Prohibition played a major role in the standardization of bad beer in this country. I am just beginning research on a book length project on beer and local breweries in America and I understand that up until Prohibition, local breweries around the nation made a wide variety of sometimes very high quality beer. I hear the original recipe for Coors produces a quite delicious beer, though I have not had it. But after years of not drinking beer, the public had largely lost its taste for complex beers by 1933 and in order to survive, the breweries who managed to reopen after fourteen years found it in their interests to produce weak lagers that appealed to wider audience. I need to research this phenomenon in significantly more detail, but if we have the Volstead Act to blame for Miller Lite and Keystone, I am going to be even more full of rage than I already am.
Have a beer, celebrate freedom.
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