Would Americans have won independence from Britain without rum? Probably not.

On the eighteenth of April in 1775, Paul Revere–who gets a lot of credit for his famous midnight ride because Henry Wadsworth Longfellow found his name more poetic than that of William Dawes or Samuel Prescott–is said to have paused in Medford, Massachusetts, at the house of Isaac Hall.

His mission? Not only to warn of the approaching British, but likely, to toss back a slug or two of rum.

Medford, in Revere’s day, was in the midst of the American rum boom, and Hall–as well as serving patriotically as captain of the local Minutemen–owned a distillery that turned out a rum said to be strong enough to make “a rabbit bite a bulldog.” Nobody knows for