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A Hobbled History of Beer: The 20th Century (1900AD - 2000AD) by Cub Lea Last updated 09/00

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As technology continued to advance at ever-increasing rates, the cost of remaining competitive in the beer industry climbed accordingly. Small breweries continued to fail until there were fewer than 1,400 breweries by 1914.

But the worst decimation was yet to come. I've comfortably skirted the issue of beer as an alcoholic beverage and thus as a mind- and mood-altering substance, but that issue can no longer be avoided. Because the one event which overrides all others in importance in brewing's 20th century, especially in North America: is the period known as Prohibition. And Prohibition wasn't about beer...it was about alcohol.

Temperance groups had been gathering strength for decades, and had already succeeded in getting alcoholic beverages outlawed in parts of Canada. Alcohol and drug abuse were rampant in the US, which was entirely understandable considering the numbers of returning soldiers from the Great War with undiagnosed stress disorders and the large numbers of frontier-dwellers and descendants who had their own versions of shell-shock to deal with. Patent medicines with any kind of punch had been pulverized in the preceding two decades, and by January of 1920, the prohibitionists had sufficient backing in the US government to ratify the infamous Volstead Act, over the veto of then-President Woodrow Wilson, and within two years, alcoholic beverages were partly or fully criminalized from coast to coast and from Baffin Island to the Rio Grande.

Prohibition had been implemented many times in the 1800s, usually on a state- or county-wide basis, but this was the first truly international experiment in outlawing alcohol. It ultimately proved once and for all times the futility of attempts by governments to keep the people from a ready means of mood alteration. The famous British scholar William James had published his cautions against such actions a full 20 years earlier when patent medicines first began coming under serious fire. Against the advice of colleagues and churchmen, James proclaimed what he believed was the necessity of altered states of consciousness to human social and psychological well-being, and he did so with the most reasoned and well-proven observations yet seen in defense of recreational intoxication. James' work is still widely cited by addiction and consciousness scholars and remains among the most important bodies of work in the field in modern history.

But hey, if Wilson, the first scholar elected to the White House, couldn't stop these temperance folk from closing down the party nationwide, a few pithy pages from some uppity limey bookworm wasn't going to turn the tide either.

The effect of prohibition on brewing was immediate and devastating. In 1920 alone, over 1,500 breweries closed across North America. Those that remained open attempted to survive on the sale of candy, malt products (the rise in popularity of malted milk can be attributed directly to prohibition) or soft drinks. Only home winemaking managed to escape the legal penalties of the Volstead Act after the Supreme Court deemed that it was the nature of fruit to ferment, and congress could not legislate against nature and therefore could not prosecute possessors of homemade wine. But even as wine flourished in these times, apparently most Americans believed that the Volstead act prohibited winemaking, too.

Many historians speculate that had we gone to war with the French rather than the Germans, who were associated as a people with brewing and beer, the atmosphere of the times might have allowed beer to escape the fate of wines and spirits. After all, had not history proven that it was just as natural for bread to ferment?

Politicians eventually learned their lesson, though. Outlawing mood alteration was proving to be political suicide, especially when governments chose to go after the people's drug of choice. From the moment when the tide turned against Volstead, western governments began to turn their attention to less popular psychoactives typically used mostly by the marginalized classes. In the post-Prohibition 1930s, that meant cannabis, which was already associated in the public mind with negro culture and the decadence of the jazz scene. Opiates had been severely restricted since around the turn of the century, as had cocaine. It was during the 1930s that the meaning of "bohemian" took a hard right turn in North American consciousness...where it had previously been associated with lager beers of the type made in Germany and Czech Bohemia, it came to be tied to hedonism and antiestablishment morals, and that stigma persists to this day.

Canning was in widespread use for food products long before beer got into the act. In 1909, American Can Company was approached by a Montana brewery with a request for a can capable of storing beer. American Can experimented with a few designs, but the chemical reaction between beer and metal fouled the flavor so badly that the experiment was abandoned. Brewers had long known that metal kegs could have the same effect if the keg wasn't lined with some form of protective layer, and epoxy resins were eventually found to solve that problem.

It was not until 1933 when American Can revived the idea and found a brewer brave enough to try a new, coated container. In market tests, they discovered some curious responses. About 91% of respondents said they liked the beer, and 85% actually said that canned beer tasted more like draft beer than real draft. The association between cans and "draft-like flavor" has persisted to this day, an association which hasn't been as marketable with bottled beer. These early cans actually used a high concentration of tin in their alloys. It wasn't until the late 1950s that aluminum alloying was refined to a degree sufficient to support the pressures of beer, and cheap enough to merit use with products as inexpensive as beer and soft drinks, and pull tabs didn't appear until the 1960s. Tin is a micronutrient, needed by the body in very small amounts like iron and zinc, and we seem to be built to find natural minerals tasty. Why else would cattle make snacks of salt blocks? Perhaps it was the tiny bit of dissolved tin salts in canned beer that added that something extra to canned beer to give it the illusion of better-than-draft flavor.

By 1935, the first flat-top beer can design had been selected for initial market trials, and Krueger's Finest Beer and Cream Ale became the first North American brew to be sold in cans. Canada didn't get its first canned beer until 1948, when Molson first tried flat-tops for its Export brand ale, and Dawes took the plunge with cone-top cans. Collectors and older beer enthusiasts are probably the only ones who remember the older-style cone-top beer can, which enjoyed a relatively long period of popularity in many locales because they looked more like bottles and had crown tops which could be removed by a bottle opener rather than a seamless top that required a puncture-style can opener.

But even as late as the 1930s only about 25% of all beer sold in the US was canned or bottled. The rest was sold in kegs. Bottled drinks were the domain of the Pepsi's and Coca-Cola's until the 1950s, and beer in cans didn't overtake bottles in sales until 1969.

What prohibition did to small brewers on this side of the Atlantic, World War II eventually did to brewers in Europe. The rampaging success of the mass-market breweries on both sides of the Atlantic in the mid-century led to a grassroots backlash against the limp lagers and watered-down ales which had become so popular.

That's not to say that lager's popularity wasn't earned. The breweries had done their market research; they knew that the average drinker preferred a light, less flavorful lager that provided the alcoholic kick without overpowering the taste buds, and they knew they could attract far more consumers to beer using a less flavorful recipe. The use of corn malt, and more notably the blander rice malt, became an institution in American brewing after World War II. The evolution of brewing in Britain took a slightly different path, and consistency seemed to be the order of the day. By the 1970s, you could find the same flavor of Guinness stout on tap in almost every neighborhood pub from Brighton to Edinburgh, and precious little choice almost anywhere you stopped along the road. By the mid-1960s, craft brewing appeared to be going the way of the dinosaur, but that was about to change in a big way.

The Campaign for Real Ale, or CAMRA, was organized in Great Britain to fight for laws and structural supports which would allow more neighborhood pubs and small breweries to brew their own traditional ales. This organization boasted high-powered membership from all sides of the House of Commons and House of Lords, and in the 1980s it succeeded in re-establishing the great pub brewing tradition which Britain had enjoyed for so many centuries.

CAMRA soon followed that success by establishing organizations in Canada and the US, and succeeded in opening up the marketplace in both countries for brewpubs and micro-breweries in the 1980s and early 1990s. Within a few years of CAMRA's first major media blitz and lobbying campaign, legal reforms resulted in a vast array of micro-brewed bottled beer and unique brewpub creations thriving alongside their mass-market counterparts, offering drinkers a real choice and range of flavors for the first time in decades. Ales began to make a comeback, although they're unlikely to overtake lagers again in popularity.

Microbreweries in North America owe their existence in no small measure to the efforts of these dedicated fans of full flavor, and CAMRA appears to have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. The renaissance of traditional brewing was their goal, but a side effect of their success was the establishment of a new market for alternative brews and contemporary interpretations of traditional brews. In essence, an entirely new category of beers emerged. Craft brewers found eager niche markets for everything from Czech-style steam beers to fruit-flavored stouts and spiced winter ales. And while microbrew still accounts for only a small fraction of the beer sold today, the beer market is large enough to support literally hundreds of private brewers across the continent.

And not a moment too soon, either. Mass-market beers had never nodded to tradition in more than name. Light beer and malt liquor were about as adventurous as a rocking chair. The brewing industry, which had for so long sold "tradition" as one of its most cherished values, was in dire danger of losing all touch with its roots before CAMRA came on the scene. In 1983, a mere 83 breweries existed in the entire United States, the sum total operated by just 44 companies, marking the heaviest concentration of brewing power in the US since the 1600s. The very next year, micro-brewing began in earnest and by 1994 the state of California alone would sport as many micro-breweries and brewpubs as the entire country had breweries just ten years before.

Changes in the brewing industry were trivial compared to what was happening in Europe with the collapse of Soviet-style communism. We might credit Vaclav Havel as the hero of Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution, but that's not how many Czechs see it. A famous quote from a Jaroslav Hasek novel states that "the government that raises the price of beer is destined to fall within a year." (Apparently Jaro never studied Canadian politics, where this edict is defied on practically an annual, basis.) It took a little longer than a year in Czechoslovakia's case...five years, in fact, from the date in 1984 when the Communists doubled the price of a pint of beer. It's often said that the beer price hike was critical to the success of the Soviet ouster, since it helped keep more of the movement's key thinkers sober and able to think more clearly about political action. One wonders, with what we know now of Eastern European alcoholism problems, whether or not this was meant as a joke.

And wouldn't you know it, Havel himself happened to be one of the best spokespeople that beer culture - particularly Czech beer culture - could have. On one trip to the US, the leader of the Velvet Revolution actually skipped out on a high-level meeting to drink beer and listen to John Cale play at a local club. We suppose it could be argued that this was actually a strategic subversive move, since Cale was one of the founding members of the legendary Velvet Underground, but it could simply indicate that the Czech mind has a very subtle sense of humor.

If in fact the tendency to populist revolt can be directly tied to the price of beer, then it seems to be a local phenomenon confined to Eastern Europe. In social democracies such as Canada, Denmark, Sweden and Germany, the popular practice of applying "sin tax" to cigarettes and alcoholic beverages appears to be an irritant most can live with, particularly now that the long-term costs of alcoholism can be quantified down to cents on your tax dollar. Consequently the price of beer relative to the cost of living has risen dramatically in all of these countries since the 1950s.

This increase in price has led to a resurgence in home brewing. It's the rare large town today that doesn't have its own "you-brew" shop, and as taxes on alcoholic beverages continue to rise, inevitably so will the popularity of the practice of personal brewing.