Counting Down to April 7, the Anniversary of the Return of Legal Beer

It was really happening!

On March 26th and 27th, 1933, breweries in Milwaukee began bottling beer. The folks at Blatz cranked up the bottling line on the evening of the 26th, running a shift through the night to get the work finished. Pabst flipped the switch on its line at noon on the 27th.

It's hard to imagine what roused the most interest: the newspaper report about all those bottles of beer -- or the photograph that accompanied the article. It showed several men tending the bottling equipment at Blatz.

Men working. Collecting paychecks. Earning money to buy food and clothes for their families.

In the end, that's probably what mattered most to Americans during that grim spring of 1933, when a third of adults were out of work.

Source: "Bottled Beer Awaits Signal," Milwaukee Sentinel, March 27, 1933, p. 9.