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-
Cock ale Francis Grose's "Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue" (1785), which also calls it provocative. Writing in 1929, William Henry Nugent claimed that Cock ale was a concoction of bread and ale fed to fighting birds. Several authors have theorised that "Cock ale" may have mutated into "cocktail", an American word first used in 1806 whose origin is now lost. Cock ale Cock ale, popular in 17th and 18th-century England, was an ale whose recipe consisted of normal ale brewed inside a container, to which was later added a bag stuffed with a parboiled, skinned and gutted cock, and various fruits