American Beers and Prohibition

TroubleShooting

Pat McMackin asks,

I know American beers are lighter today than before Prohibition, but are there records of the recipes used before all these changes? I look at labels on some of the bottles in my collection and see that some breweries claim to be more than 100 years old. I just wonder how much better the beer might have been, say when Pabst was first started in 1844.