I’m not quite forty years old, which means I can remember when the idea of imported beer was pretty exotic. Considering the American alternatives at the time, it’s no small wonder that folks would get pretty excited about beers like San Miguel or Dos Equis or Tuborg (the golden beer of Danish kings). But what a lot of people don’t know is that American beer wasn’t always characterized by the thin, bitter lagers that Budweiser and Miller and Coors offer.

Before Prohibition, America had breweries in almost every town. Some of them, like Anheuser-Busch were already on their way to becoming national giants, but there were hundreds, perhaps even thousands more that served regions, or cities, or even just neighborhoods, often run by German immigrants who presumably knew a thing or two about brewing good beer.

Then came Prohibition. The biggest brewers got into near-beer or soda pop or anything else that kept their labor and captial working, but the little breweries were virtually wiped out. In 1933 the giants like Anheuser-Busch emerged from Prohibtion with almost no competition, and after a dozen or so years of drinking bathtub gin and moonshine, Americans seemed to have forgotten that beer could be more than a cheap way to get a buzz.

It took nearly 60 years for Americans to begin to re-discover that we were capable of brewing good beer. I still remember my first pint of Cascade Head Ale at a McMininan’s pub in Oregon. It was like a revelation. In one sip, I finally tasted what a hundred bottles of Pabst and Rainer had merely been hinting at. Sure, it still came with a nice buzz (especially their Terminator Stout), but the mellow high was only half the pleasure. This was beer you really could drink for the taste!

This Friday I’m going to sit down with Violet Blue and Carol Queen and do a radio show about why porn is so bad. I think the story of American beer and what it became under the influence and decades-long after effects of Prohibition is part of the answer.

-T.C.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 13th, 2005 at 11:07 pm and is filed under pornography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.