For many decades now, the only beer you could buy in Kansas grocery and convenience stores was limited to 3.2 percent alcohol.
But on Monday, that 3.2 beer became a thing of the past.
Its a big step for the groceries and the state of Kansas, says Dennis Toney, an executive with Balls Food Stores. Weve all wanted this for quite some time.
Kansas is one of the last states to do away with this Depression-era alcohol, which looks likely to soon die out altogether.
To understand where 3.2 beer came from, you have to go back 86 years to 1933. Nine months before Prohibition was completely repealed, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Beer and Wine Revenue Act, fulfilling a campaign promise.
Because Prohibition was still officially the law, there had to be a limit on the amount of alcohol allowed in beer. Hearings were held and the political process worked out a standard that could gather the necessary votes 3.2 percent alcohol by weight.
The compromise ended up being 3.2 and it frankly, its an arbitrary number. Theres nothing magical about it, says Maureen Ogle, author of Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer.
Ogle says that after the federal government legalized all liquor, the 3.2 percent alcohol by weight standard took hold in lots of states as a middle course between allowing alcohol and not, a sort of temperance light.
I just call it the long shadow of prohibition, Ogle says.
Regulators set 3.2 beer apart from other drinks. An influential study in the 1930s labeled it a non-intoxicating beverage.
After Prohibition, states established a crazy quilt of alcohol regulations. Many, including Kansas, made special provisions for 3.2 beer. In some states, it was the only drink allowed. Other states made it easier to buy than stronger beer, wine, and spirits.
Sales of 3.2 were big about 40 years ago, in the 1970s, says Bart Watson, chief economist at the Brewers Association. This was fueled, in part, by teen consumption.
Thats a time when a lot of states had rules that differentiated consumption for 18 to 21-year-olds, Watson says.
In other words, 18-year-olds could legally drink, in many states, as long as they were drinking 3.2 beer. Younger kids found it easy to get, too.
American teen drinking peaked in the late 70s and early 80s. By the mid-1980s, the country adopted a uniform minimum drinking age, 21. Watson says that one by one, states scrapped special rules for 3.2 beer.
