Missoula’s Beer Back – 1933
Missoula Waiting For First Beer [1933]
While much of the rest of the nation celebrated the revival of beer at 12:01 o’clock this morning with watch parties and more-or-less mild celebrations, Missoula residents just wondered when they will be able to flow the foam from the top of mugs of legal brew.
Café, retail, wholesale and hotel licenses have been granted to Missoula concerns by the State Board of Equalization, but none of the dealers was able to say late Thursday night when the first bottle will be sold. The expectation among most of the dealers is that the first load to arrive will be from Spokane, the nearest operating brewery, but whether that will be today or Saturday is not known. Wholesalers acting as agents for Mid-West breweries expect beer by the first of the week.
On every corner where men stopped to talk Thursday, the talk was of beer, how soon it will be here and what it will cost. The cost question is another that dealers can not answer, they not having been quoted exact prices by sales representatives from breweries. Twenty cents for 12-ounce bottles is the price which many have estimated, but none was able to say positively. Draft beer will be somewhat later than the bottled beverage, and the cost of that is also unknown.
The above article appeared in The Missoulian on April 7, 1933.
https://www.newspapers.com/image/352115640/
An article in The Missoulian the following day, April 8, stated that Montana’s first beer finally arrived:
Billings, April 7. – (AP) – The first 3.2 beer reported received in Montana was put off a Northern Pacific train at Deer Lodge this evening – two cases to supply the city.
The beer, train expressmen said, was consigned from a Spokane brewery to a thirsty citizen of Deer Lodge.
https://www.newspapers.com/image/352115735/
The eighteenth Amendment, passed in 1919, prohibited the sale of intoxicating liquors.
Chronologically, Montana was the seventh state, out of 46 states, to endorse the eighteenth amendment.
The twenty-first Amendment, which repealed the eighteenth Amendment, was ratified in 1933.