Prohibition and What the Brewers Did Instead

The Eighteenth Amendment took effect on January seventeenth, nineteen twenty, and Milwaukee's breweries, which had been producing millions of barrels of beer per year, were suddenly producing nothing they could legally sell. The question was how to survive thirteen years of Prohibition. The answers were creative.

Frederick Pabst's company pivoted to cheese. Pabst-ett Cheese, made in a converted portion of the brewery, sold more than eight million pounds during the Prohibition years. It was not good cheese by most accounts, but it kept the company alive. Pabst also produced near beer, a beverage with less than half of one percent alcohol that technically met the legal definition of non-intoxicating.

The Valentin Blatz Brewing Company produced malt syrup, sodas, and near beer. The malt syrup was sold legally as a baking ingredient. That it was primarily purchased by home brewers was widely understood and not widely prosecuted.

Schlitz renamed itself the Schlitz Beverage Company, changed beer to drink in its advertising wherever the original slogan appeared, and waited.

Miller, smaller and less capitalized than its rivals, produced a malt-based cereal beverage and survived through a combination of near beer and institutional patience.

All four of the major breweries reopened on the same day in April nineteen thirty-three, when the Cullen-Harrison Act, signed by President Franklin Roosevelt in March, took effect and legalized beer with a three-point-two percent alcohol content by weight. The industry came back to Milwaukee so quickly that within twenty years the city had recaptured its position as the dominant brewing center in the United States.

The thirteen years of Prohibition did not destroy the Milwaukee brewing industry. They demonstrated, at significant cost, that the industry's managers were capable of considerable ingenuity when the alternative was ruin.