Today’s DOTD - Drink Of The Day - is a Boston Deluxe inspired by the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party of the American Revolution, which happened on December 16, 1773.
The Boston Tea Party incident was a revolutionary action in which 342 chests of tea belonging to the British East India Company were thrown from ships into Boston Harbor by American patriots disguised as Mohawk Indians. The Americans were protesting two things: A tax on tea, levied while the American colonists had NO elected leaders in the British House Of Commons - also known as “taxation without representation” (a status those who still live in Washington, DC know all too well) - and the monopolistic tactics of the East India Company.
The Townshend Acts, passed by Parliament in 1767, imposed taxes and tariffs on various products like tea imported into the British colonies - meaning among other places, the United States. Those taxes had raised such a storm of colonial protest and noncompliance that they were repealed by Parliament in 1770. But Parliament retained the right to raise that kind of revenue from the colonies without colonial approval.
So the merchants of Boston circumvented the Townshend Acts by continuing to bring tea into the colonies, smuggled in by Dutch traders. In 1773 Parliament passed the Tea Act designed to aid the financially troubled East India Company, who’d been undercut by the Dutch smugglers. The Tea Act granted the East India Company both a monopoly on all tea exported to the colonies, and an exemption on the export tax, as well as a “drawback” - a refund - on taxes owed on certain surplus quantities of tea in its possession.
The Tea Act said tea sent to the American colonies was to be carried only in East India Company ships, and sold only through its own agents, which bypassed the independent colonial shippers and merchants. The company thus could sell the tea at a less-than-usual price in either America or Britain – and they could undersell anyone else. The effective monopoly drove the normally conservative colonial merchants into an alliance with the more liberal anti-colonial forces, led by Samuel Adams and his Sons of Liberty.
In cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston, tea agents resigned or canceled orders, and merchants refused consignments. In Boston, however, the royalist governor Thomas Hutchinson was determined to uphold the new law and maintained that three arriving ships, the Dartmouth, the Eleanor, and the Beaver, should be allowed to deposit their cargoes – but that appropriate duties must be paid & honored before the ships were allowed to leave.
On the night of December 16, 1773, a group of about 60 men, encouraged by a large crowd of Bostonians, donned blankets and Indian headdresses, marched to Griffin’s wharf, brazenly boarded the ships, and proceeded to dump the tea chests into the water. The tea was valued at roughly £18,000 at the time, which would be roughly £3,515,000 in 2025, or roughly $4,700,000 in U.S. Dollars today.
In retaliation for the colonists’ brazen act of sabotage, the British Parliament passed a series of punitive measures in 1774 known in the colonies as the Intolerable Acts. These acts included the Boston Port Bill, which shut off the city’s sea trade, pending payment for the destroyed tea. The British government’s efforts to single out Massachusetts for punishment served only to further unite the colonies.
Other colonies sent aid to Boston, and delegates from 12 colonies met at the First Continental Congress to coordinate a response to Britain’s actions, including further boycotts and the formation of local militias.
This unified resistance among the 13 colonies, along with Britain’s arrogant, ignorant, & unyielding stance created an atmosphere where revolution became inevitable, with the first shots fired at Lexington and Concord in April 1775, just over a year later.
In a salute to our revolutionary ancestors, we raise our glasses with the Drink Of The Day today - a Boston Deluxe!
Ingredients
Here’s what you’re going to need for this drink:
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