There was also a strong sentiment to exempt hard cider, which had been extremely common in the US prior to prohibition. I wonder why it completely killed the cider industry, but the beer and wine industries came back strong.
Johnny Appleseed wasn’t planting apples to eat fresh, he was planting cider orchards. Hard cider, like beer, is safe to drink when your water is unclean.
Why is that so inexplicable, Ms twig?
I was wondering the same. There’s wine produced in every US state, and in most countries. SA has decent weather for wine. When I visited I had a lot of SA wine, and while none of it was memorably good, it was all perfectly nice to drink.
The “Word of Wisdom”, (where the LDS dietary restrictions started), doesn’t actually use the word “alcohol”. It mentions “wine” (which was okay in some circumstances) and “strong drinks” (which was only good for washing with). In one part it mentions barley being useful for “mild drinks”. Realistically - that was probably initially interpreted as “beer” (although, I guess it could just be barley water…), but over the years things evolved into a strict “no alcohol” thing.
Incidentally - it also doesn’t mention coffee or tea, but “hot drinks”. That’s evolved too, so that iced tea is out, but hot cocoa is fine.
Tobacco is mentioned by name as something not to consume, but that it is for “bruises and all sick cattle”. I’ve never heard of it being used for either of those things, but maybe it was a thing in the 1830s.
Let me see if I can find the newspaper clips I have about those damn Germans & their beer (even the women & children drink it!) – from my area of New York, about 100 years ago (well more than 100 years – it was pre-Prohibition…I think it was also pre-WWI)
okay, I didn’t find the piece, but I did find this story about milkshakes from 1888:
I started a thread on old newspaper clips, because some of my search results are amusing:
Cider industry is strong again in NY, but obviously not as big as beer. Of course, I live in a town with a lot of apple orchards, and it was only a few years back they got a license to make & sell their cider:
Yeah I don’t know what that’s about either. The climate in SA is much like Northern California and wine is a huge industry there. (And OMG it’s got to be one of the most beautiful places on earth). I had some wonderful wines there. And I don’t generally care much for wine. 
I spent some time in my high school years playing in the orchestra at a Southern Baptist megachurch.
The explanation given at that time for being anti-alcohol and anti-gambling was the risk of addiction: some people who partake will become addicted, and the effects of such addiction are sinful and/or self-damaging. You don’t partake because you don’t want to risk addiction…or if you know you aren’t at risk of such, you don’t partake so as not to tempt those who should not partake.
In terms of reconciling that to Biblical alcohol consumption: We have water treatment systems. Folks in the Bible didn’t. The rationalization is that back then, the risk of untreated water was worse than the downsides of having a bit of alcohol in your water. Now that we have treated water, we should all settle for nothing harder than sweet tea.
(Or at least that’s how it was explained to me.)
I’ve also heard people try and claim that Jesus was just drinking non-fermented grape juice, which is just completely ridiculous.
I’ve also heard that ‘wine’ in Biblical times was not as strong, in terms of alcohol content, as ‘wine’ is today.
That’s probably true, since in biblical times it was routine to water the wine. I think a lot of the wine probably didn’t taste very good, and it was expensive, and people mixed enough of it into the water to make the water safe.
Orthodox Jews, who are required to drink 4 fairly large glasses of wine during the Passover Seder, apparently argue over whether it’s permitted to water the wine today.
There was a memorable pit stop at a picturesque South African winery in season 2 of the Amazing Race when one team (the Gutsy Grannies) were so far behind, that the other teams ended up staying there 36 hours instead of 12 hours.
Contestants apparently enjoyed it too much and one of the members of the hippie team hooked up with the Boston boys team (helping them all the way to first place) and causing one of the most famous team disintegrations in race history, while the other hippie ended up really offending the married pastors with his colorful language.
I’d guess that the apple orchards were cut down and replaced with other things during the Great Depression. If a major use for apples was cider and cider was illegal, no need for as many trees. Orchards take a long time to get back to where they were and with other uses for the land, it wouldn’t make much sense to replant the orchards. The ingredients for beer are much easier to cultivate so faster time back to production. Also, the Italians had the Germans still running beer factories for them. The town I grew up in had a soda pop factory with guards armed with tommy guns so probably not making making soda.
I recall, I think from the Ken Burns documentary about Prohibition (I think that’s a thing, but fittingly I’m a little drunk at the moment so it’s also possible I’m misremembering) that Anheuser-Busch basically stayed in business by selling the ingredients to their beer, along with a recipe.
Like a package that contained the exact proportions of grain and hops that you needed to make beer and the warning “whatever you do, DON’T take this exact amount of grain and add 4 quarts of water and cook for two hours over low heat and then add the exact amount of hops and cook for 25 minutes more and then let sit for two weeks. A dangerous and illegal intoxicating brew will be the result.”
(Disclaimer, I don’t know if that’s actually how you make beer. But Anheuser-Busch did, and sold the correct recipe along with the ingredients in the correct proportion.)
Rather ingenious, actually.
Also, since you could drink wine for religious rituals, I think some wineries stayed in business by selling to “churches”… which miraculously increased dramatically during Prohibition. Probably “synagogues” too, as both were able to obtain wine legally.
If you’ve ever had South African wine, you’d understand. No disrespect to Nelson Mandela, but the stuff is positively wretched.
I’d rather drink Zima, and that’s saying something.
I’ve occasionally gotten South African wine at trader joes, not often but I didn’t find it any worse than the rest of their cheapish wines. Maybe I have no standards.
Hmm, I’ve had like 6 bottles of South African wine ever, and without a doubt and by a monstrous margin, they are the 6 worst wines I ever consumed.
I remember the first one I was on a date with this smoking hot South African guy and he was SO proud to serve me some wine from his home country and it was so awful it was really REALLY hard to not be rude about it.
Especially since he knew that I loved wine.
I’d say it’s just me, but on every trip through South Africa there was always undrunk South African wine that no one in the group wanted to actually drink after excitedly ordering it, ready to literally drink in the culture of the land.
Maybe the bartender pastor leading the trips and the South African guy I dated were just uniquely awful at selecting specifically South African wine, but not other types of wine???