"It was necessary, he suppos'd, to drink strong beer, that he might be strong to labor."

I've been listening to an audiobook of Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography. The narrator has a terribly unnatural way of speaking, but it's not driving me as crazy at it was when I was wracking my brain trying to figure out who it reminded me of. Somehow I hit upon the answer: it's the rabbi from this episode of "Seinfeld." ("Elaine, often times in life there are problems, and just as often there are solutions.")

Anyway, I liked Franklin's description of all the drinking that went on at a printing-house in London:

At my first admission into this printing-house I took to working at press, imagining I felt a want of the bodily exercise I had been us'd to in America, where presswork is mix'd with composing. I drank only water; the other workmen, near fifty in number, were great guzzlers of beer. On occasion, I carried up and down stairs a large form of types in each hand, when others carried but one in both hands. They wondered to see, from this and several instances, that the Water-American, as they called me, was stronger than themselves, who drank strong beer! We had an alehouse boy who attended always in the house to supply the workmen. My companion at the press drank every day a pint before breakfast, a pint at breakfast with his bread and cheese, a pint between breakfast and dinner, a pint at dinner, a pint in the afternoon about six o'clock, and another when he had done his day's work. I thought it a detestable custom; but it was necessary, he suppos'd, to drink strong beer, that he might be strong to labor. I endeavored to convince him that the bodily strength afforded by beer could only be in proportion to the grain or flour of the barley dissolved in the water of which it was made; that there was more flour in a pennyworth of bread; and therefore, if he would eat that with a pint of water, it would give him more strength than a quart of beer.

We hear lots of excuses for drinking nowadays, but never that one. Hilarious. How could people get anything done, drinking like that?