The excerpt below is from the Toronto Sun article “Beer love affair began with Prohibition” by Antonella Artuso. The full article is available online.
Ontarians have had an all-consuming love affair with lager and long summer weekends.
Matthew Bellamy, an associate professor at Carleton University, said beer and the outdoor lifestyle of Canadians were first linked circa 1925, when it was pitched as a lighter booze alternative in the waning days of Prohibition.
“Remarkably, for most of our history, we were actually hard liquor drinkers. That was our alcoholic beverage of choice right up to Prohibition,” Bellamy said. “One traveller actually estimated that we were drinking 11 litres of whiskey per person – that’s every man, woman and child – in the 1850s.”
“And you just need to look at the old images of Sir John A. Macdonald who was always rolling around in ditches after getting hammered on the stuff,” he added.
To Prohibitionists, the three main types of alcohol – beer, wine and spirits – were all viewed equally as the “three poisons.”