> Given the price, Americans drank an absurdly, mind-bendingly large amount of booze.

I once skimmed Prohibition-era academic text that described US drinking culture of the pre-Prohibition period in detail. It was fairly disturbing, as you suggest—whiskey in serving sizes that would work better with beer, and things like that.

But even though Prohibition failed to stop people from drinking, it apparently _did_ disrupt the earlier drinking culture in many ways. So I would be careful about using pre-Prohibition behavior to make inferences about post-Prohibition behavior.

(I'd love to find that book again, but sadly the library which had it got rid of a substantial number of rarely-used older books at some point.)