Later farmers made whiskey from their surplus corn; it was easier to get to market in that form and more valuable.

Fromhere.

7

Hence the whole Whiskey Rebellion, because the attempt by the federal government to collect a tax on whiskey was ruinous to the farmers of western Pennsylvania, most of whom didn’t have hard currency and used whiskey as a medium of exchange.

8

Drinking in America: A History

9

Rum was absurdly cheap in pre-Revolutionary Colonial America. According to history.org, a gallon of domestically produced rum cost 1s 8d, which is something like $8 in today’s dollars.

I’m sure it was “hot, hellish and terrible”, but I don’t think you can get a gallon of the cheapest liquor for $8 anywhere in the US these days.