10 Fascinating Facts About Alcohol You Didn't Know

5. Gin Nearly Destroyed English Society

In the eyes of some of the more reactionary members of the British establishment, the most terrible craze to break out across England in the eighteenth century was the gin craze. Society, they said, would crumble into a heap of drunken louts - "Dutch courage" brought back from the Netherlands destroying the country from within. Today, gin - usually mixed with tonic water - is considered something of a genteel drink, supped by the well-to-do. But the truth is that gin has something of a sordid past and indeed very nearly broke out into something of a social epidemic. It all started in the very late seventeenth century when high taxes on beer and low taxes on spirits led to the inevitable - increasing consumption of the latter. Realising they could get really drunk far more quickly, the people of England took to drinking gin like a duck to water. Matters got so bad - with scenes of drunken abandon captured in images such as William Hogarth's Gin Lane - that contemporary historians have compared it to the crack cocaine epidemic in 1980s Los Angeles; indeed, by 1750 London alone was guzzling 11 million gallons per year with a population of only 600,000. Many thought only a natural disaster would stamp the craze out - which is exactly what happened when a drought hit English crops and bootleggers were forced to turn elsewhere.