In recent years, Colorado’s local brewery scene has flourished, adding to the already considerable output of the Coors brewery in Golden. But the attitude of the state toward alcohol production and consumption hasn’t always been so encouraging.
More than a decade before the Volstead Act, Colorado passed its own legislation allowing its political territories to ban the sale of alcohol. Adoption of the prohibition followed quickly, and just three years later, in 1910, 20 out of 25 counties in the state had become anti-saloon territories.
Denver, however, was not one of them. The state’s capital resisted the efforts of the temperance movement, but it wasn’t able to hold out for long. A constitutional amendment was passed in 2014 by a margin of around 11,000 votes that significantly ramped up the state’s prohibition statutes.
The amendment added Article XXII to Colorado’s Constitution, which outlawed the manufacture, import and sale of intoxicating liquors in the state, except for medicinal or sacramental purposes. The law went into effect on Jan. 1, 1916.
The City and County of Denver had resisted the initial law, and it also attempted to resist the new law. On July 6, 1915, just months before the amendment was set to go into effect, the city of Denver issued a license allowing August Koch to sell intoxicating liquors beyond the enactment date of the new law.
The state promptly brought litigation against the city over the issuance of the license, and by September 1915, the case had reached the Colorado Supreme Court. At issue in the case was the degree of power vested in local municipalities to control liquor traffic within territorial limits and the state’s ability to override them.
In People ex rel. Carlson v. City Council of Denver, the state’s high court stated that the new amendment “necessarily implied that its inhibitions apply to the whole state, and that the article supplants every other constitutional provision and every law in the state, and every municipal regulation and charter provision inconsistent with it from and after the date it takes effect.”
Denver couldn’t opt out of this liquor prohibition, and the state’s high court nullified Koch’s liquor license from Jan. 1, 1916, onward.
Following Denver’s defeat, the state continued to ramp up its prohibition efforts. In 1915, the General Assembly passed a law against the possession, distribution and advertising of intoxicating liquors, and it gave law enforcement officers the ability to search a business with or without a warrant if it was suspected of having intoxicated liquors.
In 1917, the legislature further restricted the import of alcohol, followed by a nearly complete prohibition on intoxicating liquors in 1918. The rest of the country would soon follow soon, with the passage and adoption of the 18th Amendment, which was ratified in 1919.