On Aug. 1, 1862, the Lincoln administration enacted a recently passed tax of $1 per 31-gallon barrel on “all beer, lager beer, ale, porter and other similar fermented liquors, by whatever name such liquors may be called.” It was the first national excise tax on beer, and it had perhaps the furthest-reaching effect on the drink during the Civil War, which ended 150 years ago this spring.
The war in mid-1862 was one of grinding attrition. The optimism both sides held at its start in April 1861 was long gone. The decisive Union victories of Vicksburg and Gettysburg were almost a year away, and the Emancipation Proclamation was months off. France wanted to recognize the Confederacy; Britain, the other great power of the day, sat on the sidelines. It wasn’t clear which side, the North or the South, would win.
Simply put, by August 1862, it looked like it was going to be a long war, and the U.S. needed money to pay for it. Enter the tax.
By 1865, the last year of the war, the federal government was able to tax 3,657,181 barrels and yet collect $3,734,928, totals much higher than those amassed in 1863 and 1864. Those numbers—taxable production and amount collected—would only rise, too, both cresting 10 million for the first time in 1879. In 1919, the last year before Prohibition, the tax was up to $6 a barrel and the government collected $117,503,895… CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL STORY AT ALL ABOUT BEER
