Beverages

In olden times, the common beverage of Lowland Scotland was ale. There is evidence that it was in general use in the thirteenth century; in The Friars of Berwick (c. 1500) the ‘silly friars’, Robert and Allen, are regaled on ‘stoups of ale with bread and cheese’; and even in the eighteenth century we find that the subject of Burns’s poem, Scotch Drink, is not whisky, but ale.¹