TheBeerObserver

   Okay. I’ll admit it. This post is a bit premature. The fact of the matter is that by this time tomorrow, I’ll be in no condition to blog. By then, I hope to have drained several glasses in honor of an act of congress.

   The constitution of the United States is a lovely document. Its myriad amendments are all intriguing, and some are downright charming. It’s hard to imagine that this site – or the internet as a whole – would have been created without the protection of the Fabulous First. The rest of the Bill of Rights rocks my world as well. But tomorrow night’s festivities will celebrate the big Two-One.

   December 5th, 1933. The repeal of Prohibition. A happy day for lovers of lager, pilsner and stout.

   By any measure,  the Volstead Act, which  became law 13 years before, was misguided and ineffective. Across the land, speakeasies soon surpassed the number of pre-Prohibition watering holes. Consumption of alcohol almost certainly increased. Profits from illicit booze were a great catalyst for municipal corruption, and expedited the organization of crime.

   Other effects were more ambivalent. It was in the 1920’s that Jazz really emerged as popular art form. Rum-running is said to have bolstered the wealth and clout of the Kennedy family; as a Boston native, I can't say that’s necessarily a bad thing. The prohibition era also inspired some our greatest writers, including one Henry Louis Mencken.

  A noted critic, journalist, and gadfly-at-large, Mencken is underappreciated today. Yet it is safe to say that Hunter S. Thompson, Steven Colbert, and “The Simpsons” all owe him a significant stylistic debt. He pulled no punches in attacking the absurdity and puritanical hypocrisy of American life.

   During the First World War, rampant Teutonophobia was the order of the day. In Some U.S. Communities, it was illegal to speak German on a telephone; sauerkraut was rechristened “Liberty Cabbage”. Yet Mencken was quick to point out that the cradle of his ancestors also brought the world Goethe, Beethoven, and the reinheitsgebot. To be honest, I don’t know if he ever wrote a word about the Bavarian Purity Law. But the man sure loved to hoist a stein.

  He lived his whole life in Baltimore. When describing his childhood home, the combative tone of his prose gives way to something like affection. He rhapsodizes the drinking and dining traditions of Chesapeake Bay. One Sunday afternoon oyster roast, sponsored by an Elks lodge, is said to have featured some 200 waiters and 1000 kegs. Then there’s this bit of dewy-eyed nostalgia:

        It was the opinion of my father, as I have recorded, that all the Baltimore beers were poisonous, but he kept a supply of them In the house for visiting plumbers, tinners, cellar-inspectors,tax-assessors and so on, and for Class D social callers. I find by his bill file that he paid $1.20 for a case of twenty-four bottles. His own favorite Malt liquor was Anheuser-Busch, but he also made occasional experiments with the other brands that were beginning to find a national market: some of them survive to this day, but the most perished under Prohibition…

   Elsewhere, H.L. discusses his personal suffering in a dry country. With his publisher, the legendary Alfred Knopf, Mencken travels to Bethlehem, PA for a festival of Bach’s Choral music. There is no brew to be had. “This seemed strange and unfriendly, for it is well known to every serious musicologist that the divine music of old Johann Sebastian cannot be digested without the age of its natural solvent.”

   Eventually a local cabbie directs them to a clandestine pub. The proprietor is at first suspicious, but after Mencken produces the sheet music for the “Mass in B Minor”, they are treated to a meal of sandwiches and five immense “humpen”.

    Things did not work out as well in Cleveland. Covering the 1924 Republican National Convention, he is shocked to find that, despite the hordes of delegates and reporters, “A glass of malt liquor was as hard to come by…as an honest politician”.

    Desperate, he contacts a Detroit-based bootlegger, who agrees to send 10 cases across Lake Erie via motorboat. Sadly, the smugglers, overcome by heat, opt to drink the beer and ale themselves. “This was my worst adventure during Prohibition” writes the Sage of Baltimore, “and in many ways it remains the worst adventure of my whole life, though I have been shot at four times and my travels have taken me to Albania, Trans-Jordan, and Arkansas.”

   Even now, 75 years since repeal, the very notion can drive one to drink.