But Americans didn’t develop a more unified taste in beer until the mid-1800s, when huge numbers of German immigrants—including David G. Yuengling, whose brewery still operates today, outside of Philadelphia—arrived and brought lager with them. Less intense in flavor than porters, stouts, and ales, lagers were a hit with America’s growing number of factory workers and miners, who ate at saloons near where they worked. “It was normal to get a beer with your meal, but not allowable to be tipsy on the job,” says Dighe. “So if you wanted a beer, your safest option was a weak beer.” As more and more immigrants came to the U.S. and unemployment stayed high, the stiff competition for jobs made this pressure for sobriety even higher.

From this perspective, wateriness was not a bug, but feature. In the late 1800s, when Anheuser-Busch started selling a milder version of Budweiser made with rice, it cost a nickel more than its competitors—and it sold quite well.

At the time, beer labels didn’t include information about alcohol content, so flavor and color were usually the way these workers evaluated beer’s strength. “The milder the taste, the milder the beer, would be a natural assumption,” says Dighe. Lagers were golden-brown in color, leaving room for an even lighter beer to quench American workers. That came in the form of an especially pale lager from the Bohemian city of Pilsen—called a pilsner—that had become popular across Europe. It did the same in the U.S., where beer consumption per capita tripled between 1875 and 1915.

Meanwhile, as miners and factory workers were finding professionally acceptable ways to drink during lunch, the Temperance movement was gaining support. Initially many in the movement, which started in the 1820s, only set out to curb the consumption of liquor, figuring that a ban of all alcohol might repel potential adherents. Brewers, aware that they could be next, trumpeted their products as temperate alternatives to liquor. But as the Temperance movement found success—spirits consumption per adult dropped 80 percent between 1830 and 1900—they pushed for beer bans as well.

In the short term, the Temperance movement triumphed. Prohibition went into effect in 1920 and put 1,568 breweries out of business. In response, some families started brewing their own beer, but most didn’t, and a decade-and-a-half without full-bodied beer, Dighe and other historians have suggested, made Americans lose their taste for it.

By the time Prohibition was repealed, the breweries that opened went with what they knew would sell in the 1910s: light, bland beers. One man who witnessed a batch of particularly strong beer go unsold at the time said, “It is just too much hop for this generation.” And even if Prohibition was over, the Temperance movement’s efforts to ban alcohol at the state and local levels wasn’t: The beer industry’s reluctance to offend it permeated the pages of trade publications for decades; cowed, the industry continued to promote beer as “a beverage of moderation.”