Everyone was cool and froody in colonial times thanks to the fact that they drank like fish.
In 1790, United States government figures showed that annual per-capita alcohol consumption for everybody over fifteen amounted to thirty-four gallons of beer and cider, five gallons of distilled spirits, and one gallon of wine.
Not So Fast 
Maybe I’m just a naive non-drinker, but is that really alot? 34 gallons of beer is 272 pints, 5 gallons of spirits is about 320 shots and a gallon of wine is about 16 cups. That works out to about 1 2/3 “drinks” a day. That doesn’t seem too over the top for a normal cultural thing, does it?
Guess it depends on your definition of a lot.
2003 WHO says per capita drinking of alcohol these days is around 8.6 liters (2.5 gallons) of ethanol.
Assuming 5% alcohol in beer, 50% in spirits and 10% in wine it comes out to 4.4 gallons of ethanol for our founding fathers. They still blow us out of the water.
Yeah, but in a less Mothers-Against-Drunk-Driving/The More You Know society with no soda/lattes/bottled water it seems like you’d have to be drinking SOMETHING all day long and an alcoholic beverage with 2 of your daily meals doesn’t seem like a huge stretch.
Yeah, but the women and slaves probably weren’t holding up their end of the per capita.
I vaguely remember Johnson talking about this in his History of the American People book which is why I’m so convinced that it wasn’t a couple drinks with dinner sort of thing, I’ll have to go back and find that part.