So it’s 1920 and you’re a big American producer of alcoholic drinks. Prohibition hits. Sure, you’ve had a year to prepare for this, but what did you do during that year? Sell everything off and fire everybody? Try and convert to another line of business? Move abroad?
Once Prohibition was repealed, how long did it take for the liquor companies to get rolling again? How did they manage to get back into a market that, I assume, depended heavily on importing at this point? Did new companies start up or was it the old ones coming back?
As I understand it, distilleries could still make “limited” amounts of “medicinal” brandy. This was sold by pharmacies-by doctor’s prescription. In one section of Boston (Mattapan), there were 33 pharmacis license to sell medicinal alcohol, in a 2 mile stretch.
Wineries were allowed to make sacramental and kosher wines, again in “limited” quantities.
Beer brewers mostly shut down, or made non-alcoholic beer.
And quite few distillers moved to Canada, where they recorded huge sales to private dealers (in the USA).
Prohibition was a disaster and the best thing that ever happened to organized crime.
The repeal was foreseeable a long way off. There was widespread support for repeal by the 1930’s. The Democrats ran on a platform of repeal in the 1932 election and won in November of that year. The 21st Amendment was passed by Congress in February of 1933. The presidential inauguration back then was in March of 1933. Roosevelt signed the Cullen-Harrison Act (which amended the Volstead Act and allowed some beer to be brewed) shortly after taking office. The 21st Amendment, which ended national prohibition (states could still prohibit alcohol), was finally enacted in December of 1933.
Some switched to making de-natured alcohol for various industrial and medical uses. Also, in many states you actually could buy alcohol if prescribed by a doctor for a specific “illness”. I’ve heard that this was widely abused in some areas.
Stroh’s Brewery in Detroit became a full-service soda fountain supply house, including making some very tasty ice cream which remained a sideline product well into the 80s. It proudly proclaimed a higher butterfat content than Håagen-Dazs (back when that would have been considered a selling point).
As a side note, the Siebel Institute of Technology is a world-renowned school which teaches brewing technology, from the basics up to the microbiology of yeast. During Prohibition, they switched to teaching other subjects, including baking and carbonated beverages. They switched back when it became apparent that Prohibition was going to be repealed.
It is often said that Prohibition was responsible for the US losing many of the smaller, local breweries, leaving mostly the large ones who perhaps had the money to retool their operations to adapt during that time period.
Nobody’s mentioned yet that use for religious services got a dispensation, too. A few wineries, like Christian Brothers, made sacramental wine during Prohibition. The religious dispensation, like the medical dispensation, was abused, but not as much as one might expect.
Anheuser-Busch diversified well before prohibition. The building I work in was built by Anheuser-Busch in 1900 not as a brewery but as an office building with retail space on the first floor. It was a real estate investment.
