The eve of Legal Beer Day! Or 3.2 Day…or New Beer’s Eve as Bob notes in this comment.

(I kind of like "Legal Beer Day" for the 7th, and maybe "New Beer’s Eve" for the 6th…)

Anyway, some more tidbits I kind of like from the Anheuser-Busch stuff. First, I like this photo of St. Louis brewery workers loading up the trucks:

I guess I like the sense of "imminent to midnight" feel this seems to convey… loading up the trucks to be ready to roll out at 12:01 a.m. on the 7th.

Similarly, another picture:

The caption for this one reads, "A crowd estimated at 25,000 gathered at Anheuser-Busch’s Bevo bottling plant before midnight on April 6 to be among the first St. Louisans to taste post-Prohibition Budweiser." Sounds like a crazy Saturday at the Oregon Brewers Festival. Interesting on how A-B wasted no time in ditching their Bevo drink for the real deal—I imagine this sentiment was shared all over.

Speaking of Bevo, I’ve ferreted out some more Prohibition-era products A-B was producing. Aside from the Bevo and malt syrup and ginger ale and such, there were:

• Buschtee and Kaffo: soft drinks (introduced 1920, withdrawn ’21)
• Extra Dry Ginger Ale
• Old Devon Root Beer
• Grape Bouquet (?)
• Corn sugar, corn oil, corn syrup
• Carcho: chocolate beverage
• Other drinks: Malt Nutrine, Ino, Fermo, Windsor

Interestingly, by 1926 their ice cream sales topped 1 million gallons per year—though I don’t know what a comparable ice cream production/sales figure for other companies would be.

Tomorrow: Drink a beer for Legal Beer Day!