At least that's the idea behind the problematically named Brew Year's Eve, an April 7 "holiday" being pushed nationwide by the Brewers Association trade group to commemorate the repeal of Prohibition.

(Though Prohibition wasn't fully repealed until Dec. 5, 1933, on April 7 of that year laws were changed to re-legalize beer below 4 percent alcohol by volume. So technically April 6 would be the "eve" of such a commemoration. Anyway …)

With an eye toward being proper, and, admittedly, toward upping their traffic this Thursday, Downingtown's Victory Brewing has created a holiday of its own, "Victory Over Prohibition Day."

"We're not trying to get people to drink a ton of beer," says Victory's co-honcho Bill Covaleski. "We're just trying to celebrate that it's great that we can actually do this."

And the day will have its own official drink. You may recall that a year ago Victory, with nominal assistance from your humble reporter [Cover, "Hop Heaven," April 14, 2005], rolled out a new/old beer it called Throwback Lager. It was part brewing exercise, part history experiment wherein Covaleski and his partner in suds Ron Barchet exhumed a recipe for a pre-Prohibition American lager, a style of beer—light but substantial—that had been wiped out save for its memory by the teetotalers of the 1920s. Victory released Throwback as a limited run on a wait-and-see basis with regard to doing it again.

Well, wait-and-see no longer. As part of the brewery's VOP Day festivities, it'll be releasing a 50-barrel batch of Throwback ("It was such a success, we followed the recipe verbatim," says Covaleski) both at its own brewpub—where the event will be celebrated with waitstaff clad in Prohibition-era gangster outfits—and on a handful of local taps, where participating bars will be using glassware commemorating VOP Day (see logo above).

"Clearly [drinking] is a privilege we take for granted," says Covaleski, noting that his brewery's VOP celebration is "a nondenominational drinking holiday. It's about celebrating the diversity of the drinking public."

So rejoice, ye who shun green and take long detours around bars with names like O'Flannergan's each March 17. Whether you celebrate on April 6 or April 7, know there's a day for the rest of us, as Victory plans to make this an annual affair. And the only thing you'll ever have to pretend to be is thirsty.