BEER BOTTLES
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.
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. 21]A), and William Painter’s 1892 crown cap ([Fig. 21]B), 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.