Excel Bottled Liquors

It occured to me only afterward: Why bother to specify "bottled"? Draft beer to go, at least in legal forms, faded from the public eye in the decades leading up to Prohibition. It's hip again, thanks to a resurgence of craft brewing in recent years, but the typography of the sign suggests that it was designed and mounted long before any such distinction would have been needed. If you were buying liquors, of course they'd be bottled. The reason is probably buried deep within the state liquor laws; this seems to be a Massachusetts thing.

Excel Bottled Liquors (a.k.a. Excel Package Store)
613 Merrimack St. (Cabot-Suffolk Sts.), Lowell, Massachusetts
978-452-1601

Comments

[Dave Cook]

By email, an EIT reader observes:

Don't know about Massachusetts, but in Knickerbocker New York places that sold liquor -- not beer, hard liquor -- by the glass occupied a murky and disreputable legal territory. They were not inns or taverns; often they called themselves "grocer's shops," much to the indignation of more respectable grocers. (Later on, they morphed into "saloons.") Sales of bottled liquors were on a safer legal footing. This could be a remnant of some similar distinction.

Thanks, Anne!