The son of a teetotaling mother and a preacher father who drank occasionally and socially, T. B. Welch had taken his mother’s side in the family arguments and been a teetotaler his whole life. Serving alcoholic wine at Communion bothered him greatly, but no acceptable substitute existed that he knew of. His impetus to develop such a substitute increased, the family story goes, when a visiting preacher with a drinking problem stayed at the Welches’ house and revealed that partaking in Communion wine had awakened dangerous urges.

In 1869, a 43-year-old Methodist dentist on his third career helped Methodists change American Protestantism forever. You’ve experienced the results of his change every time you take a drink of Welch’s grape juice. But you wouldn’t be drinking that juice today if it wasn’t for Thomas Bramwell Welch’s desire to make non-alcoholic Communion wine.

T. B. Welch hailed from Glastonbury, England, the place celebrated in British folklore as the gravesite of the legendary King Arthur and his ill-fated queen Guinevere. Born there on December 31, 1825, he came to the United States with his family as a six-year old boy. The Welches settled in upstate New York, where T. B. Welch joined first the Methodist Episcopal Church and then—in anger that these mainstream Methodists permitted slaveholding—their abolitionist offshoot, the Wesleyan Methodists. He began preaching in Wesleyan Methodist churches at age 19, but his vocal chords were no match for his religious fervor, and he was out of the ministry at age 21.

Needing a new occupation to support his wife and children (he had just married the quiet and steady Lucy Hutt, much to the surprise of his parents as she had been serving as the Welches’ cook), T. B. chose medicine, receiving his MD in 1852. But the traveling life of a rural doctor near Syracuse, New York, was not much better for his health than the ministry had been. He turned to dentistry in 1856, moving halfway across the country to Minnesota for 12 years before returning to the East Coast to settle in Vineland, New Jersey in 1869.

T. B. Welch prospered as a dentist for some years. He made false teeth (“good chewers or no sale”) and performed the relatively new operation of extracting teeth “under gas”—nitrous oxide—which had come into common dental use in the 1860s. (Much of the early story of T. B.’s life is told in the excellent corporate history of Welches’ Grape Juice by William Chazanof, Welches’ Grape Juice: From Corporation to Co-operative.)

It’s unknown exactly when during his time in Vineland T. B. returned to the Methodist Episcopal Church (the slaveholding question no longer an issue after the Civil War), but he became active at the First Methodist Episcopal Church there and was asked to serve as a Communion steward. The son of a teetotaling mother and a preacher father who drank occasionally and socially, T. B. had taken his mother’s side in the family arguments and been a teetotaler his whole life. Serving alcoholic wine at Communion bothered him greatly, but no acceptable substitute existed that he knew of. His impetus to develop such a substitute increased, the family story goes, when a visiting preacher with a drinking problem stayed at the Welches’ house and revealed that partaking in Communion wine had awakened dangerous urges.

T.B. and his son Charles—who would one day serve as the marketer of their new discovery to the masses—had heard of Louis Pasteur’s experiments in pasteurizing liquids. Heating the liquids to between 140–212 degrees Fahrenheit killed bacteria and molds, Pasteur had discovered; the yeast naturally occurring on the skin of grapes would be killed. Pasteur injected his pasteurized grape liquid with precisely the kind of yeast he wanted in order to control the flavor of the resulting wine. But T. B. and Charles wanted to halt the process right after the pasteurizing: no yeast, no fermentation. They picked grapes from the trellis outside their house, cooked them, filtered them, and plunged the bottles of cooked and filtered juice into boiling water—keeping them in there not too long, but just long enough.

When the bottles were uncorked, they had not fermented. T. B. had succeeded. Now he had to succeed in selling “Dr. Welch’s Unfermented Wine” to the Methodist church.

Rooted in the Soil of the Temperance Movement

For many years, tellers of the saga of the Welches have believed that the Methodist church was not ready for T. B.’s discovery. After all, Christians had been using wine at the Communion table for over 1,800 years. Methodists were no friends of drunkenness (John Wesley’s tract Word to a Drunkard begins “Are you a man! God made you a man; but you make yourself a beast.”), but they had accepted wine in the sacrament for over 150 years—first as a religious movement within the Church of England and then as a separate denomination. How could their minds have changed so quickly? They must have been convinced by the power of advertising and done it in service to capitalist greed, historians argued.

But the story is more complex than that. And T. B. Welch and his denomination had theological reasons for doing what they did: It was not simply chasing the almighty dollar.

Nineteenth-century Protestant America as a whole was in the middle of a seismic change in the way it viewed alcohol. That tectonic shift would produce the idea of teetotalism: total abstinence from all alcohol. Various people had practiced such abstinence throughout history specifically as an ascetic discipline (from Nazirites in the Bible to Muslim adherents in the Middle East), but asking a whole society to become teetotalers was a new approach to the problem of alcohol abuse, unique to American Protestants and those who came under their influence. The virtue of temperance had been defined ever since Aristotle (in the 4th century BC) as moderation in all things: neither too much nor too little. But by the time the 20th century dawned the average American Protestant understood “temperance” to signify “teetotalism.”

It’s ironic that Americans were on the forefront of the movement for total abstinence, because we started out as a hard-drinking bunch. In the American colonies, whether you were attending a political debate, celebrating Christmas with family and friends, or helping your neighbor put up a barn, there was a good chance you’d all partake liberally in a pint or two (or three or four) of beer or hard cider. If you were a colonial governor or a big landowner, chances were you were putting away a lot of fancy European wine as well. Taverns were the center of social and political life: today’s coffeeshops, post offices, campaign headquarters, and blog networks all rolled into one. Eighteenth-century Americans consumed about 7.1 gallons of absolute alcohol a year on average (that’s about 72 bottles of 100-proof vodka). The bar tab for George Washington’s farewell party by his troops in 1787—a party attended by 55 people—ran to 60 bottles of claret, 54 bottles of Madeira, 22 bottles of porter, 12 bottles of beer, 8 bottles of hard cider, 8 bottles of whiskey, and 7 bowls of spiked punch.

As the 19th century dawned, whiskey rose in popularity (other drinks suffered from Revolutionary-era blockades) and German immigrants brought a new drink, lager beer. And alcohol abuse grew for another reason as well: America was industrializing. In small colonial villages, the whole community could watch out for the local drunk, and tasks were done slowly on small machines or by hand. In the city, you could drink in perfect anonymity—despite the fact that you needed to be sober to operate the newly-invented heavy machinery at your job. Cities also multiplied the number of places where people could buy liquor: bars, groceries, restaurants, beer gardens (blame those Germans). People were drinking more, especially 18- to 25-year-old men, and society had fewer and fewer ways to control them. Perhaps the best way, many like T. B. Welch’s mother thought, was to outlaw alcohol altogether.

The definition of what counted as “alcohol” began to change, too. Early in the 19th century, the focus of temperance agitation was distilled spirits, especially whiskey: a famous “temperance thermometer” produced in the 1780s by Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush, member of the Continental Congress, attributed the most horrific effects to the consumption of distilled spirits. But cider, strong beer, and wine, if “taken only at meals and in moderate quantities,” would bring “cheerfulness, strength, and nourishment,” said Rush; weak beer along with non-alcoholic drinks would produce “health, wealth, serenity of mind, reputation, long life, and happiness.” (I had confirmed for me that some people still hold to this attitude when I protested to one of my husband’s Scottish second cousins that no, I could not drink the relatively-low ABV Guinness while pregnant. “But it’s practically medicinal!” she said. Indeed, Arthur Guinness had intended his beer as a healthful drink, though that’s another story.)

Such an attitude posed no danger to Communion wine. But by the 1830s–1840s, popular scientific experiments produced new evidence that wine and beer also contained alcoholic stimulants, just in smaller amounts. The most famous of these was US Army surgeon William Beaumont’s experiments on the stomach of a Canadian voyageur named Alexis St. Martin.

St. Martin was injured by a musket in 1822, leaving a hole in his stomach that Beaumont could not fully repair. In 1825, Beaumont began experiments on the human digestion by looking into St. Martin’s stomach. He inserted beef into St. Martin’s stomach on silk strings directly through the hole (removing it when his patient experienced distress), took the stomach’s temperature, observed the changes that weather caused in digestion. And, crucially for the history of alcohol consumption in the United States, he gave St. Martin beer and wine. These, along with pretty much any spicy condiment you can think of (mustard was one chief offender), produced changes in the stomach that led Beaumont to advise against ever consuming them.

The case was a sensation, and Methodist doctor and temperance supporter Thomas Sewall soon got ahold of it, made his own experiments (by dissecting corpses, not looking at live patients), and published the results. Soon, no temperance book was worth its salt if it didn’t have gruesome descriptions of a drunkard’s stomach (here’s one, if you can stand it.) And Communion wine’s days in Methodism were numbered. The Welches weren’t the only temperance-minded individuals trying to find a solution to the problem of alcoholic Communion wine; they were just the first to succeed on a large scale.

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