Beer Essay Research Paper BeerHistorically hops yeast — страница 3

and quantity of beer products. By 1890 there were seventy-four breweries clustered in Philadelphia alone, seventy-seven in New York City, and thirty-eight in Brooklyn. This was not just an East Coast phenomenon either. Chicago had forty-one breweries, Cincinnati, twenty-four, Buffalo, twenty, and St. Louis, twenty-nine. Milwaukee was an important brewing center in the upper Midwest, and San Francisco, with twenty-six breweries, was the brewing capitol of the Pacific Coast. This explosion of breweries gave beer drinkers a wide variety of beers to choose from. On July 1, 1919 the 18th Amendment to the United States Constitution went into effect. Know as prohibition, the law forbade the manufacture or sale of any beverage with more than one-half percent alcohol. Throughout the days

of Prohibition, some breweries managed to stay in business selling soda water, ice cream, and malt beverages. Others took advantage of gangsters and corruptible police officials to keep production going. Many breweries survived prohibition by selling malt syrup, which works quite nicely for home brew. Flavor, taste, and appeal do matter, but with thousands of breweries shutting their doors, quantity, rather than quality, became what really mattered. When Prohibition was repealed by the 19th Amendment in 1932, the entire face of the brewing industry had forever changed. The beer can was introduced in 1935, America entered a new era of brewing. The can was lightweight, no deposit, no return container that could be shipped anywhere. Radio, and later television, meant national

advertising on a scale unheard of before. Beer became a national product instead of a local one. By 1940 there were over six hundred breweries nationwide. By 1980 that number had dwindled to forty. The beer renaissance got its start in 1978 in the United States Congress. That is when the lawmakers legalized beer making at home. When Prohibition ended in 1933, Congress intended to legalize the home brewing of both wine and beer. Homemade wine was legalized, but the stenographer’s omission left the words “and/or beer” out of the Federal register (1). Home brewing of beer was technically illegal forty-seven years after Prohibition ended. Jimmy Carter erased that glitch with the stroke of his pen in February 1979. Now it is legal for every adult in a household to brew one

hundred gallons of beer a year. Today the the American Homebrewers Association counts twenty-seven thousand members, and their numbers are growing drastically. Now the microbrewery industry is in its second decade, and the number of breweries in America has jumped from eighty to almost five hundred in less than 10 years. The microbreweries are doing great and are here to stay. In 1992 sales for microbreweries have increased more than 44 percent. In 1993 the story was quite the same when sales increased yet another 40 percent. Recently Becks beer has done some brewing experiments aboard the space shuttle to study zero gravity brewing. So you can bet that by the time we take our vacation to the moon we will have a beer waiting for us there. Beer has been through a lot in its over

8000 years on this earth, and by the looks of the beer market it may continue to be one of the oldest beverages in the world.