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Comment by sparrish | Hacker News Reader

Honest question: how did this SF brewing company survive prohibition? If it really is 127 years old, it must have existed during prohibition. How was it not shut down then? I'm curious.

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Slightly less than 10% of US breweries surcived the 13 years of prohibition, mostly through a) being large companies that owned a lot of assets and real estate, and b) successfully pivoting into anything from ceramics production to non-alcoholic foods like ice cream/tea/coffee/juices to the sale of yeast and malt syrup that people could use to homebrew beer.

And prohibition had been a long time coming, some companies like Anheuser-Busch had been preparing for several decades.

According to their website: "Prohibition effectively shut Anchor down in 1920. There may have been a few “activities” during Prohibition and the era of bootlegging, but there is no record of Anchor Brewery doing anything—legal or illegal—during this time. After Prohibition ended in April 1933, owner Joe Kraus began brewing Anchor Steam Beer after a thirteen year hiatus. As luck would have it, the Brewery went up in smoke the following February. He re-opened Anchor in an old brick building with a new partner, Joe Allen, just a few blocks from where the historic Brewery is today."

https://www.anchorbrewing.com/about-us/the-anchor-story/

A lot of American brewers survived by switching to non-alcoholic beverages or selling the raw ingredients for home brewing and winemaking operations under the guise of 'baking ingredients' or the like. Some sold practically non-alcoholic 'near beer'/kvass-type malt drinks, but it wasn't especially popular.

The grape growers dehydrated grape juice and sold it in bricks as "instant juice", with instructions: "After dissolving the brick in a gallon of water, do not place the liquid in a jug away in the cupboard for twenty days, because then it would turn into wine."

https://grapecollective.com/articles/prohibitions-grape-bric...

Some p[eople I knew purchased a really huge victorian in the Castro some years ago - and in the bottom floor was an original speak-easy with full bar and pool table and booths etc...

I would assume that there were many of these speak-easys in SF during prohibition...

Sadly they immediately remodeled and took the speak-easy out.

> Sadly they immediately remodeled and took the speak-easy out.

Well sure, gotta get that basement unit... bar & pool table out, vinyl flooring & Ikea in!

Yes, that's a good thing. Constantly navel gazing at the past is a bad thing.

https://apnews.com/article/us-army-ukraine-russia-ammunition...

Enough of this nonsense. Those who remember history are doomed to relive it. We're going to build the future, man, and it's going to be better, and we'll remember our past in our museums. The world matters. The present matters.

> The obstacles the U.S. faces in ramping up production can be seen at the Scranton plant.

> The factory — built for the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad just after 1900, when the city was a rising coal and railroad powerhouse — has produced large-caliber ammunition for the military going back to the Korean War.

> But the buildings are on the National Historic Registry of Historic Places, limiting how the Army can alter the structures.

I went down this rabbit hole on National Beer [1] day this year.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Beer_Day_(United_Stat...

Some breweries pivoted to selling near-beer and other NA beverages or foods during Prohibition, or just closed for those years and restarted afterwards.

Yuengling famously sold ice cream during Prohibition, and apparently still makes it in small batches.

They started selling at scale 1 or 2 days after prohibition ended. This is logistically impossible if they were truly shut down during the entirety of prohibition.

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