Drink: The Growler
The growler isn’t really a drink, it’s a vessel for a drink, and that drink is freshly brewed beer. Growlers have been around for more than a century, when they were tin cans or pitchers. Though it is unclear where the word originated, I like this explanation:
[A]n early reference, in the Trenton Times for 20 June 1883 said “It is called the growler because it provokes so much trouble in the scramble after beerâ€.
At the turn of the last century, the growler was associated in tenements of New York with the unsavory practice of sending boys to fetch beer for men who were either too industrious, lazy, or mindful of their reputations to enter a bar themselves. Jacob Riis described the practice in his How the Other Half Lives:
I doubt if one child in a thousand, who brings his growler to be filled at the average New York bar, is sent away empty-handed, if able to pay for what he wants. I once followed a little boy, who shivered in bare feet on a cold November night so that he seemed in danger of smashing his pitcher on the icy pavement, into a Mulberry Street saloon where just such a sign hung on the wall, and forbade the barkeeper to serve the boy. The man was as astonished at my interference as if I had told him to shut up his shop and go home, which in fact I might have done with as good a right, for it was after 1 A.M., the legal closing hour. He was mighty indignant too, and told me roughly to go away and mind my business, while he filled the pitcher. The law prohibiting the selling of beer to minors is about as much respected in the tenement-house districts as the ordinance against swearing.
We’ve been to a few Mulberry Street saloons (you occasionally see our favorite, which sat around the corner from Autumn’s apartment, on the Sopranos), but growlers are harder to find there. While there is one small brewery in New York that brews beer worth taking home with you–today, most of New York’s breweries are chain restaurant tourist gimmicks–that brewery lies in the far reaches of Brooklyn, so I never had the opportunity to fill a growler with Brooklyn Lager.
Growlers more common in Montana’s local breweries. They are now glass jugs, not tin cans, and they can keep beer drinkable for up to two weeks–though I’ve never owned a half gallon of beer that long, and once you open a growler you’ve got only a day or two to get to the bottom of it. Take home a growler of Montana beer and a friend or two, and that won’t be a problem.