National Beer Day.

 A glass of Mishap! Brewing Company's dark double IPA in a Seward Alaska Brewing Company glass. A Wyoming beer in an Alaskan glass, sort of a small scale Distributist brewing triumph on National Beer Day.

Today, as it turns out, is National Beer Day.

National Beer Day?

Yes, it's National Beer Day.  

According to Time magazine, this day came about  as it was the day when the first step out of Prohibition, the Cullen-Harrison Act, came into effect. As time notes, about that act, and the day.

National Beer Day’s origins go as far back as 1919, when Congress passed the Eighteenth Amendment, prohibiting the sale, transportation, and production of alcohol in the U.S. This marked the start of the Prohibition era, which made many Americans turn to creative ways to enjoy their illicit beverages.

But 14 years later, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office, Americans were in for a change when he signed into action the Cullen-Harrison Act, which once again made selling and consuming low-alcohol beverages like beer and wine legal in the U.S.

And so, the day is celebrated on April 7, the first day you could pour a glass of amber goodness into a glass, legally, for fourteen years.

The Volstead Act and the supporting Constitutional amendment, as noted, came in during 1919, so we're almost at the centennial of that.  That certainly has its lessons, not all of them obvious, but here on National Beer Day we might note that Prohibition was arguably a byproduct of World War One, although there'd been a strong movement in that direction for decades.  The war, however, pushed Prohibition over the top for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was that there was a strong fear that American troops would come back from the war exposed to all sorts of terrible things, such as death, violence, French women, and wine.  There wasn't much that could be done about death, violence and French women, but there was something that could be done about wine and everything alcoholic, so Prohibition got a bit boost.

Added to that, beer was associated, somewhat unfairly, with enemies of the Allies, most particularly the Germans, but also Irish nationalist. Everything German was really getting dumped on during the Great War, and only Irish resilience and the fact that the Irish were clearly fighting with the Allies even if some were fighting against the British kept that from occurring to them.  And the fact that the United States was going through a grain conservation mania also weighed in.  So, beer, along with every other form of alcohol, became a casualty of the war, although it was taking hits before.

But beer would be the first back, and nearly everywhere, as Prohibition started getting stepped back out following the election of Franklin Roosevelt.  Nonetheless, it was pretty wounded.  Piles of regional and local breweries died with Prohibition came in, their brews, and the jobs they'd provided to brew them, gone with the Volstead Act.  American beer, which didn't have the greatest reputation in the world anyhow, but which had developed some strong regional brews of quality, really took a pounding and when it came back out of Prohibition there was much less variety.  Indeed, American beer wouldn't be much to write about until the local micro brew boom of the 1980s, a good fifty years after it became legal to brew it once again.

Now, of course, the story is radically changed and the United States is the center of beer experimentation.  Weird brews take their place along side every variety of traditional European brews including a good many the average European has no doubt never tried.

So, here's to the revival of American beer. Better than it ever was.