Sipping Savannah: a dispatch from America's first prohibition museum

21.07.2023 - 08:02 / roughguides.com

The first ever prohibition museum in the States opened in Savannah, Georgia earlier this year. And it’s a pretty apt place for it. Until recently, prohibition-era laws here prohibited breweries from selling beer directly to punters – but that’s all starting to change. Jacqui Agate goes to meet the new wave of craft brewers shaking up the city’s drinks scene.

Spanish moss drips from the oak canopy shading East Jones Street. Mottled sunlight plays on the brick paving, and the air hangs heavy with the afternoon heat. Here, in the Historic District, Savannah is at its most genteel.

But revelry rumbles across these oak-cloaked streets and has done for almost 300 years. Savannah was built by English colonisers who, led by General James Oglethorpe, settled on the land that would become Georgia in 1733. Such was their merrymaking – they made rum from molasses and spent days on end in a pie-eyed stupor – that Oglethorpe banned all ‘strong waters’ from the colony. This was the first act of alcohol prohibition in America.

Artillery Bar in Savannah

Fitting then, that Savannah, the ‘Hostess City’, is home to the USA’s first prohibition museum (book your entrance ticket here). Opened in 2017, it chronicles the temperance movement from its early beginnings in America, to the national Prohibition era from 1920 to 1933. It shines a light, too, on the moonshine makers and rum runners who did everything in their power to buck the dry law.

But the sultry streets of Savannah could be a museum of Prohibition-era history themselves. About half a mile from East Jones Street is The Distillery Ale House. Today it’s a sleek craft-beer spot – but, so the story goes, in the 1920s it was a pharmacy-cum-speakeasy and bathtub gin was made on the second floor.

Savannah legend spills into the Crystal Beer Palor too. It was once the Gerken Family Grocery Store, later changing to The Crystal restaurant. It was also the first spot to serve alcohol after Prohibition ended – most likely because it never stopped.

“We like to be a bit tricky in Savannah,” smiles Kayla Black, director of the American Prohibition Museum. We’re now sat outside Collins Quarter, a trendy café-restaurant that serves brunch by day and whips up modern plates and artisan cocktails by night.

Savannah in Georgia

Georgia’s conservatism, and its location along the Bible Belt, meant the state actually went dry in 1908, twelve years before nationwide prohibition took hold. So “tricky” Savannah had had more than a decade of dealings with underground booze before the rest of the country followed suit in 1920.

Some really big names had illicit operations in Savannah during Prohibition, too," she continues. «Even Al Capone had an operation here…

“First, Savannahians set up a system