Adam's ale Adam's ale Adam's ale (also referred to as "Adam's wine", especially in Scotland; sometimes simply called "Adam") is a colloquial allusion meaning water. It alludes to the idea that the biblical Adam had only water to drink. This inference gained popularity around the beginning of the 19th-century temperance movement. "Adam's ale" means unadulterated water, based on the presumption that the biblical first man Adam had only water to drink in the Garden of Eden. Common variations are "Adam's wine" in Scotland, and sometimes simply "Adam". The phrase is an allusion, colloquialism, epithet, and idiom. In common use until the mid-
Burton Ale favour of the brewers of Burton ale, to exempt them from the new tax, because they brewed not for home consumption, but exportation. Lord North said the clause would open a door to fraud, and consequently it ought not to be admitted. The motion therefore was rejected." In the 1790s Charles Lamb the writer, John Mathew Gutch the journalist and James White, founder of the UK's first advertising agency, were "in the habit of meeting at the "Feathers" in Hand Court, Holborn, to drink nips of Burton ale, as they were called". White's "Falstaff's letters" turns the "Feathers" into the