On 17 January 1920, the Eighteenth Amendment to the US Constitution took effect, banning the manufacture, sale and transport of “intoxicating liquors.” For the country’s brewers, many of them from German immigrant families, it was a catastrophe. The “noble experiment,” as supporters called it, lasted nearly fourteen years and reshaped American beer for generations.
How America went dry
Temperance movements had campaigned since the nineteenth century, arguing that alcohol fuelled poverty, domestic violence and political corruption. Groups such as the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the highly organised Anti-Saloon League turned that concern into political power, pressing for local bans and then a national one.
The First World War tipped the balance. Wartime grain conservation made brewing look wasteful, and fierce anti-German feeling cast brewers named Busch, Pabst, Schlitz and Blatz as suspicious. The Eighteenth Amendment was ratified in January 1919. The Volstead Act that enforced it set the legal limit at just 0.5 percent alcohol, which ruled out even weak beer.
How breweries survived, or didn’t
Before Prohibition, the United States had well over a thousand breweries. Many closed for good. Those that survived got creative. They sold “near beer” (cereal beverages brewed normally and then dealcoholised), soft drinks, ice cream, baker’s yeast and malt syrup. Malt syrup was officially for baking, though everyone knew many buyers used it to brew beer at home. Anheuser-Busch made a near beer called Bevo, as well as ice cream and even refrigerated truck bodies.
Meanwhile, illegal drinking thrived. Speakeasies, bootleggers and organised crime supplied demand, and figures like Al Capone grew rich. Historians debate how much drinking actually fell. The evidence suggests overall consumption dropped substantially, especially early on, but enforcement was patchy and corruption widespread.
Repeal and a changed industry
By the early 1930s, the Great Depression had made Prohibition look expensive: lost jobs, lost tax revenue and a thriving criminal economy. Franklin D. Roosevelt campaigned partly on repeal. Weeks after taking office, he signed the Cullen–Harrison Act, allowing beer up to 3.2 percent alcohol by weight. It took effect on 7 April 1933, and the night before is still celebrated by some as “New Beer’s Eve.” Roosevelt is often quoted as saying it would be a good time for a beer, but that line may well be apocryphal. Full repeal came with the Twenty-first Amendment, ratified on 5 December 1933.
Repeal handed alcohol regulation largely to the states, which led to the “three-tier” system that separates producers, distributors and retailers in much of the country. Far fewer breweries reopened than had existed before 1920, and the survivors, with capital, distribution networks and brand recognition, grew larger. Over the following decades, consolidation, national advertising, canned beer and a preference for lighter lagers produced a market dominated by a handful of giant brewers.
Why it matters
Prohibition is the great break in American beer history. It wiped out hundreds of regional breweries and many local styles, and it left a legal framework that still shapes how beer is sold today. The uniform landscape of the mid-twentieth century was partly a Prohibition legacy, and it set the stage for the craft beer rebellion that would arrive a few decades later.