A question came up about the taste of american beers after prohibition. For a given brewery, did a given brand taste the same after prohibition ended as before prohibition started? Were the specific yeasts preserved?
Thanks for any information that can be provided.
Probably varied greatly from beer to beer and company to company, depending especially if the brewery had stayed open through Prohibition, under the same ownership, brewing "near beer" cereal beverages. Near beer sales, IIRC, started out strong but dropped continually throughout the period but one would expect those brewmasters continued to maintain their standard yeast strains.
I'd imagine a number of breweries re-opening bought their new yeast from breweries in Canada or Europe or even US breweries (Schaefer, for example, claimed as late as the 1970's that they sold yeast to "over 70 breweries in the US and Canada").
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