Watching “The History of Jazz,” a comment about the end of prohibition puzzled me. It was said that when people finally tasted the legal liquor, they longed for the liquor of prohibition. Seems to me that there would be plenty of imported booze, especially from Canada, from breweries and distilleries who had stayed in business during probihition. Did U.S. Distilleries and brewers actually have to relearn the art, or did U.S. tastes just adapted to the illegal hooch enough to actually desire it?
WAG - On bottles of whiskey I often see things like “aged 5 years” or even longer. At the end of prohibition, the US distillers probably just started up and flooded the market with “raw” whiskey. The imported stuff would still be could, just more expensive than the US produced stuff.
Bear in mind that we had Prohibition too, although on a province-by-province basis, backed up by federal laws prohibiting the transport of alcohol across provincial boundaries. Canada was certainly a source for alcohol for the U.S., but it was under similar restrictions.
I sortakind a doubt that hootch was aged for more than a few days.
I could not find any references as to which Provinces suffered under prohibition. Can you fill me in? Alberta must have been abstaining from the prohibition since my paternal grandfather was allegedly one of many bootleggers running liquor across the Canadian border into Montana during prohibition. Don’t know if it still is know as such, but there used to be a road north of Great Falls known as the bootlegger trail.
A reference I dug up (http://live.looksmart.com/cgi-bin/framer?http://www.tv.cbc.ca/witness/drugs/traffikpro.htm):
This would back up jti’s assertion that Prohibition wasn’t strictly an American phenomena, but I suspect that Canadian governments weren’t all that unhappy about the big markets that suddenly opened up south of the border. It would certainly explain why company’s like Seagram’s (out of Montreal) became such vast enterprises.
Canada experimented with different types of prohibition, at both the federal and provincial levels, for rouchly 40 - 50 years, as I recall, from around the 1880s to the 1920s - don’t have exact dates. In the 1880s, the federal Parliament passed a “local option” act that allowed local municipalities to go dry, upon a local vote. That Act was challenged in the courts on constitutional grounds, and was upheld by the Imperial Judicial Committee, in a case called Russell v. The Queen.
The different provinces also experimented with prohibition from time to time, and the temperance movement was strong enough that they persuaded the federal government to hold Canada’s first national referendum, around 1903, I believe. A slim majority nation-wide favoured prohibition, but Quebec, given a different culture (notably its Roman Catholic background, rather than Protestant) voted solidly against it. The feds concluded that they would not bring in a nation-wide prohibition, if Quebec was so strongly opposed. Instead, they left it to individual provinces to prohibit, and then passed matching legislation that forbade the import or export to/from a province that had gone dry under provincial law.
The big boost for Prohibition was the Great War, from 1914 to 1918, when it became patriotic to use all grain products for the war effort, feeding the troops, keeping Britain from starving, and so on, so more provinces went dry then. The movement was quite strong in the three Prairie provinces, and I’m pretty sure Alberta was dry for a period. (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, was originally founded as a temperance colony. The establishment of the University of Saskatchewan, with thirsty undergrads, pretty much put paid to that.)
Prohibition survived into the 20s, but was gradually repealed on a province-by-province basis. Whenever a province went wet, the corresponding federal legislation ceased to resterict import/export of alcohol from/to that province.
Note that there was one little quirk in the federal law: it only restricted the transport of alcohol across provincial boundaries, not across international boundaries. And, since the provinces can’t legislate in the area of international trade, they couldn’t plug that gap. That meant that it was perfectly legal for someone to brew hooch in, say, southern Saskatchewan, and export it to the U.S. Given that you were dealing with Americans engaged in illegal activity under U.S. law, there were some risks involved, but the money was good. That’s how old Mr. Bronfman (founder of Seagrams) got his start, but in the process one of his brothers-in-law was killed in what everyone assumes was a “business dispute” with some of his American customers.
All of the above is from memory, so I’m certainly open to correction. For a good read on the topic, see The Bronfman Dynasty, by Pierre Berton (or is it Peter Newman? I think Berton, but again, it’s been a while.)
As far as beer goes, this might be what they were talking about. This is paraphrased from “The New Complete Joy of Home Brewing” by Charlie Papazian:
Prior to prohibition, there were thousands of breweries in the U.S… Prohibition killed off most of them, leaving only a handful who were able to survive by making food products during those years. After prohibition ended, these fewer breweries ceased to brew the richer styles of beer from before prohibition, and instead attempted to market beer that would appeal to a wide variety of people, including women.
So they were going for the mass market, making the lighter beer that Europeans and Canadians mock us for 'til today (and deservedly so. Bud? Blech!). The beer prior to (and during) prohibition would have been much stronger and tastier.
Perhaps the answer lies not in the actual product consumed, but in the psychology of it? Forbidden fruit, and all that. Anything that was available during The Grand Experiment must surely have been available afterwards, and if it was expensive, would it not have been equally or more so (no competition) in the Twenties? Maybe it’s just more alluring to drink something illegal, somehow.
As you will see At This Site, not all alcoholic production ceased during Prohibition.
At least in Northeastern Pennsylvania, they did just fine and never lost their taste for a nice cold brew. I’ve taken the tour, and at least in 1984, Mr. Yuengling tended bar at the end of the tour. A free beer for everyone who toured the place. Ingenious way around the Vollstead Act, I’d say 
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