The irony was that Prohibition torpedoed a century of temperance campaigning. Since the Civil War the consumption of spirits had declined as beer became more popular. Prohibi tion changed that, driving people away from beer and toward spirits, which carried a higher profit margin for bootleggers. Samuel Eliot Morison recalled that “college students who before Prohibition would have a keg of beer and sit around singing the ‘Dartmouth Stein Song’ and “Under the Anheuser Busch,’ now got drunk quickly on bathtub gin, and could manage no lyric more complicated than ‘How Dry Am I!’” Heywood Broun dubbed the Volstead Act “a bill to discourage the drinking of good beer in favor of indifferent gin.” Worse, there were dangerous grumblings. Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labor fumed that Prohibition was a class law directed against the beer of the workingman, since wealthy people had laid in supplies of wine before the ban and were the only ones who could afford to drink in speakeasies.Nothing's funnier than seeing stodgy busybodies have their campaigns backfire. One of the best things that could have ever happened in American history would have been if some saloonkeeper had plugged Carrie Nation right between her beady eyes.
4. Great Lakes Dortmunder Gold has a grainy dryness in addition to the big maltiness that characterizes all beers from this brewery, in Cleveland, Ohio. The Gold is one of the few lagers to model itself on the firm-bodied, minerally style of Dortmund, Germany. The brewery also has an amber red, yet maltier, Vienna-style lager, named Eliot Ness. There are bullet holes from his era in the brewery’s restaurant, formerly the Market Tavern.Both Great Lakes and its competitor Crooked River have several excellent brands that are highly recommended when visiting here.
The bullet holes are pre-Ness, who came here after Prohibition was over. The Volstead Act was basically ignored in Cleveland anyway, except for the fact that organized crime rather than legitimate business ran the alcohol trade.
-Eric
Dortmunder Gold is good stuff.