Beer Ban Years: Why Was Beer Banned For 74 Years?

And why was hard liquor allowed?

It’s hard to believe now, with ale flowing from every tap and with beer being brewed in every township, but until 1989 you couldn’t walk into a bar in Iceland and ask for a beer to drink. Or you could, but no beer would be forthcoming. This wasn’t a quirk of Icelandic bars or of taste or economics, it was the result of a full-fledged state policy. Beer was a controlled substance; a dangerous intoxicant, it was said, and especially tempting to the working class, teenagers, and even children. In this bar, your options still ranged from wine to hard liquor of all kinds: whisky, vodka, gin, aquavit, and rum.

How we ended up in such a strange situation was due to the temperance movement. Alcohol, they said, was a plague upon society. It stole husbands from their wives and children. Men lost work and even their own minds. A drunkard’s children would go barefoot for want, while he spent his stuporous days making trouble with other no-good lowlifes.

With alcohol exacting such a terrible toll on society, and with so many good men completely in its thrall, would it not be most straightforward to simply ban it? The Faroese had done exactly this a few years previously. The USA seemed to be heading towards prohibition as well. Across the Protestant world temperance was on the ascendant, sweeping all before it.

“Þarf alltaf að vera vín?”

In a referendum conducted in 1908, Iceland voted to ban all alcohol. Like all good commitments, implementation was put off until 1915. From the moment prohibition came into force people tried to circumvent it. Smuggling became a fun and profitable sideline. Home distillers flourished. Epidemics of illnesses broke out, illnesses which happened to need prescriptions of alcohol that local doctors, reliable as ever, prescribed in great numbers. Yet the ban was ostensibly in effect and if it did not fully stop the ills of drunkenness, it did at least reduce it.

“With alcohol exacting such a terrible toll on society, and with so many good men completely in its thrall, would it not be most straightforward to simply ban it?”

However, in 1922 the Spanish took notice. Unsympathetic to Protestant ideas of sobriety, and probably a little drunk, they said that if Iceland didn’t purchase Spanish wine by the shipload, then the Spaniards wouldn’t be buying fish from Iceland. What is an export-dependent country to do? Thankful for an excuse, a pragmatic exception was made for Spanish wines. This was a major blow to the abolitionist cause, yet they could comfort themselves in the knowledge that at least the people wouldn’t be subjected to hard spirits, or even worse, beer.

Wine is fine, but whiskey’s quicker

Soon the masses clamoured for harder stuff. Why on earth should only wines be legal? Should space not also be made for the soul-balming qualities of Scotch whisky, or the bonhomie brought on by a shared bottle of Brennivín? Beleaguered on all sides, the temperance movement grabbed at beer and held it hostage. They would support legalisation of all other alcohol, so long as beer remained bibere non grata. Beer, they said, would be too slippery a surface for the working classes and teenagers to safely tread on. It was a surface which might see them slip and fall into the depths of debauchery. “Vímulaus æska!” the cry went out. A sober youth? Who in their right mind could disagree? On this compromise the vote went through, and in 1933 all alcoholic drinks, except beer above 2.25% ABV, became legal once more.

Thus began the beer ban, a ban that would last 56 years. Yet even that ban would be prodded and tested. Another World War broke out, and Iceland found itself hosting many a foreign fighting man on its shore. That these brave Brits and Americans should be deprived of beer seemed to be a great pity, and more importantly, wholly unprofitable. Soon enough a brewery was up and running, selling beer to the thirsty occupiers.

Exceptions multiply

With that first exception, the stable doors were opened and slowly the out-clauses and exceptions went galloping off. Why should embassies not also have beer? Surely beer was safe in the hands of refined and worldly ambassadors. Then in 1958 beer became available at the DutyFree in Keflavík airport, but only to drink there and then. In 1965 aircrew were allowed to bring a few cans with them into the country. A glance at those splendidly uniformed airmen and stewardesses brought home the obvious fact that they could be trusted. Only in 1979, after a legal challenge, was the same privilege extended to the public.

Bars in Reykjavík began selling bjórlíki (“near beer”) to great acclaim. They mixed the completely legal 2.25% alcohol beers with vodka, whisky or aquavit; thus emulating the alcohol by volume of beer if not the taste. In 1985, this repulsive cocktail further emulated beer by getting its very own state ban.

Over time, these small and reasonable exceptions put the wisdom of the beer ban into question. People began asking why only those rich enough to travel should have unfettered access to beer. Meanwhile, those who did travel saw how other nations seemed to live side by side with beer in total serenity. Children there weren’t drunkenly stumbling about the streets. In fact, countries that indulged themselves with a glass of wine for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, appeared to get less drunk than the unrestrained, binge-drinking Icelanders; an intriguing paradox.

The vote for beer

When hard alcohol is already allowed, why bother keeping beer, the weakest of all drinks, illegal? The logic didn’t seem to hold up. Public support for the ban was slowly eroded until eventually it no longer held. A vote went through in parliament and on 1 March 1989 the spigots were unstopped, and the beer gushed forth, at which point the country collapsed into a vicious cycle of carnivalesque revelries, followed by numbing alcoholic stupors, which it has yet to escape. Or did it? It appears instead, 35 years on, that a national habit of apocalyptic binge drinking has given way to a culture of tame sipping. A beer with a weekday meal, so feared by the temperance movement, is often the beginning and end of a night’s drinking.

Photo by Art Bicnick

Abolitionists can look back with both pride and bitterness. That beer was kept out of youthful hands for half a century — quite the accomplishment. The undrunk litres could be counted in their millions. Yet they could also curse the haughty Spaniards who began the dreadful process of liberalisation. In the Faroe Islands, they’d kept the country largely sober until 1992. For Iceland meanwhile, once we’d crated the first shipment of Spanish wine ashore, each subsequent step seemed only natural. Like someone vowing to stop drinking, except on every other Friday, we’d made exception after exception until we found ourselves metaphorically lying in the bathtub on a Tuesday morning, clutching a Carlsberg.

Tempering temptation

After the 2016 US presidential elections, a friend’s grandmother said she rather approved of their new president. To her generation, sobriety was the unerring mark of a go-getter, so the news that he was a teetotaller was all the information she needed: “Here,” she will have thought approvingly, “was a good egg.”

In these vestigial ways the temperance movement still holds Iceland in its gentle paternal grip. Spanish wines remain unusually popular. Alcohol can still only be purchased from state-run liquor stores, and their opening hours reflect vintage notions of propriety: no booze on Sundays, no booze on religious holidays. Many an unlucky drinker has found themself unbearably sober on a long Easter weekend. Which was, of course, always the intention.

CORRECTION: This article’s fourth paragraph was corrected on October 1 to change the cited year of the referendum from 1911 to the correct year of 1908.

Freyr Thorvaldsson also writes personal essays, book reviews and poetry at freyr.substack.com.