No room is sought for renting without an
inquiry as to the quality of the beer of the neighborhood; and the
landlady feels that her chances for a tenant are exceedingly slim, if
she cannot furnish a satisfactory recommendation in this respect.
Scarcely a house in the city is thirty steps from where the article can
be had. The places fitted up with seats and tables for drinking
accommodate from twenty to five hundred persons, and even one thousand
or more in summer, when a garden is generally prepared with seats for
the purpose. At these larger places, music is often provided, and ladies
are frequently found lending the charm and solace of their presence, and
sometimes a good deal more, to the other sex, in this self-denying work,
in which the men have generally been the great burden-bearers. But the
greatest crowds of real beer-drinkers go to another class of
houses,--that is, the breweries themselves, where rooms are always
fitted up for drinking. Of these the Court Brewery is perhaps in highest
repute, and is at least a great curiosity. I visited it three or four
times during a six years' residence in the city, and always in company
with others who wished to see the lions of the place, and for the same
reason that would have taken us to see a menagerie.
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