The History of Beer

While the origins of beer stretch all the way back to Mesopotamia and the brewing goddess Ninkasi, American craft brewing is a relatively new phenomenon on this 7,000-year timeline. Yes, today's fruit-infused sour ales and bourbon barrel-aged barleywines are obviously light years ahead of the corn lagers colonists were first brewing when they landed on our shores. But in order to truly understand the cult of worship craft beer has come to inspire, we first need to rewind to an era when "beer geek" hadn't even entered our vernacular.

American brewing was initially built on the back of the grand European tradition of simple, four-ingredient beers. Early commercial examples of American beer were brewed by German and Czech immigrants, often in Milwaukee, St. Louis, and New York, who were looking to bring the classic ales and lagers from their homelands to their new turf. These beers were apparently flavorful and made with quality grains and hops—that is, until Prohibition hit. By the time those awful 13 years ended, American beer was completely dumbed down with corn and rice replacing the grains. Suddenly, these German lagers and Czech pilsners were now “lite” beers in aluminum cans, meant for pounding while eating a TV dinner and sitting on your La-Z-Boy.

Luckily, in the last 50 or so years, a new industry has arisen to combat the “corporate” swill that came to dominate America. These new microbrews—as they would be called—weren’t paeans to the goddess Ninkasi, but instead tributes to the new gods of the industry: titans like Fritz Maytag, Ken Grossman, and Jim Koch. Brewers that valued flavor, hops profiles, and regionality over bland, mass-marketed drinkability. Likewise, these beers became admired by the same kinds of consumers who loved artfully crafted, independently made foodstuffs—and all the better if they could nerd out over the rarity and obscurity of any particular offering.

Prohibition

January 17, 1920, marked a dark day for American brewers. At the stroke of midnight, America became a dry country under Prohibition, with over a thousand producers swiftly banned from selling their chief commodity: alcohol.

Prohibition forced brewing companies to adapt or die—and many did. According to Maureen Ogle, author of Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer, out of the more than 1,300 brewers in operation in 1915, no more than 100 survived. However, they included some of the most iconic names in brewing—such as Anheuser-Busch, Coors, Miller, Pabst and Yuengling.

“What separated the companies that made it from the ones that didn’t is what they had to begin with at the start of Prohibition,” Ogle says. “The Pabst, Busch and Miller families had all invested in real estate holdings across the United States.”

These now-dominant companies had also expanded into making non-alcoholic drinks some two decades before Prohibition became the law of the land, including soft drinks, malted milk and fruit juices. “They understood that if they wanted to stay competitive, they were going to have to make not just beer but beverages that non-alcoholic drinkers wanted,” says Ogle.

At the start of Prohibition, many brewers pinned their hopes on non-intoxicating beers that were legal under Prohibition as long as they had less than 0.5% alcohol content. But it turned out that near beers weren’t near enough for many consumers. They wanted the real thing, and when the proliferation of bootlegging and speakeasies made real beer easy to come by, the near beer market tanked.

The sale of malt syrup and yeast also helped brewers stay afloat. Prohibition banned the sale of beer, but not the ingredients for making it. Although malt syrup was advertised as a baking ingredient, many buyers used the extract to make beer. An in-store cardboard sign display for a Budweiser-brand barley malt syrup even featured a grocer winking knowingly at customers. When the beer began to flow again in 1933, the brewing companies that did survive found little competition remaining.