Life in the beer industry can be a thankless task. As a major supplier of beer to the American public once complained
“I’ve been spending the best years of my life as a public benefactor. I’ve given people the light pleasures, shown them a good time. And all I get is abuse”
Your sympathy, please, for Alphonse Gabriel Capone, purveyor of quality beer to the good folk of Chicago during the 1920s. He was keen to stress his credentials as he had just been named America’s first Public Enemy Number 1.
(And this was something that he did actually say. For example, the whole business about “getting more with a kind word and a gun than just a kind word” is one of many things that everyone knows he said, except that he didn’t.)
Many people think of bootleg gin and whisky when they think about Capone and Prohibition. But beer was his key mass market product. His occasionally over-vigorous defence of his market share against rival businessmen - some of whom suffered unfortunate fatal mishaps - was dubbed “The Beer Wars” by the Chicago press.
Prohibition is probably the low point of America’s history as a beer nation. But Prohibition didn’t just blow up suddenly out of a clear blue American sky. The attitude of Americans to booze has always been ambivalent. The story starts with the evangelical revival of the 1780s known as the Second Great Awakening. (There was a First Great Awakening, in the 1740s. It was one of the causes of the American War of Independence. But it didn’t really have much to do with beer, so I will leave others to write about it). This movement embraced various interconnected social causes. Abolition of Slavery. Female Emancipation. And Temperance. It all started when Dr Benjamin Rush published in 1784 “an inquiry into the effect of ardent spirits upon the body and mind”. At the risk of spoiling the ending of Dr Rush’s work for you, he thought that ardent spirits were a bad thing. So began a gradual campaign to ban alcohol at state and municipal level.
And of course ardent spirits could be a bad thing. We lovers of beer must admit that. Temperance and women’s rights were linked because women generally didn’t want their husbands drinking away the family money and then hitting them. Afro-American labour activists were strongly on board. But nevertheless I would argue that Temperance was pursued in America with an unattractive combination of zealotry and hypocrisy. The harmless pleasure of moderate drinking was not recognised. We saw campaigners such as Carrie Nation, who used to go into bars with a hatchet and smash things up - giving us, in the process, the word “battleaxe” to describe a somewhat determined woman. (We in England later had our own “battleaxe” in the form of Lady Nancy Astor - more on her another time). We saw blatant attempts to cut off the supply of alcohol to poor people only - witness the 1840 Massachusetts “15 Gallon Law”, whereby spirits could only be purchased in units of 15 gallons or more.
Eventually the Temperance movement morphed into the Anti-Saloon League and they eyed a bigger prize - a federal law banning the production and sale of alcohol, and not just a law but an enshrined through an amendment to the Constitution. The German American community fought stoutly for their right to brew beer. But then the USA declared war on Germany in 1917 and suddenly the views of this community did not carry weight - indeed, support for Prohibition became a mark of anti-German patriotism. Hence the 18th Amendment, the Volstead Act and, as night followed day, the establishment of a thriving unofficial market.
I have tried to empathise with the Anti Saloon League. I have some personal sympathy for their leader, Wayne Wheeler, who was disabled as a consequence of a drunken farm worker operating machinery. But they were an unsavoury bunch. They did deals with politicians along the lines of “you can still drink in private; just vote the way we want”. They insisted on the addition of poison to industrial alcohol to deter people from drinking it, and argued that a few deaths were all in a good cause. And, in a slight reversal of the traditional Temperance alliance with Abolitionism (of slavery), they formed an alliance with… the Ku Klux Klan. (Read Professor Tom Pegram of Loyola University if you want to hear more about this). It was agreed that the one thing stopping the prohibitionist purity of America was the decadence of Catholic immigrants, and the Klan were happy to do something about that. Only small isolated groups of Catholic immigrants who couldn’t fight back, obviously. For some reason the Klan decided not to venture into Chicago shouting “hey, Capone, come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough”.
If you want to read a bit about how the USA emerged from this dark time and became the brewing superpower that it is now, have a look at my earlier blog (“America the Beer-tiful Part 1” https://www.londonbiermeister.co.uk/blog/america-the-beer-tiful-part-1-january-2021, and please excuse the fact that I wrote the two blogs backwards).
Equally peversely, I am not going to round this off by extolling the virtues of particular American beers. I have done that on previous occasions. So instead, a plug for Beer Hawk’s “The Ones to Watch” mixed case, which I enjoyed with two friends in a garden the other weekend. Eight beers from up and coming breweries, well worth a try.