title_body: What type of beer did the pilgrims have?
upvoted_answer: Also bear in mind that beers back then were made out of lots of ingredients that we'd think of as odd.  Cock ale was obviously a thing, which was beer that was fermented (or boiled) with a rooster in it.  Lots of beers would also have been strained through spruce post-boil which would've given them some wood or pine quality.  Lots of other flowers were often involved.
  
  Check out George Washington's small beer recipe here.  Though this is a poor transcription and a lot of folks agree that it should read "Bran, Hops to taste", it's still clear that the grain is sort of a "for taste, whatever you can spare" thing while the molasses is the star of the show.  A lot of early drinks were like that, involving some sort of concentrated or burnt sugar in addition to grains, which generally weren't barley at the time.
  
  However, in the most ideal case where you had access to the best beer you could find...it would be some form of brown ale or lighter porter.  Maybe an amber ale if you could find one that wasn't very hoppy.  The stable kilning process that enabled people to make pale malt wasn't really invented until the mid-1600's and wasn't very popular until the 1700s, so brewers in the 1600s would've used a sort of generic-y brown malt that might taste slightly burnt and premium beers may have been able to include some lighter malt that was much harder to make and find.  And it'd probably still have some molasses in it.