Beer Goes to War

Abstract

In the Second World War, American brewers launched a massive public relations and advertising campaign to combat a resurgence of prohibitionism. This paper examines how brewers gained the stature of an essential wartime industry—a classification that gave them access to rationed goods denied other industries—despite dry protestations that beer wasted vital foodstuffs. It argues that brewers achieved such success by repoliticizing beer as an emblem of American national identity and linking their fortunes to other wartime food crusades. Brewers convinced military and government officials that brewers' yeast, a byproduct of brewing, provided a rich source of vitamin B complex that could enrich soldiers' rations and boost the productivity of factory workers. By the war's end, the once illicit associations of brewers' yeast with Prohibition-era homebrew had acquired entirely new patriotic associations with victory over fascism and freedom from want. A previously suspect commodity had gained new legitimacy.