• American brewing peaked in 1873, when there were 4131 breweries. By 1978, the industry's low point, forty-one brewers operated eighty-nine plants. Today breweries number a healthy 1400.     • In the early nineteenth century, Americans didn't drink beer - they drank whiskey instead, more than seven gallons per adult a year. There were 14,000 commercial distilleries in the United States but only about two hundred small breweries.     • In February 1858, George Staats, a Brooklyn brewer, went on trial on charges of violating the city's Sunday drink law. Staat's lawyer offered an ingenious defense: his client was innocent because lager beer was not intoxicating. The jury agreed and acquitted him. That scenario played out in dozens of courtrooms around the country.     • The Civil War increased the popularity of beer: Commanders banned liquor from camp and field, leaving lager-officially non-intoxicating-as the soldiers' drink of choice. The United States Sanitary Commission also recommended that troops drink beer to avoid constipation; since vegetables were in short supply, lager was advised as a substitute.   •  In 1879, the top brewer in the US was George Ehret of New York, who made about 1.5 percent of the nation's beer, or just over 180,000 barrels (the #2 brewery was Pabst). Today Anheuser-Busch is the largest, producing more than 50 percent of America's beer - around 108 million barrels.     • The nation's oldest brewery is D. G. Yuengling and Son, which was founded in 1829 by David Gottlieb Yuengling. It's the second-oldest family-owned business in the United States. The family may have to change the brewery's name: current president Dick Yuengling's daughters have joined the company.   • Prohibition has always been an American impulse - Maine banned all alcoholic beverages in 1851, and in 1910 (a decade before Prohibition began) more than half of all Americans lived in states, counties, or cities where alcohol was outlawed.     • Millions of Americans still remember the Hamm beer jingle: "From the land of sky-blue waters." The song's catchy tom-tom rhythm was pounded out on a cardboard box that once held Star-Kist tuna.       • Starbucks founder Gordon Bowker also co-founded Redhook Ale Brewery of Seattle.   • In recent years, beer drinkers have worn t-shirts decorated with a quote attributed to Ben Franklin: "Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy." Just one problem: Franklin didn't say that. It's a mangled version of another Franklin quote about the pleasures of wine. In a 1779 letter, he wrote that the rain that fell on vineyards and transformed vines into grapes for wine provided "a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy."