Today, Maine has one of the highest number of breweries per capita in the country: ironic, given the state’s history as the home of prohibition. 

Americans in the colonial era didn’t drink much beer, outside of home-brewed “small beer” meant for immediate consumption. Both spirits (particularly rum) and hard cider were far more popular than beer for the first half of the nineteenth century. Beer consumption began rising around mid-century. After the Civil War, it jumped dramatically. 

But Maine’s early commercial brewers were working under peculiar conditions. In 1851, the state passed the “Maine Law” (or, “An Act for the Suppression of Drinking Houses and Tippling Shops”), which prohibited the “manufacture, sale, and possession of alcohol with the intent of sale.” Portland native Neal Dow was its champion, and he would be elected the city’s mayor in the wake of the law’s passage. It was the first such law in the nation, laying the groundwork for national prohibition in 1920 and earning Dow the nickname, the “Father of Prohibition.” The law would be repealed in 1856, replaced by another that allowed limited alcohol sales. Over the following decades, new prohibitionary laws were variously created, enforced, and weakened, until prohibition was written into the state constitution in 1885. 

Many Mainers defied these laws, some brewing openly and advertising in city directories. Often, they were brewing low-alcohol small beer (1%-3%). By the end of the nineteenth century, most Maine brewers had been chased out of the business. It would be nearly a century before smaller-scale brewing re-emerged in the state. 

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