beer shooter
n.— «Alcohol is also “shot” or “needled” into near beer.…Much available evidence was brought to light concerning the methods in which breweries in that locality “shot beer,” as the saying goes among the beer barons.…They secure three or four citizens, generally individuals with good reputations but keen to place the same for, of course, a consideration, at disposal of the beere shooters.…One beer racketeer calmly advised the assistant administrator in Philadelphia that he was the “fastest beer shooter” in the state, and that if he, the assistant administrator, would leave town with his forces for about an hour, he would shoot enough beer to hold them for a month. This same modern brewer also delivered himself of the statement that he would “shoot beer any time that he could get away with it.”…If the coast is clear, the regular beer is quickly “shot” out to what are termed “drops,” the latter being garages or other convenient hiding places.…Another method breweries have utilized to defeat the law was the supplying of near-beer to establishments products conforming to the one-half of 1 per cent limitations, but accompanied by secret supplies of alcohol which was “needled” or “shot” into the glasses of near beer as served.» —“Government’s Bungling Aided Brewery Frauds” by Mabel Walker Willebrandt Los Angeles Times Aug. 12, 1929. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
It was a dark and stormy night. So begins the long and increasingly convoluted prose of Edwards Bulwer-Lytton’s best-known novel. Today the annual Bulwer-Lytton Contest asks contestants for fanciful first sentences that are similarly...
Enthusiastic book recommendations! Martha’s savoring the biography of Alexander von Humboldt, the 19th-century explorer, polymath, and naturalist who revolutionized our understanding of nature and predicted the effects of human activity on...