“Let us sing our own treasures, Old England’s good cheer, to the profits and pleasures of stout British beer. Your wine tippling, dram sipping fellows retreat, but your beer drinking Britons can never be beat. The French with their vineyards and meager pale ale, they drink from the squeezing of half ripe fruit. But we, who have hop-yards to mellow our ale, are rosy and plump and have freedom to boot.” — English drinking song, 1757