On the importance of beer........

 As early as 1650, in England and America, Adams men had made their living as malsters, steeping, drying, sweating, and kilning barley to be fermented into beer.  It was a messy, exacting, labor-intensive business at which Samuel Adams Sr. had splendidly succeeded.  At the time of his son's birth, the family occupied a stately home on what is today Purchase Street, with a commanding ocean view, an observatory, a wharf that bore the family name, various outbuildings, and an orchard.  The estate fronted Boston's sparkling harbor; a garden sloped to the shore.  Even a non-admirer was impressed.  Samuel Adams Sr. had - in an intricate business, practiced on a modest scale, supplying Boston housewives with the malt with which they brewed beer - "accumulated a surprising amount of money."

-Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary Samuel Adams