Orr Raise your glass to a Happy Brew Year (with audio)
April 7th, 2008, 4:42 am Hobbies And Interests
I am going to urge all you beer lovers and hop heads out there to pour a pint, raise it to the sky on Monday, and give some props to some guys named Cullen and Harrison before you quaff. You also may want to thank FDR. That’s because April 7 is the 75th anniversary of the practical end of Prohibition for beer drinkers.Persnickety types like to point out that the 21st Amendment to the Constitution wasn’t ratified until Dec. 5, 1933, which officially ended the national ban on beer, wine, and spirits in “wet” states. (Fun but bizarre fact - Utah was the last of the 36 states needed to ratify the 21st Amendment. Utah - which has some excellent craft brewers - now has the most restrictive beer laws in the nation. But for one day at least, Utahns rocked.)But Prohibition for beer drinkers basically ended on April 7th of that year, when the Cullen-Harrison Act went into effect, ending 13 years of misery. The dreaded Volstead Act, which banned the production or sale of any alcoholic beverage higher than 0.05 percent alcohol by volume, was changed to allow beer at 3.2 percent alcohol by volume to be legal. Idaho beer historian Gregg Smith says the more than 1 million gallons of beer were consumed on April 7, 1933. Thousands jammed the streets in New York, Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis, and other cities to celebrate the return of beer. More than 25,000 people gathered around the Anheuser Busch brewery in St. Louis just before midnight to listen to August A. Busch Jr. address the nation over the radio to celebrate the end of the dark days of Prohibition for beer drinkers. Back in the day, St. Louis radio station KMOX was like CNN or CBS.In Milwaukee, Miller Brewing passed out samples to people who brought milk bottles and tomato cans. Pabst had police escort kegs of beer to hotels minutes after midnight.Later that day, the now iconic Budweiser Clydesdales made their first appearance, delivering a case of Bud to former New York Gov. Alfred. E. Smith, who was a vocal opponent of Prohibition. Several breweries, including Anheuser-Busch, sent cases of beer to the White House for President Franklin Roosevelt, who urged Congress to modify the Volstead Act earlier that year.If there ever was a day to celebrate the awesomeness of beer, April 7 is it. It is hard to comprehend not being able to go over to the Boise Co-op or local package store to pick up a sixer. Here in the Treasure Valley (like everywhere else in the country) Prohibition basically killed beer production. Local historian Arthur Hart said Boise had at least three breweries before Idaho went dry in 1916. When Prohibition was over, only the Bohemian brewery on North 6th Street managed to survive. It produced beer until about 1948, Hart said.”(Prohibition) killed the breweries in Idaho,” Hart said, mirroring what happened around the country.In 1910, 1,568 breweries were producing beer in the US. By 1934, 714 had reopened, according to the Brewers Almanac. The end of Prohibition led to the rise of the dominance of big brewers such as Anheuser-Busch and Miller, which had the production capacity, technology (for instance, Anheuser-Busch had the first refrigerated warehouses and railcars, and embraced pasteurization) and distribution network to make them national brands. The American public connected in a huge way with these thirst-quenching German/Eastern European-style lagers, and the rest is history.It wasn’t until the craft beer movement took hold in the late ’90s that the U.S. got back to pre-Prohibition levels for breweries, according to the Brewers Almanac.It’s hard to comprehend a society where the act of drinking a beer was illegal. Prohibition was a miserable failure on so many levels - the rise of crime, the loss of tax money, the infringement on liberty, etc. - that we should celebrate the repeal with a toast. Patrick Orr: 373-6619Patrick Orr’s beer column runs the first Friday of the month.
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