On the day New York was finally evacuated by the British army in November of 1783, George Washington stopped for a beer at the Bull’s Head Tavern on what is now the Bowery—one of many mentions of the first American president’s devotion to beer and its concerns.

Modern hobbyists and beer enthusiasts are fond of citing Washington as an early practitioner of homebrewing, largely on the strength of a 1737 diary entry from when he served as a colonel in the Virginia militia. In the entry Washington outlines the brewing of a small beer. See small beer. Whether he turned his own hand to the craft or put it down for the use of those on his estate, it shows a sensibility familiar with the practices of brewing.

Washington was a great aficionado of porter, a beer style that captured such enthusiasm in Britain that it is sometimes credited with having spurred the Industrial Revolution there. America showed a lesser, but still evident fascination with porter. Washington credited the Philadelphia brewer Robert Hare with making the best porter in the city, even to shrewdly attempting to corner remaining supplies of Hare’s beer when the brewery was destroyed by fire. Washington’s interests ran as well to more general advocacy of American brewers by urging his countrymen to “buy American,” boasting in a letter to the Marquis de Lafayette in 1789 that he used no “porter or cheese” in his family that was not produced in America, touting the superior quality of the American articles.