The three late nineteenth century bottles shown below represent one of
the oldest pastimes in America. Until the late nineteenth century,
however, most American beers were locally produced ales, stouts, and
porters that were not bottled but sold in kegs to taverns. Modern lager
beer was first introduced by German immigrants in the 1840s, but it was
not until the 1870s that the expanding railway system, together with the
food preservation techniques developed by Louis Pasteur in 1870, made it
feasible to brew and bottle lager beer for a nationwide market.
[Illustration: Figure 21. Beer bottles. A. Pint champagne beer,
Lightning stopper, c. 1892-1895. Embossed in plate mold THE PALMETTO
BREWING CO. CHARLESTON S. C.; on back THIS BOTTLE NOT TO BE SOLD. B
and C. Export beer bottles, a type used after the 1870s. The tooled
crown finish dates bottle B between about 1892 and 1925.]
Lager beer was less alcoholic but more effervescent than earlier beers.
Increased bottling of lager and carbonated soft drinks spurred the
search for new bottle seals capable of withstanding more pressure than
the traditional cork, which was subject to leakage and had to be tied
down to prevent its popping out altogether. Two of the most successful
of the dozens of stoppers patented in the decades following 1870 were
Henry Putnam’s levered 1882 Lightning stopper (Fig. 21A), and William
Painter’s 1892 crown cap (Fig. 21B), the closure still used on most beer
bottles.
With these and other developments, production of bottled “export” lager
increased rapidly through the 1880s and 1890s. Keeping pace with the
growth of the beer industry, however, was the group that was to prove
its undoing: the American temperance movement. The temperance movement
became an organized lobbying force with the 1893 founding of the
Anti-Saloon League, and thereafter exerted increasing pressure on
Congress and the state legislatures. “Dry” agitation in South Carolina
led to the implementation from 1893 to 1907 of a statewide dispensary
system to control distribution of beer, wine, and spirits; by 1916,
South Carolina and 22 other states had prohibited all sale of
non-medicinal alcohol. National wartime legislation banned the
manufacture of distilled spirits in 1917 and beer and wine in 1918. The
Volstead Act of 1919 extended this ban until the eighteenth amendment
forbidding the production or sale of any beverage with more than .5%
alcohol could take effect in January 1920.
Prohibition completely changed the face of the American brewing industry
and almost completely destroyed the tradition of the small local brewer.
Many brewers tried to survive by selling soft drinks and “near beer,” a
lager with less than .5% alcohol. “Near beer,” however, could not stand
up to the competition of home brewers and bootleggers, and most
breweries either turned to the manufacture of other products or closed
down altogether. Two months after the sale of wine and beer was again
permitted in April, 1933, only 31 breweries had reopened. In 1940, seven
years after the lifting of all national restrictions on alcohol, beer
production finally reached its pre-Prohibition level, but the number of
breweries in operation was less than half the number in 1910.