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^{Robert Hubner}

Here in Washington, our beer is different. Because of the proximity of barley for malting and fresh hops in Yakima, regional brewers can make hoppier, more robust beer, a far cry from most of the post-prohibition lagers that have dominated the beerscape.

In the time before temperance, breweries spilled across the Northwest. Every little town had a brew hall--Aberdeen, Ellensburg, Fairhaven, Twisp. The City Brewery in Walla Walla was for nearly 30 years run by a widow who lived on-site. And Steilacoom had the first in the territory, built near the sawmill by Nicholas Denlin in 1854.

A great grandfather of James Bockemuehl's '68 opened a brewery with his brother near Fort Spokane in 1887. They did a brisk business selling lager to the soldiers stationed at the fort four miles up the road. They made such frequent trips to deliver beer, their horse could do it on his own, says Bockemuehl. "My grandfather was born in 1880, and he sort of grew up at the brewery," he says. "He had these great stories about working there and about riding the stagecoach from there to Hartline, paying for the trip with six bottles of beer."

Even little Uniontown, a German farming community south of Pullman, had Jacobs Brothers. A popular center for the townsfolk, the little brick brewery was home to the local Fourth of July celebrations, according to historians Gary and Gloria Meier, who wrote Brewed in the Pacific Northwest. Brewer Peter Jacobs would catch, cook, and serve up for free the local chickens that had fattened themselves on his leftover mash over the previous months.

These beer halls were havens from a difficult life on the frontier. There weren't many places a man could go to socialize and relax. Women, at least those with a proper upbringing, were not included.

The halls were homes to lively discourse, clubs every man could join, and he often attended in his work clothes, still dirty from his job. "The saloon was a place where a man informed himself about the social and political matters of the day," says historian Norman Clark in his 1965 book about Washington's prohibition. In these brew halls, over lagers, pilsners, porters, and cream ales, workers forged political alliances, found jobs, and formed unions. Fed by growing populations and by demand boosted by the railroad and the Alaska gold rush, the Northwest was home to a beer boom.

Most of the old brew makers were trained German braumeister, some with very familiar names, like Henry Weinhard, who came to Portland in 1856. In the late 1800s, they were drawn to the American West, where they could ply their trade among thirsty loggers and pioneers. Weinhard's Portland brewery was soon followed by Andrew Heimrich's Seattle Bay View Brewing Company, where Rainier's Steam Beer was first made. At the same time, Leopold Schmidt liked the artesian water in Tumwater and opened what years later became the Olympia Brewing Company.

And then suddenly, the breweries and beer halls disappeared.

On December 31, 1915, Washington enacted its state prohibition law, a good four years before most everyone else. Organizations like the Women's Christian Temperance Union and the International Order of Good Templars enlisted churchgoers and tapped into the polarizing tensions that came from rapid population growth, immigration, and urbanization. They argued that many of society's ills could be traced to drunkenness and vice stemming from alcohol use, particularly in the cities.

As the nation followed suit, the move to Prohibition drove thousands of saloons and small breweries out of business. Several of the bigger breweries were able to survive by producing other products. Olympia's parent company, for example, made sparkling apple juice. But the small-town breweries disappeared, most believed forever.

By the end of the 1920s, public sentiment turned against Prohibition. It was clear that the law hadn't reduced the social ills of poverty, crime, and mental illness. In fact, it had created a black market for alcohol and benefited organized crime. The repeal succeeded in 1933, but the beer culture that returned was only a shadow of what it had been in the early days. The larger breweries started up again, but they changed their products to meet a wider taste. The local beer halls had been devastated. Instead, big plants were bottling lagers and pilsners, golden-colored mass-market beers that were believed to have a wide appeal.

As beer sales expanded, product selection narrowed. The big beer companies started consolidating. In just the past few years, even the big names in the Northwest, Olympia and Rainier, have been bought up and closed down. Today most of the beer in America is produced by just three companies: Anheuser Busch/Budweiser, Miller, and Coors. In 2005 these three accounted for nearly 80 percent of all beer sold in the United States. The same fate befell Europe, except that the diverse legacies lost there were centuries old, not just decades.

Caught up in all this change, the hops growers in Washington could well have gone the way of the saloons. Instead, thanks to a series of bad harvests in Europe during World War I that increased international demand for American hops, Washington doubled its hop acreage between 1920 and 1930. So when Prohibition ended, the hops vines were ready.

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