Thomas Bramwell Welch was born in England on the last day of 1825. He emigrated to America with his parents at age 8. As a teenaged young man, he became a staunch Wesleyan Methodist and heavily involved in the two social issues predominant in his day: temperance and abolition. Throughout his late teen years, he was involved in the Underground Railroad, the transporting of escaped slaves surreptitiously into Canada.
Thomas graduated from a Wesleyan seminary at age 19 and became an ordained minister. He served his church for a few years until his voice failed. He went back to college and took up the profession of dentistry, but remained an active church member.
Wesleyans, as a number of denominations of the day, were Temperance-minded – prohibiting the manufacture, sale, or consumption of any intoxicating liquor. A number of churches recognized the appearance of hypocrisy in offering fermented wine during the rite of the Lord’s Supper. Welch’s denomination addressed this by mandating that only non-fermented grape juice be used in Communion.
This presented an issue – as pasteurization had not yet been invented and non-pasteurized grape juice naturally ferments when stored at rom temperature. Individual churches took a variety of approaches to meet this requirement. Some churches squeezed their own grapes during the week and would serve the juice before it had a chance to ferment. The problem with this was that not all churches had a ready supply of grapes. Others would pound raisins to a pulp and mix the pulp with boiling water – making their own “wine.” Some churches did not offer Communion unless grapes were available to be freshly squeezed. Other churches used water in place of the wine – using Jesus’ miracle of turning water to wine as Scriptural justification.
A staunch Temperamentalist, as well as a godly man who wanted to obey God’s word in all things, Dr. Welch pushed his own church in Vineland, New Jersey, to use unfermented grape juice. After reading about the new process of pasteurization, Welch experimented with ways to apply the technique to grape juice – with the intent of supplying churches with an alcohol-free substitute for Communion. For four years, he tried to sell what he marketed as “Dr Welch’s Unfermented Wine” to churches. Unfortunately for him, the idea didn’t evolve into a sustainable business model and he had to give up his side business.
Two years later, Thomas’ son Charles – also a dentist – encouraged his father to try again with an expanded reach. He published advertisements in Temperance magazines and offered samples to churches, marketing the product as “unfermented wine” and “the kind [of wine] that was used in Galilee.” He later marketed the product as a health tonic. The business took off when it samples were given out at the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893.
Today, Welch’s is a multinational corporation offering many products. It began, however, with the desire of a godly man to give his church an alternative to fermented wine during the Lord’s Supper. In Charles Welch’s will he wrote, “Unfermented grape juice was born in 1869 out of a passion to serve God by helping His Church to give its communion the ‘fruit of the vine,’ instead of ‘the cup of devils.’”
https://www.umc.org/en/content/communion-and-welchs-grape-juice
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Bramwell_Welch
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