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Comment by senkora | Hacker News Reader

Prohibition also had the effect of largely killing off the small breweries started by various immigrant groups in the United States.

When it ended, the industry rapidly consolidated around the large-scale industrial breweries which have dominated the market ever since.

This is a big reason why the beer industry in America is weird. You have large mass-market brewers on the hand one, and small craft brewers making more creative beers on the other hand, but you don't have many medium-sized brewers making high-quality traditional beers.

It's pretty hard to compete with Europe in that segment.

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> Prohibition also had the effect of largely killing off the small breweries started by various immigrant groups in the United States

Same for wine production. Beringer, Mondavi...these were families who secured sacramental wine contracts from the Church.

If your theory is right, then countries without prohibition would have structural differences of brewers.

I don't think I've noticed much difference in Australia or New Zealand (admittedly I don't know the markets). As far as I know there's always been a few big brewery companies in both countries (and smaller ones have got bought out).

Booze is regulated unevenly from state to state, which is a weird aspect in America that could make it hard to grow depending on where you are in the country.

Outside of that though, I don't think prohibition has too much of the blame as consolidation is the natural conclusion under capitalism. Breweries that get to a certain level get bought out by multinational corporations. I was in Asheville, NC a few years ago. It was kinda funny to me that one mark of fancy restaurants was to boast about their pre-ABInBev Wicked Weed bottle lists (I'm more a fan of Burial Beer either way).

It’s a different time scale. The microbreweries of the 90s were an upstart.

In the 70s and early 80s, you probably had a half dozen SKUs account for 90% of volume. My grandfather ran a busy bar in Brooklyn and had like 4 beers on tap. The other thing was post prohibition ABC laws usually gave distributors a lot of power. They had exclusivity agreements and would stuff the channel or segment the market as they saw fit. Grandpa’s bar was Reingold and Schaeffer.

Microbrews went crazy in the 90s, and the big brewers bought and created brands to regain share. Then cheap capital led to M&A by bigger fish.

I had occasion to study the Whiskey Rebellion a few years ago, and I discovered the flipside of alcohol distribution.

Farmers love distilling grain alcohol. Because it can take their crops and make the product easy to transport. If you're trying to ship lots of corn, barley, rye, or potatoes, etc., overland, you're looking at a large volume and mass. It is cumbersome to load and unload. It spoils easily, and pests can make lots of problems in storage.

So [historically,] if you're a farmer in Kentucky or Western Pennsylvania and you grow plenty grain to feed your townspeople and livestock, and there's anything left over, it's only logical to distill it and ship it out to an urban market.

But on the market side, it's feeding into vices, so what's an honest farmer to do? Contract for torpedo juice?

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