et, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, circa 1885
One of the earliest large-scale brewers was Best Brewing, a Milwaukee brewery built by German immigrantPhillip Best in the 1840s. It began shipping its beer to Chicago and St. Louis the following decade, first by ferry and eventually by rail, establishing an early trans-market beer brand in the United States. Other successful breweries of the era begun by German immigrants in Milwaukee included the Valentin Blatz Brewing Company,Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company, and the Miller Brewing Company, owned Frederick Miller, who took on the brewery which had originally been owned by Phillip Best’s brother, Carl.
In St. Louis, a prosperous German soap maker, Eberhard Anheuser, purchased a struggling brewery in 1860. His daughter married a brewery supplier, Adolphus Busch, who took over the company after his father-in-law’s death, and renamed it Anheuser-Busch. Busch soon toured Europe, discovering the success of Bohemian lager, and introduced Budweiser beer (named after a beer brewed in the town of Budweis in Bohemia) in 1876. Anheuser-Busch, and its Budweiser beer, would go on to be the largest brewery and beer brand in the world. The company innovated the use of refrigeration in rail cars to transport its beers, which helped make bottled Budweiser the first national beer brand in the United States.
Detroit Police discover an underground brewery during Prohibition
On January 16, 1919, the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was enacted into law, creating the Prohibition era, wherein the production, sale and consumption of alcoholic beverages was made illegal. All legal American brewing came to a halt when Prohibition was imposed, though the earlier temperance movement had already reduced the number of breweries significantly. Only a few breweries, mainly the largest, were able to stay in business by manufacturing near beer, malt syrup, or other non-alcohol grain products, in addition to soft drinks such as colas and root beers. Production and shipping of alcohol was largely confined to illegal operations that could deliver compact distilled beverages — smuggled rum and domesticmoonshine — more efficiently and reliably than bulkier products such as beer.
American Prohibition was repealed by degrees. First, the Volstead Act defining “intoxicating liquors”, was amended in April 1933 by the Cullen-Harrison Act to provide that beer with a strength of up to 3.2% alcohol was not “intoxicating”, and thus not prohibited. Within 24 hours of legalization, as much as 1.5 million barrels of 3.2% beer was sold, causing some to predict a “beer famine”. Soon thereafter, in December of the same year, the Twenty-first Amendment to the United States Constitution repealed Prohibition in general, but left the production of alcoholic beverages heavily regulated by federal, state, and local authorities. Included in this regulation was the imposition of a three-tier distribution system.
Although the Twenty-first Amendment allowed brewers to legally resume practicing their craft, many “dry” counties remained and many states failed to ratify altogether, which slowed the resurgence of the brewing industry. In addition, the many prohibitionists of the temperance movement were still quite vocal and were able to retain a large following despite the repealing of the 18th amendment. Before the American beer industry could attempt to re-establish itself, World War II began. This further inhibited the re-emergence of smaller breweries because much of the grain supply was rationed due to the war, forcing the breweries to use adjuncts such as corn and rice alongside the barley traditionally used in brewing. The prohibitionists saw a tantalizing opportunity to quell the efforts of remaining breweries, insisting that the commercial brewing of beer squandered manpower, grain, fuel and cargo space that should have gone towards the war effort overseas. Brewers responded to these accusations by extolling the benefits that brewer’s yeast have on human health, namely, their high vitamin B content. It was argued that th