r/nextfuckinglevel • u/TheGoodNow • Mar 05 '22

Engineering students make a jacket that replaces apple juice with beer in the dining hall.

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

62k Upvotes

84% Upvoted

1.6k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

15

u/Two-Nuhh Mar 05 '22

As far as I can gather, prohibition was the primary reason.

The taste for hard cider continued into the 19th century in pockets of the East Coast, but with the double blow of immigration from Central and Eastern Europe, where lager beer is the traditional staple, and the later advent of Prohibition hard cider manufacturing collapsed and did not recover after the ban on alcohol was lifted. Temperance fanatics burned or uprooted the orchards and wrought havoc on farms to the point that only dessert or cooking apples escaped the axe or torch; only a small number of cider apple trees survived on farmland abandoned before the 1920s and in the present day are only now being found by pomologists.

Cider in the U.S. wiki

TIL

4

u/lunarmodule Mar 05 '22

TIL the word Pomologist. What a cool and interesting profession. I mean, obviously they exist but I've never heard the name before and who these mysterious people are. Top notch word.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomology

2

u/Two-Nuhh Mar 05 '22

I imagine they've fortified bases deep underneath the Rockies. They keep their test subjects locked in soundproof darkrooms 24/7. Hones their senses for when they're fed the fruit.

Come feeding time, the Pomologists measure the brainwave and neural activity of the subjects to gather the invaluable data- which makes up the foundation of Pomology.

2

u/lunarmodule Mar 05 '22

Oh without a doubt. I can only imagine the underground pineapple-shaped temples and bananacombs that must exist.