How was alcohol production managed in places like East Germany and the USSR?

by b3ntleg

In planned economies was there just one government ran brewery/distillery or did the government run multiple ones for variety? Or was this something that was heavily imported?

MartinGreywolf

Private enterprises that existed before the socialism took over were taken from their owners and managed by the state. You still had differing brands of beer, and in most cases they were still made the way they used to, only with increased industrialization, and most of the people employed by them were left in place. It was usually just owners who got the real short end of the stick and got everything stolen from under them, unless they had good standing with the Party, but that's a lengthy topic.

Most modern beers are made in the same place, and their brewing process goes back centuries - the most famous are probably Czech beers Pilsner Urquell and Velkopopovicky Kozel, the former actually giving birth to an entire type of beer, and still using more or less the same logo it did during the socialism.

As for import, nothing was really heavily imported into the Soviet block, at least not from the US block, and definitely not consumer goods. You had hell of a black market for Western songs, books, movies and the like, though.