[logfromblammo]

To make a long story short, it was because you boil the wort when you make beer, and the kinds of beers that people drank all day were small beers and session ales, with lower alcohol content (and cheaper to buy).

Those things actually are related. Franklin proposed that Parisians could save on candle wax by getting out of bed earlier, as a joke. Nobody actually changed a clock until WW1 when Germany did it to save lamp oil.

Franklin likely promoted the lark lifestyle only because he was one, rather than from any real evidence of objective superiority. He participated in a business group that looked at successful businesses with an aim to emulate their practices. It is possible that his advice to work early was just cargo culting, in following with a long line of sanctimonious lark philosophers that painted their owl counterparts as slothful or lazy.

Standard business hours favor being a lark because those are lark hours! And then they have the nerve to be all chipper and cheerful every morning, at a time when every decent owl would prefer to be getting one last REM cycle in. How do you think they'd like it if we made them stay up past midnight every day?