The ginger ale in this 1926 ad is just one of the products that Anheuser-Busch created to survive Prohibition.
Years earlier, co-founder Adolphus Busch had seen public support for prohibition growing. So in 1916, he began brewing Bevo, a near-beer with 0.5 percent alcohol, which permitted it to be sold in areas that had already gone dry. Sales were good when Prohibition started, but fell as Americans became more comfortable with buying bootleg, full-strength beer.
The company also produced two cold beverages: a sweetened, carbonated coffee called Kaffo, and a carbonated tea, named Buschtee. (The company advertisement suggested using Kaffo as an ice cream topping.) Other products include a camper body that would fit on top of a Model T, an amphibious car, and police vans.
Other brewers survived by producing ceramics and porcelain (Coors), malted milk and soft drinks (Miller), ice cream (Yuengling), and cheese (Pabst).
This article is featured in the September/October 2026 issue of The Saturday Evening Post.
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