Did Benjamin Franklin really say that? No!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At a traffic light I wound up right behind a Hayden Beverage delivery truck with a quote on its rear door as shown above:

 

“In WINE there is wisdom, in BEER there is freedom, in WATER there is BACTERIA” – Benjamin Franklin”  

 

But there is a big problem regarding the last word in that quotation. Ben Franklin lived from 1706 to 1790. The word bacteria first showed up in 1864 according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, and in 1867 according to the Oxford English Dictionary. That’s seven decades after Franklin died, so he obviously did not say that. The problem was noted by Matthew Powers in an article at Drink314 on August 13, 2017 titled The Franklin Myth| “Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.”