What did breweries do during Prohibition?
The years following the passage of the 18th Amendment were tough for most brewers. From 1919 through the repeal in 1933, brewers fought to stay in business and did whatever it took.
Most brewers took up the production of near beer, a beverage the National Prohibition Act of 1919 still allowed, with an alcohol content of 0.5 percent. This was often accomplished by making beer according to the normal process and sending the finished product back to the kettle to boil off the alcohol (this is not how modern low/no alcohol beers are made.)
Certainly the most profitable way to stay in business was bootlegging the real stuff. Yet there was the ever-looming threat of a government raid. In this context, brewers were able to provide partially processed ingredients, such as malt syrup and yeast, to those looking to make a batch of brew in their bathtubs.
Brewers, often with little capital, had to take advantage of their available resources. Two major resources were refrigeration capacity and packaging equipment. One can imagine the odds and ends businesses that each might have been able to obtain with these resources, such as soda production or cold food storage and distribution.
While there are probably hundreds if not thousands of things brewers did to remain in business, there are a few more interesting than others. Yuengling was permitted to continue making their porter, as it was available by prescription for pregnant women suffering from certain ailments. Anheuser Busch produced truck bodies and refrigerated cabinets along with other more conventional means to survive.
Of the thousands of brewers alive in 1919, only 160 made it to see the end of the dry days in 1933. Today less than 20 of these pre-Prohibition brewing concerns are still producing independently, according to beerhistory.com. For those that did make it, times were not about to get easier. The strain of Prohibition had set up a struggle that would result in five decades of consolidation into what are now the three major players in the industry with one style of beer. Only in the 1980s would the microbrewery revolution bring back the diversity.
What is ice beer and how is it different than regular beer?
Ice beers are known for being more alcoholic and, for the most part, relatively cheap. The production of ice beer is quite simple. After beer is almost finished, it is chilled to lower temperatures where some of the water freezes and forms ice crystals, but the alcohol remains liquid. Thus the filtering process takes out these ice crystals and just like that, you have ice beer.
That idea never panned out but it inspired a new product for them. More breweries jumped on the idea in the early 1990s as a simple method to put another product on the market. In most cases they simply took an existing brand, concentrated it and called it (brand) ice. Although ice beers are not a large part of the American beer market, each of the big three have a few ice beers in their portfolio, the most notables of these being Natural Ice (Anheuser Busch), Milwaukee's Best Ice (SABMiller) and Keystone Ice (Molson Coors). All three of these beers have an alcohol content of 5.9 percent, as some states have different laws or taxes beginning at the 6 percent mark. Ice beers generally have a reputation of being the best bang for the buck in terms of alcohol. There is a style of beer called Eisbock, which is a stronger than ordinary doppel bock and uses the same ice crystal-formation technique. Eisbocks are much darker, stronger and of course, more expensive than an ordinary ice beer.
Chris Straub is a senior majoring chemical engineering and a Collegian columnist. He is also the great-great grandson of Straub beer's founder. His e-mail is cts150@psu.edu.
