Forty Days and Forty Nights

By Dick Cantwell

I didn’t actually debate in high school. I was more a speech kind of guy--original oratory was my métier—but I did play chess with some of the debate people. That’s probably providing too much personal information, but I was always intrigued by the idea that in debate you could find yourself arguing an unpopular side of an issue, even at times the side of an issue at odds with your own inclinations and opinions. Lawyers and politicians are familiar with this kind of dichotomy, of course, but with the addition of some social skills that’s who debaters often turn out to be.

My thesis for today runs along the lines that contrary to what we’ve been conditioned to believe, prohibition was the best thing that could have happened for us, down the line, in the craft segment of the brewing industry. Oh sure, it smacks of abhorrent government intervention and fostered a system of organized crime bigger, as Hymen Roth says in The Godfather, part II , than U.S. Steel, but a good debater isn’t about to dwell on aspects that undercut his or her argument. The fact is that prohibition wiped the slate all but clean, reducing brewing in this country, once it returned to legality, to a scant several dozen players initially, winnowed down by the late seventies into a mere handful of battle-weary hangers-on. Of course the seventies weren’t a great time for U.S. Steel, either. This was a case where government intervention was actually good—for us, anyway—bringing things in the brewing industry to such a pass that there was truly nowhere to go but up, or to Europe. Most of us of course did both, and somewhere in there as homebrewing was somehow capriciously made legal, we learned enough to be able to brew beer that at first at least had more color than what was commonly commercially available.

Prohibition was forty days and forty nights of rain and abnegation, a deluge of cynicism and wishful thinking on the parts of legislators, regulators and T-men, horrendous to anticipate and endure. But when the sun came out and the ark came to rest and the doors were thrown open, disgorging mother and daughter cells of two basic yeasts, a scant handful of raw barley and a single female Cluster hop rhizome, we were all set. The rest, as they say, is revised history. Noah got drunk, as I recall, but I’m fairly sure that was later.

There are places these days, of course, that are all about prohibition. In addition to having a lot of antediluvian laws on the books where alcohol is concerned, the state of Kansas is all hung up on this flap about evolution. I can’t help thinking that given these two staunchly held bodies of denial, a little fancy jurisprudential footwork might have them at odds with each other. Here’s where I’m going with this: I haven’t myself seen any reference to beer, or perhaps the simple yeast cell, as being evidence of intelligent design, but I put it to you in the craft segment, etc., etc., etc., if the arguments could somehow be linked, we might be looking at the legalization of extra-sacramental drinking in certain dry counties and municipalities or at the very least the teaching of fermentation in the public schools. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, after all, especially where doctrine is concerned, and putting foes at each others’ throats is at least a good spectator sport.

Do I favor a return to prohibition?, my debating opponent might ask. And of course the answer is no. We had a little run-in with it here in Washington state several years back when a cult of legislators introduced a bill that would have criminalized driving with a blood alcohol level of .02%, the effect, pretty much, of one beer. Passage into law would undoubtedly have caused such joy in repressive circles that John Ashcroft might even have danced. It didn’t go anywhere in the end, but for such a thing to even come up for discussion, effectively dividing the population into people who don’t drink at all and people who do, was a bit too East German for my taste.

Prohibition can have some unfortunate ripple effects as well. We in Washington are now a few months into a pretty extreme ban on smoking in public spaces (unless it’s been overturned since I wrote this). Without even debating that issue, I’m sure it won’t take long for inevitably declining tobacco sales—and more importantly, the resultant tax revenues—to cause legislators to come calling once more looking to compensate for shortfalls with alcoholic beverage-related tax increases.

Perhaps it’s the disarming simplicity, the classic slapstick-y tenor of the Volstead Act that appeals to me, the introduction of a whole slew of comic figures to the American mythos—the hillbilly, the revenuer, the gangster and the goon at the speakeasy peephole, all of whom now stand alongside Paul Bunyan, the Yankee peddler and the gunslinger. It’s kind of cute, really, that such a thing ever happened, now that we are separated from it by seventy-odd years. And while we occupy a lower rung in the popular-cultural pantheon, the ludicrously bearded and tattooed craft brewer has at least offered un updated alternative to the potbellied and ludicrously mustachioed beer baron of pre-prohibition brewing.