I. Introduction
The equity financing market, which had boomed during the 1920s, came to a virtual halt during the first three years of the Great Depression. The Commercial and Financial Chronicle, which reported on new capital flotations each month, noted in early 1932 that “very few issues are being brought out [due to the] loss of confidence in security markets.”Footnote 1 The market might have remained stagnant far longer had it not been for new political developments related to alcohol. Beginning in the summer of 1932, after the Democratic Party platform explicitly called for Prohibition reform, speculators began placing bets that National Prohibition (1920–1933) was nearing an end. Hoping to participate in legal alcohol's pending return, investors poured money into new and seasoned stock issues of firms tied to the industry.
Between July 1932 and October 1934, the Commercial and Financial Chronicle reported 215 new equity flotations, and more than three-quarters of those stock issuances came from companies with some tie to alcohol's return, including breweries, distilleries, wineries, cooperages, alcohol distributors, and malt producers. In dollar terms, more than half of the roughly $202 million in total stock issuances reported across those 28 months originated with alcohol-related companies.Footnote 2
Taylor et al. (Reference Taylor, Wright and Adamu Bukari2026) document the important role that new equity financing played in the U.S. brewing industry's rapid return after Prohibition. They show that around 20% of all breweries in operation in 1933 held a new stock offering. Most were initial public offerings (IPOs), together with some direct public offerings and a few seasoned offerings from breweries that were already publicly traded. The proceeds funded more than a quarter of the $250 million spent on new brewery construction and equipment, delivery trucks, barrels, and raw materials.
This paper extends the post-Prohibition equity financing analysis to other alcohol-related sectors, especially distilleries. At least 37 distilleries offered shares to the public between May 1933 and October 1934, involving $30.3 million.Footnote 3 As with breweries, the monies raised were employed to rehabilitate long-idle sites, to purchase new equipment, or to acquire the assets of defunct brands.
Brewery issues outnumbered those of distilleries, but the average distillery issuance of $818,000 was around 55% larger than the average brewery one ($528,000). Moreover, far fewer distilleries than breweries operated in the immediate post-Prohibition era. By July 1935, over a year and a half after Repeal, 79 whiskey distilleries operated compared with approximately 700 breweries. Thus, in terms of the share of an industry's firms employing it, equity financing appears to have been more important to distillers than to brewers.
Section II describes the effects of Prohibition on distilleries, including industrial and medicinal producers. Sections III and IV show how expected Repeal induced investment, including physical plant improvements, funded through new and seasoned issues of shares.Footnote 4 Section V shows that wineries, cooperages, maltsters, and distributors also sometimes funded expansion or renewal by selling shares. Section VI concludes that equity financing played a hitherto little appreciated role in the rapid post-Repeal alcohol industry rebound.
II. Effects of prohibition on distilleries
a. Industrial structure and output before and during prohibition
Alcohol prohibition spread slowly across the United States over many decades via state and local laws (Poelmans et al., Reference Poelmans, Dove, Taylor and Dighe2022). By 1910, 68% of the population, living on over 95% of the nation's landmass, resided in “dry” jurisdictions with some restrictions on alcohol manufacture or sales, though only about 15% lived in “bone dry” areas where all forms of local alcohol production and distribution were illegal (Hacker, Reference Hacker1932, p. 664; Higgins, Reference Higgins1946, p. 54). The national prohibition movement gained momentum during World War I and Congress approved the 18th Amendment in December 1917. The states ratified the Amendment in January 1919, and one year later the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors, which the Volstead Act of October 1919 subsequently defined as anything exceeding 0.5% alcohol, was prohibited.
In June 1914, the Annual Report of the Commissioner of Internal Revenue (1914, p. 114) counted 352 operational grain distilleries, nearly half of them (170) in Kentucky and primarily producing whiskey. Twenty-three additional distilleries employed molasses in the production of rum and gin, and 368 fruit distilleries, around half located in California, made brandy. Total production of fruit brandy amounted to only 7.3 million gallons, however, spirits from materials other than fruit stood at 175 million gallons (p. 122).
The Lever Food Control Act of 1917 shut down beverage-alcohol-producing distilleries, putatively because the nation's European allies needed grain and molasses. Passed on August 10, the act gave distilleries 30 days before the production of spirits for beverage purposes had to cease. Most distilleries responded by operating at full capacity through the deadline because prices were expected to jump significantly as the nation's whisky supply diminished.Footnote 5 Distilleries continued to produce alcohol for industrial uses. In the two decades prior to Prohibition, U.S. distilleries had annually produced around 100 million gallons of industrial alcohol, which was subject to distinct taxes and regulations. Denatured alcohol was used in solvents and cleaning fluids and constituted a key ingredient in detergents, perfumes, and, most importantly during World War I, explosives.
In 1917, U.S. distilleries produced a record high 286 million gallons of spirits.Footnote 6 Around 58 million gallons was “straight” whisky, which was placed into distillery bonded warehouses under government supervision to age, generally for four to eight years, after which the distiller paid the excise tax and the government released the whisky for sale. U.S. distilleries that year also produced around 3 million gallons of rum, 6 million gallons of gin, and 8 million gallons of brandy. The remaining 211 million gallons were neutral grain spirits, of which in 1917 around 115 million gallons were “rectified,” or in other words brought more quickly to market by adding colors and flavors or blended with straight whisky. The remainder of the neutral spirits were denatured for industrial use.
Although denatured industrial alcohol generally accounted for around one-third of spirits production in the lead-up to Prohibition, only a relatively few large distilleries made it, because profitable production required large economies of scale as well as separate buildings and dedicated bonded warehouses. As a result, rather than switch to producing industrial alcohol, most beverage distilleries ceased production in late 1917 and remained shuttered throughout Prohibition. U.S. Prohibition Commissioner Roy A. Haynes noted in 1923 that around 35 entities actively produced industrial alcohol, several of them breweries that captured the alcohol removed when beer was dealcoholized for legal consumption. His account suggests that approximately 25 distilleries were actively producing industrial alcohol in 1923, down from the more than 700 distilleries in operation in 1914.Footnote 7
Most of the nation's distilleries remained physically standing at the end of Prohibition. Some decayed idly while others were converted to alternative uses. The Highspire Distillery of Highspire, Pennsylvania, which traced its roots to 1823, leased its main distillery building to a knitting company that manufactured hosiery there throughout Prohibition, while other buildings were leased for storage. Most of its whisky stock had been legally sold to buyers in Canada and Cuba just before Prohibition took effect.Footnote 8 Lexington, Kentucky's Tarr Distillery was purchased by a tobacco company and converted into a redrying plant,Footnote 9 and the Old Rock Distillery of Galena, Kansas, was sold in January 1920 to owners who converted it into a zinc oxide facility producing 10,000 pounds per day by that August.Footnote 10 Such stories were not unusual. A June 1922 report by Judson Welliver, assistant secretary to President Warren Harding, found that a large proportion of breweries, distilleries, and liquor warehouses had been converted into profitable ice factories, storage warehouses, meat packing plants, ice cream factories, soft drink producers, and other manufacturing concerns.Footnote 11
Not all distillery facilities, however, survived intact. The T.B. Ripy Distillery of Tyrone, Kentucky, one of the largest mash-tub distilleries in the country, was razed in 1921, and its warehouse and bottling houses were torn down in February 1923.Footnote 12 The Bond Brothers Distillery of Anderson County, Kentucky, was flattened a few months later.Footnote 13 In June 1926, the 27-building A. McGinnis Company distillery, appraised at $250,000, was sold to scrap iron dealers for $50,000.Footnote 14 A 1927 article in the Louisville Courier-Journal noted that many of Kentucky's historic rural distilleries had “fallen into decay or become ramshackle structures … and would hardly be worth the salvage in wrecking them.”Footnote 15
b. Medicinal spirits
The Volstead Act permitted states, at their discretion, to allow the sale of whisky by medical prescription, and 25 states formally did so. During the 1924 fiscal year, 57,597 physicians acquired government permits to prescribe liquor. Although prescriptions were federally limited to no more than one pint per person every 10 days, a total of 11,268,496 prescriptions were filled that year, legally permitting the sale of 1,347,573 gallons of whisky along with smaller quantities of brandy, gin, and rum.Footnote 16
The potable spirits used to fill those prescriptions were drawn from pre-Prohibition stocks sitting in government-supervised warehouses, but some entrepreneurs saw the medicinal liquor market as a potentially lucrative long-term business opportunity. National Distillers formed in the spring of 1924 to purchase the rights to the whiskey that smaller distilleries had sitting in bonded warehouses. Sellers with little hope that Prohibition would end welcomed the opportunity to liquidate their locked-up inventory (Browning, Reference Browning2022, p. 12). Also incorporated in 1924, Schenley Distillers began purchasing surplus liquor, vacant distilleries, and defunct brands, placing the company in an excellent position when Prohibition ended. By 1935, Schenley comprised what had previously been 30 independent distilleries and had increased its productive capacity from 3.5 to 20 million gallons per year (Rosenbloom, Reference Rosenbloom1935, p. 48).
By the summer of 1929, the stock of whisky on hand was just under 10 million gallons. As withdrawals of whisky for medicinal purposes held steady at around 1.6 million gallons per year, the nation's inventory was on track to be depleted within six years. Because straight whisky must be aged at least four years, the government agreed to grant permits to distilleries to produce up to 2 million gallons of spirits, mostly whisky, per year.Footnote 17 The six permit recipients were American Medicinal Spirits Company (which became a subsidiary of National Distillers), Arthur Phillip Stitzel Distillery, Brown-Forman, Frankfort Distilleries, Glenmore Distillers, and Schenley Distillers. Kentucky's Brown-Forman, for example, received a permit to begin distilling medicinal whisky under federal supervision on October 17, 1929, and used its allocation to produce Old Forester, Early Times, Old Tucker, and Blue Bonnet, well-known brands the company had made prior to Prohibition.
Aside from the post-1929 output of this small handful of distilleries, no other beverage spirits were legally produced in the United States during Prohibition. Illegal production, in contrast, flourished. Home brewing of beer made economic sense for many households, supporting lawful enterprises that supplied equipment and inputs (Jackson, Reference Jackson1978, p. 269). Wine saw a large increase in illegal home production, driven in part by heavy demand from Italian-American households and the unregulated trade in wine grapes and raisin cakes suitable for home fermentation (Landolfi, Reference Landolfi2022, p. 166). The winemaking accessory business also thrived (Kassens, Reference Kassens2019, pp. 56–67). Small-scale producers distilled illicit spirits such as moonshine but faced competition from smuggled imports and some industrial alcohol that chemists restored to potability by reversing the denaturing process and adding flavorings for retail sale in speakeasies and restaurants that flouted the law (Hacker, Reference Hacker1932, pp. 666–67; Kassens, Reference Kassens2019, pp. 109–12; Jackson, Reference Jackson1978, p. 268).
III. Return of the distilleries
The November 1932 election proved a landslide for the wet cause. Franklin D. Roosevelt soundly defeated the dry incumbent Herbert Hoover, and the Democratic Party made large gains in both the House and the Senate. Because Prohibition reform had been a major, and winning, campaign issue, the election results strongly signaled imminent reform. During the four-month interregnum, Congress passed the 21st Amendment, which repealed the 18th, and sent it to the states for ratification. Because a constitutional amendment requires the approval of three-quarters of the states, however, major doubts about the outcome persisted.
Breweries, though, enjoyed a shortcut. The Volstead Act defined “intoxicating liquors” as anything above 0.5% alcohol. On March 13, 1933, nine days after taking office, Roosevelt asked Congress to amend the Volstead Act's intoxicating threshold to allow legal beer, and nine days later he signed the “beer bill” into law. After a 15-day waiting period, beer up to 3.2% alcohol by weight (4% by volume) was declared non-intoxicating and hence legal to manufacture and sell. On April 7, 133 breweries were licensed to sell 3.2 beer. Most had been producing dealcoholized beer during Prohibition, and in anticipation of legalization, many had begun holding off on the dealcoholizing process after the 1932 election. Around 50 breweries per month resumed operations throughout 1933, so that more than 600 were selling by Christmas (Taylor et al., Reference Taylor, Poelmans and Hayne2024).
Distilleries began 1933 with cautious optimism about Repeal, but the outcome remained uncertain and they were accordingly less likely to take the anticipatory actions many breweries did. On April 10, Michigan became the first state to ratify the 21st Amendment. By July 1, eight of the necessary 36 states had ratified and Repeal seemed increasingly likely. That summer many distilleries began gearing up to produce beverage-grade spirits. On July 22, 1933, Brown-Forman announced plans to overhaul its idle White Mills distillery plant with a new fermenting house, a drying house, grain elevators, and a new cistern room.Footnote 18 The renovations, completed by November, just in time for Repeal on December 5, cost $300,000 (around $8 million in 2026 dollars), and the company's treasurer declared the plant the most modern in the country. The first run, after aging in charred barrels for four years, became Early Times whisky.Footnote 19
In October 1933, Penn York Distilleries, Inc. of York County, Pennsylvania likewise began to prepare, with surveyors, engineers, water testing, and site work underway “so that they may be ready to go as if and when repeal becomes a fact.”Footnote 20 All such preparations cost money, however, and capital was difficult to come by due to the numerous bank failures and bond defaults over the previous four years. Distillery owners, like most Americans, had seen their balance sheets stretched thin, and most firms, especially newer or riskier ones, faced large borrowing hurdles because U.S. bond markets and banks remained heavily impaired (Bernanke, Reference Bernanke19831983).
IV. Financing the return of legal spirits through stock issuances
Taylor et al. (Reference Taylor, Wright and Adamu Bukari2026) document the important role that public equity financing played in reviving the U.S. brewing industry after Prohibition. At least 127 breweries, one-fifth of all breweries operating in 1933, issued over $66 million in new stock (around $1.7 billion in 2026 dollars) and spent the funds rehabilitating idle breweries and purchasing new equipment, delivery trucks, barrels, and raw materials.
The U.S. distilling industry likewise turned to equity financing to fund its return. The monthly “new capital flotations” section of the Commercial and Financial Chronicle reported 32 distillery stock issuances between May 1933 and October 1934, totaling around $29 million (around $740 million in 2026 dollars). Following Taylor et al. (Reference Taylor, Wright and Adamu Bukari2026), we also searched historical newspapers for distillery offerings that the Chronicle editors did not catch, finding evidence of at least five additional distillery stock offerings worth another $1.3 million. Table 1 lists the identified 37 distillery stock issuances across those 18 months, reporting the company, the number of shares offered, and the amount involved in each offering.
Distillery stock issuances, May 1933 to October 1934
Table 1 Long description
Rows list distillery stock issuances by month and company, with columns for Shares Offered and Amount Involved, grouped by entries labeled, Via Commercial and Financial Chronicle, and, Via Newspaper Search. The total at the bottom is 11,976,889 shares and $30,276,942. Under, Via Commercial and Financial Chronicle, entries run from May 33 through Oct 34, starting with National Distillers Products Corp., 67,591 shares and $1,689,775 in May 33. The largest Shares Offered in this section is Distillers and Brewers Corp. in Dec 33 with 1,500,000 shares and $3,450,000; another large entry is Walker Distillers and Brewers in Jan 34 with 1,241,396 shares and $2,482,792. Nov 33 contains six issuances, including Cummins Distilleries Corp., 800,000 shares and $2,000,000, and Wright and Taylor Distilling Corp., 700,000 shares and $875,000. Dec 33 contains seven issuances in this section, including Brown Forman Distillery Co., 35,000 shares and $551,250, and Rock River Distillery, 329,450 shares and $411,813. Under, Via Newspaper Search, five additional issuances appear: Irish Hills Distilleries, Inc. in Dec 33 with 125,000 shares and $125,000; Old Lewis Hunter Distillery Co. in Feb 34 with 50,000 shares and $350,000; Arrow Distilleries, Inc. in Apr 34 with 76,000 shares and $76,000; Blair Distilling Co. in Jul 34 with 111,000 shares and $111,000; and McCulloch′s Green River Whiskeys Inc. in Oct 34 with 300,000 shares and $600,000.
The first 32 issuances were reported in the “New Capital Flotations in the United States” section of the Commercial and Financial Chronicle, which appeared in the first (occasionally second) issue of each month and covered the prior month. The final five issuances were identified through a systematic search of historical newspapers.
The first distillery issuance was announced on April 29, 1933, just three weeks after the return of legal beer. With enthusiasm for full repeal growing, National Distillers Products Corp. had seen its stock price soar to $32 a share by late April, double its January level. The company announced a seasoned offering of 67,591 new shares at $25 each, with 27,591 offered to current shareholders, who could buy one additional share for every 10 shares held, while the other 40,000 were sold to Owens-Illinois Glass, a Toledo, Ohio company booming due to increased demand for beer bottles. The $1,689,775 raised was earmarked for expansion as the company ramped up in anticipation of Repeal.Footnote 21 A few weeks later, National Distillers purchased the historic Overholt Distillery in Broad Ford, Pennsylvania, another Pennsylvania distillery in Large, and 31,000 barrels of Overholt rye whisky that had sat in bond since before Prohibition.Footnote 22 By late June, shares of National Distillers traded at $102, six times its 1933 low. The company later announced a “whisky dividend,” payable in warehouse receipts entitling the holder of every five shares to one case of whisky “when and if” Repeal arrived, as it did on December 5.Footnote 23
Anticipating repeal, industrial alcohol producer American Commercial Alcohol Corp. decided in spring 1933 to diversify into beverage alcohol. To finance the speculation, on June 7 it offered shareholders an option to buy one newly issued share at $20 for every five shares held, an issuance of just under 41,000 new shares that raised around $820,000.Footnote 24 In October 1933, the company spent $500,000 to double the capacity of its Pekin, Illinois distillery with the intention of producing whiskey and gin, while its plants in New Orleans, Philadelphia, and California, continued to make industrial alcohol.Footnote 25 In January 1934, the company announced that the newly equipped Illinois plant would blend, rectify, and bottle liquor brands of two Canadian companies, Pioneer Distillers and British Columbia Distilling Co. Because their production had not been constrained by prohibition, Canadian distillers held large stocks of aged whisky that could be blended with newly produced neutral spirits and flavors to better approximate the taste of aged whiskey.Footnote 26
The largest purely distillery stock issuance of the period involved Schenley Distillers Corp. On July 11, 1933, Schenley chartered as a new corporation and acquired the assets of its predecessor, Schenley Products. Three days later, the new company held its IPO, handled by New York's Lehman Brothers, which offered 230,000 shares of $5 par value at a speculative price of $15, raising $3,450,000. The shares were quickly subscribed and immediately traded on the over-the-counter market at $35. The stated purpose of the IPO was to secure funds for the expansion of the corporation and its subsidiaries, with some proceeds earmarked to repay bank loans taken out on May 31 that had financed the rehabilitation and expansion of the Fine Distillery in Schenley, Pennsylvania, and the acquisition of the historic James E. Pepper & Co. distillery.Footnote 27
The Brown-Forman Distillery Company also issued shares. On December 5, 1933, Repeal Day, it announced that Hallgarten & Co. of New York City would underwrite a public offering of 35,000 shares of Brown-Forman common stock. For the prior 63 years, the company had been privately owned and managed by George G. Brown and his son Owsley Brown. Advertisements for the issue, one of which is reproduced in Figure 1, appeared in newspapers nationwide on December 6. The company offered its shares at $15.75 each, raising $551,250.
Brown–Forman distillery stock offering advertisement.
December 1933 was the busiest single month for distillery stock issuances, with eight offerings involving around $7.2 million. Penn York Distilleries, Inc. made its public offering of 290,000 shares on December 15, with Harris, Ayers & Co. offering them at $2.50 per share to raise $725,000.Footnote 28 The funds were earmarked for constructing and remodeling distillery facilities, including a cooperage plant, on the company's Shrewsbury, Pennsylvania property.Footnote 29 The company struggled, though, and filed for bankruptcy in November 1935.Footnote 30
The Rock River Distillery of Dixon, Illinois, incorporated on August 15, 1933 and offered 329,450 shares at $1.25 each in early December. The company wanted its shares to be accessible to local citizens, and many Dixon residents reportedly subscribed. To convince potential investors that the offering was not designed merely to enrich the company's owners, all proceeds were placed in escrow with the Trust Company of Chicago, to be released only to cover rehabilitation expenses, new equipment, and working capital.Footnote 31 Rock River purchased a facility of the Oat Products Corporation and used the funds to convert it into a modern distillery. Engineers predicted that only minimal modifications were required, and the location was considered advantageous given access to two major railroads for grain supply and shipment of finished product.Footnote 32 The company also emphasized its local roots, pledging to purchase as much of its grain locally as supply allowed.Footnote 33
The smallest of the December 1933 offerings came from Irish Hills Distilleries of Northville, Michigan, just west of Detroit. The firm was incorporated in October 1933, one of a dozen small distilling companies recently incorporated in Michigan.Footnote 34 On December 10, Irish Hills placed an advertisement in the Detroit Free Press, shown in Figure 2, inviting the public to purchase shares at one dollar each. The advertisement recalled that more than 800 distilleries had operated nationwide two decades earlier, while only a relative handful currently did, and promised that the proposed Michigan distillery would be among the finest in the country.Footnote 35 Additional advertisements in January noted that distillery shares had “doubled—sometimes trebled in value” over the past year.Footnote 36 By April 1934, the company had reportedly sold $125,000 worth of shares and used the proceeds to build its production facility.Footnote 37 It began producing whisky blends on April 15 and was selling by summer.Footnote 38
Irish hills distilleries stock share advertisement.
Distillery stock issuances slowed somewhat in the months following Repeal, with four more in January 1934 and 13 others combined between February and October. Among those was A. & G. J. Caldwell, Inc., which in February announced a public offering of 140,000 shares at $3 each. The proceeds helped the company complete a modern distillery on the same Newburyport, Massachusetts site where Caldwell rum had been produced since 1790. The first run of Caldwell rum came off the still on August 27, with the company's president pledging that the product would measure up to the traditions that had made it famous in New England for more than a century.Footnote 39
V. Other alcohol-related corporate issuances
Firms other than breweries and distilleries that were tied to the return of legal alcohol also engaged in public offerings. Among them was Gambrinus Cooperage Works of Louisville, Kentucky, which incorporated on June 16, 1933, to acquire the assets of the existing Gambrinus Cooperage Works plant and expand its capacity. On June 26, the company announced an offering of 100,000 shares of common stock at $1.20, with the proceeds funding new machinery to replace hand production methods and greatly increase output.Footnote 40 A few weeks later, Michigan Cooperage held an IPO of 130,000 shares at $1 each, with proceeds earmarked toward retiring debt and creating a modern tight cooperage plant. Its advertisement in the Detroit Free Press observed that the modification of the beer laws and the possible repeal of the 18th Amendment had created an increasing volume of business for the company's product.Footnote 41 Between late June 1933 and April 1934, five cooperage firms held stock offerings involving just over $1 million.
A few wineries also engaged in equity financing. By late summer 1933, long idle wineries in New York's Finger Lakes region were undertaking reconstructions, with several plants contemplating extensive additions.Footnote 42 Between March 1933 and July 1934, wineries engaged in at least six rounds of equity financing involving nearly $3.5 million. The first came from the White Top Champagne Company, Inc. of Pulteney, New York, which incorporated on March 1, 1933 with a listed capital of $250,000. That firm traced its origins to 1865 and had been the second-largest producer of wine and “champagne” in the United States in the decades leading up to 1920.Footnote 43 On July 26, 1933, White Top's IPO was conducted by H.M. Kilborn & Co., which offered 100,000 shares of $1 par value stock at a speculative price of $4.
The largest winery issuance of the era involved the Pleasant Valley Wine Co. of Hammondsport, New York. Pleasant Valley opened in the Finger Lakes region in 1860 and became well known for its Great Western “champagne.” Pleasant Valley remained active during Prohibition by selling sacramental wine from its pre-Prohibition stock.Footnote 44 Although the vineyard could have produced a 3.2% wine after April 1933, or partially dealcoholized some of its pre-Prohibition stock to that level, the company's president declined, choosing instead to hold out for full Repeal.Footnote 45 In January 1934, shortly after Repeal, Pleasant Valley conducted an IPO of 150,000 shares at $7.75 each, raising $1,162,500 to finance new plant and equipment and to retire debt. An advertisement for the offering is reproduced in Figure 3. After changing ownership several times over the subsequent decades (Taylor Wine Co., Seagram, and Coca-Cola are among its former owners), the winery continues to operate, though it was again put up for sale in April 2026.Footnote 46
Pleasant Valley Wine Co. stock offering advertisement.
La Salle Wines and Champagne of Farmington, Michigan, engaged in two separate rounds of equity financing. The company incorporated in the fall of 1933 as a subsidiary of the Windsor Company of Canada, whose aged Canadian wines it offered for sale in Michigan immediately upon Repeal. In November 1933, La Salle offered 425,000 shares at $1 each, with the proceeds employed in constructing a new winery in Farmington, Michigan, using grapes grown in the state. The plant was completed in June 1934 with a capacity of one million gallons per year.Footnote 47 In May 1934, La Salle raised another $238,964 through a second round of 119,482 shares at $2 each, with the stated purpose of completing the Farmington plant and buying out its Canadian parent.Footnote 48 La Salle became Michigan's largest winery over the following decades and was purchased in 1970 by St. Julian Winery, which still operates in Michigan.
A few producers of barley malt, a primary ingredient in beer, also relied on the equity financing channel. In July 1933, H.W. Rickel & Co., privately owned in Detroit by the Rickel family for 57 years, conducted an IPO of 180,000 shares (out of 325,000 total, with the remainder staying with the family) at $2 each. The stated purpose was to provide additional plant capacity and working capital to meet greatly increased demand from the leading brewers of Michigan and surrounding states.Footnote 49 The stock was heavily oversubscribed, and a week after the IPO it traded over the counter at $3 a share.Footnote 50 Two other Michigan maltsters, Commercial Malt Co. and Continental Malt Co., held stock offerings in September and October 1933, respectively. In total, those three malt offerings raised more than $1.7 million.
A final broad category of alcohol-related issuers is that of distributors and importers, with the Commercial and Financial Chronicle reporting five distribution companies offering a total of $3,335,000 between July 1933 and June 1934. Tiller-Thompson Inc., which incorporated in New York in July 1933 to import and sell wine, held an IPO on July 22, 1933, offering 80,000 shares of common stock with a par value of $1 at a speculative price of $6 each to raise $480,000 for expansion and the buildup of wine inventory. That was reported to be the first public financing of a wine-importing firm since before World War I.Footnote 51 In November 1933, Maynard and Child Inc., wine and liquor importers, held an IPO of 100,000 shares of $1 par value stock, likewise offered at the speculative price of $6.Footnote 52
Table 2 summarizes all alcohol-related public offerings from July 1932 to October 1934. In total, there were 180 new capital flotations involving alcohol-related firms looking to raise almost $103 million (around $2.7 billion in 2026 dollars). Across those 28 months, the Commercial and Financial Chronicle reported a total of $202 million in new capital flotations involving 215 companies. In dollar terms, therefore, more than half the value of all issuances reported in the Chronicle in those two years was related to the alcohol industry. With respect to the number of issuances, more than three-quarters came from an alcohol-related firm.
Summary of new stock issuances by type in the era around repeal
Table 2 Long description
Stock issuances are summarized by company type, with columns for Number, Sum of Issuances, Average Issuance, and Median Issuance. Distilleries list 37 issuances totaling $30,276,942, with an average issuance of $818,296 and a median of $532,500. Alcohol distribution lists 5 issuances totaling $3,335,000, with an average of $667,000 and a median of $480,000. Cooperage lists 5 issuances totaling $1,045,000, with an average of $174,167 and a median of $130,000. Wineries list 6 issuances totaling $3,451,464, with an average of $575,244 and a median of $412,500. Malt producers list 3 issuances totaling $1,710,000, with an average of $570,000 and a median of $550,000. Total Boozy Issuances lists 180 issuances totaling $102,621,083, with an average issuance of $576,499 and a median of $375,000. Notes indicate some brewery and distillery issuances were double counted across those two categories, so totals may not sum to the reported amounts in the rows above.
The Commercial and Financial Chronicle, reports on “new capital flotations.” The reported amounts include five distillery issuances and 21 brewery issuances (Taylor et al., Reference Taylor, Wright and Adamu Bukari2026) that were not reported in the Chronicle but were reported in newspapers. Three firms—Walker Brewers & Distillers ($2,482,792), Gilmark Brewing & Distilling Corp. ($100,000), and Allied Brewing & Distilling Co. ($871,875)—were double-counted as both breweries and distilleries. This is why totals do not sum to the reported amounts in the rows above. The brewery stock issuance data, which are those reported by Taylor et al. (Reference Taylor, Wright and Adamu Bukari2026), are for the 18 months from July 1932 through December 1933. Since legal beer had a nine-month head start over legal spirits, this keeps these numbers a bit more comparable since data for all other types runs from March 1933 through October 1934. The first alcohol-related stock issuances outside of breweries occurred in March 1933 (American Wine Company), nine months after the first brewery issuance. Incidentally, the Financial Chronicle reported nine additional brewery issuances across 1934 for a total of $3,651,915, which is far below the pace of brewery issuances across 1933. If these are counted, the number of brewery issuances rises to 136 associated with $69,909,259. The standard deviations of stock issuances for each type were $631,840 (breweries), $825,639 (distilleries), $536,460 (distribution), $107,629 (cooperage), $368,403 (wineries), $180,185 (malt), and $656,661 (all).
In comparing the stock issuances of the various categories of alcohol producers, distilleries had the highest average issuance at $818,296, which was around 55% higher than that of the average brewery issuance. While median issuances were below their averages in all categories, distilleries ($532,500) again dwarfed breweries, and most other categories, by this measure. Of the 180 alcohol-related issuances the median was $375,000 while the standard deviation was $656,661, suggesting a wide variation in issuance sizes.
VI. Conclusion
The beverage alcohol industry, broadly defined, was in poor condition at the start of 1933 after 13 years of federal Prohibition. Financial markets were likewise depressed. When political events signaled the potential return of legal alcohol, breweries, distilleries, wineries, cooperage firms, malt producers, and liquor importers and distributors spent millions rehabilitating idle capital and purchasing new facilities, raw materials, and equipment. Although alcohol producers and allied companies financed some retooling with their own capital, made payroll with the help of bank loans, and obtained raw materials with the aid of trade credit, equity financing constituted an important channel. At least 180 alcohol-related issuances sought to raise up to $103 million in the roughly two years surrounding Repeal.
While recent research has carefully documented the extent of equity financing for breweries, this paper is the first to explore the prominence of IPOs and seasoned offerings by distilleries and other alcohol-related corporations. We found 37 distillery firms that issued stock between the spring of 1933 and the fall of 1934, raising more than $30 million used to rehabilitate distilleries, purchase new equipment, and acquire the rights to defunct brands and recipes.
Although distillery issuances were fewer than those of breweries in absolute terms, far more breweries than distilleries were in operation during this period. By mid-1935, there were around 700 breweries in operation but only about 100 distilleries making whiskey, rum, or gin. Despite this, while beer production did not regain pre-Prohibition levels until the 1940s, the production of beverage spirits approached its pre-Prohibition peak by 1935 and had far exceeded it by 1936.Footnote 53 Demand-side changes certainly contributed to those differences between beer and spirits, but the supply side cannot be ignored. Equity financing clearly played a large role in the striking rebound of the distilling sector and, as with brewing, gave outside institutional and individual investors a larger role in the industry in the decades to come. We must, however, leave the effect that broader ownership of the industry had on post-Prohibition alcohol regulations—as well as a systematic analysis of the subsequent performance of these boozy stock issuances—for future research.
Acknowledgments
The authors thank the editor, Karl Storchmann, and anonymous reviewers for helpful comments. We used Claude Fable 5.0 to provide an initial shortening of our original 9,000-word draft that we researched and wrote ourselves to get it to the Journal of Wine Economics suggested 6,000-word limit on July 14, 2026. We are happy to share the full version. We made substantial further edits to this streamlined draft.
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