In the last century in the United States alone, the bar and beverage business has gone from an illegal enterprise, carried on behind the locked doors of a speakeasy, to one of the nation’s most glamorous and profitable businesses. Together with the foodservice or restaurant business, the two form the country’s fourth-largest industry. In fact, it is impossible to separate them. In the 1930s the United States was nearing the end of Prohibition, which was an unsuccessful attempt to regulate alcohol consumption by outlawing it entirely. History tells us that such attempts have never worked because people find other ways to get what they want. From earliest times, human beings seem to have wanted alcoholic beverages. Indeed, some historians theorize that one of the reasons our nomadic forebears settled into civilized life was to raise grain and grapes to ensure supplies of what they looked upon as sacred beverages.