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You are here: Home / Food & Recipes / Beer Blogging / 75 Years Ago Today

75 Years Ago Today

by Michael D.|  April 7, 20084:48 am| 28 Comments

This post is in: Beer Blogging

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Beer became the only legal alcohol in the United States. (Why today is not a national holiday baffles me.) On April 7, 1933, Prohibition was modified to allow beer with no more than 3.2% abv. It was the beginning of the end, as Prohibition was officially repealed on December 5th of the same year.

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28Comments

  1. 1.

    JR

    April 7, 2008 at 4:56 am

    Just tried my first bottle of Sam Adams Irish Red, and I completely agree with the recommendation. Good, smooth stuff.

    Now I’m watching an old Ronald Reagan movie, “It’s a Great Feeling,” which is neither smooth nor good.

    Beer makes us do self-destructive things, I guess.

  2. 2.

    Michael D.

    April 7, 2008 at 5:24 am

    Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.”

    — Benjamin Franklin

  3. 3.

    purpleOnion

    April 7, 2008 at 5:53 am

    Beer is the American pass time.

    Where problem solving skills are required it substitutes apathy and everything is right with the world.

    Belligerence comes more easily.

    Being right all of the time is a done deal.

    It helps one forget about all those dead people.

    Sexuality is heightened or deadened depending upon tolerance.

    It is cheaper than therapy.

    One can momentarily love one’s friends.

    It helps tolerate fascism.

    It lets one believe everything is fine for awhile.

    It gives religion something to complain about.

    DWI laws bring in the big bucks for the State.

    People are funnier than usual.

    It brings out the hidden demogogue.

    It helps those who are losing their hearing to understand the loud mouth slobbering in their direction.

    It helps make otherwise dull sporting events seem entertaining and gives a novel meaning to the word “we” as in, “We beat them; we did it.”

    It aids in turning differences of opinion into disagreements, disagreements into arguments, and arguments into fights that lead to seeking revenge or forgetting about it altogether. Forgetting is often dependent upon size and skill factors that did not seem relevant at the time. This dependency can be mitigated with ambush. It may turn out that the entire episode had no meaning in the first place. Glorious.

    It increases the number and size of perpetrators.

    It gives some people a reason to live or an excuse to die.

    It makes one comment on blogs when one should not.

    It makes doing foolish and hurtful things easier.

    Stupidity and philosophy merge.

    One might become a better fighter, dancer, lover, worker, but then again maybe not.

  4. 4.

    jake

    April 7, 2008 at 6:06 am

    Holy crap, you’re right. If not today, we should at least celebrate the 5th as the day the pulled the plug on the Great [Failed] Experiment. People need a reason to drink during the Holidaze season and the greeting cards would be a riot.

  5. 5.

    gypsy howell

    April 7, 2008 at 6:29 am

    Now if only we could rid ourselves of our most useless and destructive Prohibition, and end the War on Drugs.

  6. 6.

    Soliton

    April 7, 2008 at 7:19 am

    It’s a well known fact that you do not buy beer, only rent it briefly.

    Quite possibly the most deliberately ignorant phrase in the English language: “Alcohol and drugs”.

    Anyone ever wonder why we can’t *all* be happy with alcohol as the sole recreational drug?

    After all, we are all biochemically identical and all medicines effect everyone exactly the same.

  7. 7.

    peach flavored shampoo

    April 7, 2008 at 7:52 am

    cannot figure out how they actually passed an Amendment to ban alcohol. A federal law, perhaps, but 3/4ths of the states agreed to this crapola?

  8. 8.

    Velvet Elvis

    April 7, 2008 at 7:53 am

    Anyone ever wonder why we can’t all be happy with alcohol as the sole recreational drug?

    robitussin

  9. 9.

    MR Bill

    April 7, 2008 at 7:59 am

    Anyone ever wonder why we can’t all be happy with alcohol as the sole recreational drug?

    robitussin

    Well, alcohol is really bad for some of us.
    Waiting for the end of the Cannibis Prohibition (a ’30s relict), and suspect Medical Marijuana is the way this will happen.

  10. 10.

    mikesdak

    April 7, 2008 at 8:04 am

    Ah yes, 3.2 beer. Until the feds started blackmailing the states to raise the drinking age(the mid 80’s as I recall), 18-year-olds could buy it here in South Dakota. Unless they were strictly beer joints, though, most places kept only a token amount of it on hand; I don’t recall ever actually being served any in my hometown bar.

  11. 11.

    Gus

    April 7, 2008 at 8:07 am

    3.2 is the only beer you can buy in Minnesota on Sundays. It’s also the only beer you can buy in anything but a liquor store. MN has the most ridiculous alcohol laws.

  12. 12.

    D0n Camillo

    April 7, 2008 at 8:16 am

    PurpleOnion, you’re harshing our buzz.

  13. 13.

    Bob In Pacifica

    April 7, 2008 at 8:18 am

    Didn’t Utah just pass a law limiting the amount of alcohol in drink? Not the number of drinks someone could serve, but the amount in a single drink.

  14. 14.

    Xenos

    April 7, 2008 at 8:35 am

    I thought 3.2 beer was what they served at football games, thus the enormous cups and long lines for the bathrooms.

  15. 15.

    DBrown

    April 7, 2008 at 8:40 am

    When in the F*ck are they doing to repeal the drug laws that put so many people in jail for using a drug little different than beer? This country is insane – tobacco kills 450,000+/year yet we outlaw harmless (comparatively) drugs and put the people in a vast jail system that just enriches the top 1% … I see a trend here.

  16. 16.

    Zifnab

    April 7, 2008 at 8:40 am

    Didn’t Utah just pass a law limiting the amount of alcohol in drink? Not the number of drinks someone could serve, but the amount in a single drink.

    Problem: Too many people are getting shitfaced.
    Solution: Make them drink out of smaller glasses.

    Brilliant!

  17. 17.

    Dennis - SGMM

    April 7, 2008 at 8:52 am

    Didn’t Utah just pass a law limiting the amount of alcohol in drink? Not the number of drinks someone could serve, but the amount in a single drink.

    I lived in South Texas in the late Sixties. I lived in a ‘dry’ county (Kleberg) but even in the adjacent ‘wet’ counties you couldn’t go into a bar or club and order liquor by the drink. You had to go to a packaged goods store, buy your bottle of booze, take it into the club and then pay for ‘setups,’ glasses of soda or whatever your mixer of choice was. Brilliant: “You can’t order just one drink, you have to buy the whole bottle.”
    Weather report: “Hot, humid and drunk with occasional showers of vomit.”

  18. 18.

    Krista

    April 7, 2008 at 9:00 am

    Anyone ever wonder why we can’t all be happy with alcohol as the sole recreational drug?

    ‘Cause beer is more fattening than weed. Unless your weed is in the form of brownies. Or unless you have a bad habit of ordering quarter-chicken dinners with extra gravy when stoned.

  19. 19.

    Billy K

    April 7, 2008 at 9:06 am

    You had to go to a packaged goods store, buy your bottle of booze, take it into the club and then pay for ‘setups,’ glasses of soda or whatever your mixer of choice was.

    I still frequent a bar that sells setups.

    Gus, I’ll see your ridiculous MN alcohol laws, and raise you crazy Texas Blue Laws.

  20. 20.

    FredW

    April 7, 2008 at 9:16 am

    Just a nit to pick — the limit was beer that was no more than 3.2% alcohol by weight (abw) not abv. That would make it about 4% abv.

  21. 21.

    Punchy

    April 7, 2008 at 9:49 am

    KS has those same f’ed up liquor laws. 3.2% everywhere but an actual booze store. they just passed laws to sell EtOH on Sundays, and did so only b/c Missouri allowed it, and their liquor stores were making a killing.

    Speakin of beer, gunna get my drink on here soon…in preparation for a KU championship tonite.

  22. 22.

    jake

    April 7, 2008 at 9:50 am

    cannot figure out how they actually passed an Amendment to ban alcohol.

    A lot of it was fueled by anti-immigrant hysteria. Drinking was linked to those strange people from places like Ireland, Italy and Poland and their funny speech, odd religion and violent behavior.

    Sound familiar?

  23. 23.

    Soliton

    April 7, 2008 at 10:07 am

    Speaking of strange blue laws.

    We lived near New Orleans in the early 80’s, you could buy a gallon of vodka at the grocery store on Sunday.. But you couldn’t buy a pair of panty hose.

  24. 24.

    b. hussein canuckistani

    April 7, 2008 at 10:29 am

    Canada has a beer holiday. What was originally the Victoria Day holiday (on or near May 24th), named for the queen when Canada was founded, has evolved into the May 2-4 weekend.

    Do Americans call 24-bottle cases of beer “2-4″s?

  25. 25.

    Dennis - SGMM

    April 7, 2008 at 12:14 pm

    We lived near New Orleans in the early 80’s, you could buy a gallon of vodka at the grocery store on Sunday.. But you couldn’t buy a pair of panty hose.

    If you bought a better grade of vodka you wouldn’t have to filter it through the panty hose.

  26. 26.

    paradox

    April 7, 2008 at 12:18 pm

    A lot of it was fueled by anti-immigrant hysteria.

    And an amazing amount of arrogance. The vast elements of American society that turn into repressive authoritarian assholes on the turn of a dime is very disturbing. Wtf? Take off, mind your own business. Every dern generation it has to be beaten into their wooden skulls, Jesus.

  27. 27.

    joel hanes

    April 7, 2008 at 7:19 pm

    peach flavored shampoo says:

    cannot figure out how they actually passed an Amendment to ban alcohol.
    A federal law, perhaps, but 3/4ths of the states agreed to this crapola?

    Encouraged by the WCTU, many women pulled that old Lysistrata trick.
    “Lips that touch liquor shall ne’er touch mine.”

    So the poor guys were up against it:
    at least appear to support the Volstead Act, or no sex.

  28. 28.

    Xenos

    April 7, 2008 at 7:51 pm

    So the poor guys were up against it:
    at least appear to support the Volstead Act, or no sex.

    The solution was simple – teach the next generation of girls to drink. My grandmother was a flapper who came of age in 1922. Even in old age she drank more in a weekend than I could manage in a month.

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