Definition
A beverage, in legal usage, refers to a liquid prepared for drinking, with the term carrying particular significance in the law of liquor sales and licensing. In regulatory and criminal contexts — especially under nineteenth- and early twentieth-century temperance and prohibition statutes — courts used "beverage" to distinguish liquors sold or consumed for pleasure from liquors dispensed for medicinal purposes. The distinction had direct legal consequences: sales of intoxicating liquors "as a beverage" were frequently prohibited or taxed under statutes that carved out exceptions for medicinal, sacramental, or industrial uses. A sale "as a beverage" indicated the liquor was intended to be drunk for the enjoyment of drinking itself, not pursuant to a physician's direction.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A liquid to consume; a drink, such as tea, coffee, liquor, beer, milk, juice, or a soft drink, often excluding water. Also, drink money.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Liquid for drinking; drink — usually applied to drink artificially prepared and of an agreeable flavor, as an intoxicating beverage. Also, slang for a treat or drink money.
The ordinary meaning of "beverage" is simply any drinkable liquid. The legal meaning is narrower and purposive: it characterizes the intent behind a sale or consumption of intoxicating liquor. A researcher who reads "sold as a beverage" in a nineteenth-century statute or case is reading a term of art, not a neutral description of a liquid. The phrase imports a finding about motive and use that triggers specific legal liability or prohibition.
Common Confusion
The core confusion is treating "beverage" in historical legal sources as merely descriptive rather than operative. Under prohibition-era and pre-Prohibition temperance statutes, the phrase "intoxicating liquor sold as a beverage" was a threshold element of the offense. Liquor sold by a druggist on a physician's prescription was the same liquid but not, legally, a beverage — the sale fell outside the statute. Modern readers accustomed to the word's ordinary breadth may miss that a court's use of "beverage" is making a factual and legal determination about purpose, not simply identifying a category of drink.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in the Law Mind corpus will encounter "beverage" most heavily in three contexts:
First, temperance and prohibition litigation. From the mid-nineteenth century through the National Prohibition Act (Volstead Act, 1919) and its state analogs, statutes routinely prohibited the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors "for beverage purposes" or "as a beverage." The phrase was an element of the offense and was litigated extensively. Cases turn on whether the sale was for beverage use or for some excepted purpose.
Second, licensing and excise law. Licensing frameworks often taxed or restricted "beverage alcohol" while exempting industrial or medicinal alcohol. The beverage/non-beverage line determined which regulatory scheme applied and what penalties attached.
Third, the medicinal exception. The Black's entries derive from Commonwealth v. Mandeville (142 Mass. 469), which illustrates precisely this divide: a druggist selling liquor on a doctor's order was not selling a beverage in the legal sense. Researchers should be alert that this exception was frequently litigated and that courts were not uniform in applying it — some courts construed the medicinal exception narrowly, others broadly, depending on the restrictiveness of the underlying statute.
Post-Prohibition, much of this definitional apparatus became less prominent in general common law but persisted in state alcohol beverage control (ABC) statutes, where "alcoholic beverage" remains a defined term carrying distinct regulatory meaning from "food," "medicine," or "industrial solvent."
Historical Dictionary Support
Both Black's editions are in agreement and offer nearly identical language, with the second edition adding the case citation. The definition is remarkably spare for a term that generated substantial litigation: both editions capture only the pleasure-versus-medicine distinction and do no more. Neither edition addresses the legislative context that gave the term its force — the temperance statutes that made "sold as a beverage" an operative phrase rather than background description.
What the historical dictionaries miss: neither edition surveys jurisdictional variation in how courts drew the beverage/medicine line, nor do they address the broader regulatory uses of the term in licensing and excise law. Researchers should not rely on these entries as a complete picture of the term's legal work during the prohibition era. The entries are best read as a starting point that identifies the key distinction, not as a comprehensive treatment.
Jurisdictional Note
During the Prohibition era, both federal law (the Volstead Act) and state statutes defined "intoxicating liquor" and "beverage purposes" with varying specificity. Some states retained broader medicinal exceptions than federal law permitted; others applied the beverage/non-beverage line to malt and fermented beverages differently than to distilled spirits. Post-repeal, every state with an alcohol beverage control statute defines "alcoholic beverage" by its own terms, and those definitions may or may not track the historical common-law distinction.