The Cullen–Harrison Act Brings Legal Beer Back

On April 7, 1933, the Cullen–Harrison Act took effect in the United States, permitting the manufacture and sale of beer and light wine containing no more than 3.2 percent alcohol by weight, approximately 4 percent by volume. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had signed the measure on March 22. The federal law allowed legal beer to return wherever state law permitted it, while states retained the power to continue prohibiting alcohol. The Act did not end National Prohibition or repeal the Eighteenth Amendment. Instead, Congress reclassified low-alcohol beer and wine as nonintoxicating under federal law, creating the first major breach in the Volstead Act’s prohibition regime. Breweries prepared rapidly for the effective date, and legal beer returned more than seven months before ratification of the Twenty-first Amendment ended National Prohibition completely.