Demography -- And Geography -- Is Destiny

More updates coming in a bit, but I wanted to highlight something I read in The Brewmaster's Table by Garrett Oliver of Brooklyn Brewing. Summer of Beer Steve has loaned me this for the week so I'm trying to hurry through it before returning to him.

This passage jumped out at me, in a broader discussion of beer history and its history in America.

While the mid-Atlantic colonies [generally speaking thats us - Maryland - as well as Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, lower New York, probably Northern Virginia -ed] sprouted breweries left and right, the southern colonies were slower to establish them. Hotter weather hampered brewing operations, and businessmen saw better opportunities in growing and selling tobacco, rice, cotton, and trees. The northern colonies had the opposite problem -- colder weather precluded good barley crops, so Massachusetts Bay Colony and other northern colonies concentrated on fishing and whaling, preferring to import beer from England, New York, Pennsylvania, or New Jersey.