TALEA recreates George Washington’s small beer for America’s 250th anniversary

TALEA Beer Co. has put George Washington’s small beer back on the New York City tap list, turning a handwritten 1757 wartime recipe into a limited-edition release that now shows up in TALEA taprooms and select city restaurants and retail outlets. The New York Public Library tied the beer to its 250 Years: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness initiative, making this more than a novelty pour and more than a museum piece. It is a live experiment in how a colonial-era brew can still speak to today’s drinkers.

The recipe itself is startlingly spare: bran, hops, molasses, water, and yeast. NYPL says Washington wrote it in a military journal around 1757, when he was 25 and stationed at Fort Loudoun in central Pennsylvania, and the notebook now sits in the Manuscripts and Archives Division at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building. Mount Vernon notes that small beer was a low-alcohol staple in early America and may have been safer than water for troops, since brewing killed bacteria and the beer did not need aging. Washington’s instructions are unusually fast by modern standards too, calling for 24 hours of fermentation in the cooler before bottling, with 3 gallons of molasses for every 30 gallons of water.

TALEA did not stop at a single historical facsimile. The brewery made two versions, an exact historical “Washington’s Beer” and a more approachable “Liberty Lager,” which NYPL describes as an interpretation that comes in at 6.5% alcohol and reads like a classic amber lager with subtle maltiness and a hint of hops. Meredith Mann, NYPL’s interim curator of manuscripts, put the present-day angle plainly: “I think that low ABV is having a comeback.” That matters in a market where drinkers are once again looking for lighter, more sessionable beers that still feel thoughtful, and it helps explain why this brew reportedly will run through the end of July 2026. NYPL and Coney Island Brewing Company tried a similar idea in 2011, but this version lands at a moment when beer lovers are already rediscovering lower-strength styles with more texture, more history, and a little less apology.