In 104 years, the sprawling building at 40 Bowden Square in Southampton has been a tavern, inn, speak-easy, hangout for socialites, Italian chain restaurant and brew pub.


It’s most famous for its roughly 40-year stretch as Herb McCarthy’s, a place remembered more for its customers’ copious consumption of hard liquor than for its food.


The story of what is now the Southampton Publick House reflects America’s changing attitudes toward alcohol. It’s an appropriate story to tell today, the 75th anniversary of the day beer became legal again in the waning days of Prohibition.


Publick House owner Don Sullivan is trying to ride the wave of change as best he can in the face of strong headwinds that have reduced the volume of alcohol sold at bars. That means finding a way to greatly boost off-premises sales of his Belgian-style craft beers, bottled and marketed under the name of Southampton Ales & Lagers.


”People are drinking dramatically less than 25 years ago,” Sullivan says, “but instead of having a scotch and water or a beer, they’re having a Bass Ale or a Dogfish Head, or they’re having a Tanqueray 10 cosmo or Arrack gin.” They want better-quality products, he says, because they’re more likely to drink one or two drinks rather than three or more.


”Moderation has far surpassed the idea of drinking to excess, and that’s a great thing,” he says. National Institutes of Health statistics show an 18 percent drop in per-capita alcohol consumption from 1980 to 2005.


While it is good news for safety on the roads and for peoples’ health, moderation has brought about a significant change in the restaurant business. “The old adage was that bar restaurants made their money at the bar,” Sullivan says. “That’s not the case anymore. You may have had 40-50 percent of your sales at the bar, now if you’ve got 10-15 percent, you’re lucky.”


Sullivan, who opened the Publick House with his brothers in 1996, struck a deal in January with Pabst Brewing Co. to expand distribution to the eastern half of the United States. This year, Sullivan hopes to triple last year’s beer sales of 50,000 cases.


The 46-year-old entrepreneur admits the beer business has been a struggle. While he says the restaurant is profitable, he loses money on beer sales. “You need 200,000 cases to begin to say, OK, this makes sense,” he says.


Sullivan grew up in Floral Park. He got his bachelor’s in business from St. Francis College in Brooklyn and his master’s in hospitality management from the New School. In the winter he worked for the company that managed the huge wine cellar for Windows on the World, the restaurant at the World Trade Center.


During the summer he worked at the waterfront Chart Inn in Hampton Bays as a chef and manager. Eventually, Sullivan became a partner in the restaurant, which was renamed Riptide.


He began to notice the rise of unusual beer brands at bars in Brooklyn and Manhattan. “Bars that used to have six taps now had 20 taps,” he said. Sierra Nevada, Brooklyn Beer, Summit and Pyramid “were beginning to get on the shelf at King Kullen, and you were beginning to see them at steakhouses,” he says. That gave him the idea that brewing your own craft beer could strengthen a restaurant’s chances of survival.


Southampton Ales began slowly, with sales of kegged beer made at the restaurant’s microbrewery, where workers excavated four feet below the basement and removed the floor of the bar to drop beer storage tanks into place.


Sullivan hired Phil Markowski as brewmaster and the company’s beers began winning awards and favorable reviews. It expanded by inking contracts with brewers in Saratoga and Wilkes-Barre, Pa.


To further increase production, Sullivan looked into the idea of building a brewery in an economic development zone at Gabreski Airport in Westhampton. That would have cost more than $7 million, Sullivan says. With freight costs high and growing, “how do we effectively get finished beer off Long Island through the tri-state area and out into the East Coast distribution network? We simply could not, no matter what we did, come up with a model that was going to make money over time.”


Pabst was looking to expand into the craft beer segment and Sullivan felt the much bigger company could handle the complicated logistics of dealing with distributors and expanding the availability of Southampton ales. Pabst will continue to deal with Southampton’s wholesalers in 11 Northeast and mid-Atlantic states and will make it available in the Southeast and Central states.


On April 7, 1933, as Prohibition was nearing the end of its 14-year run, the federal government began allowing production and sale of beer containing 3.2 percent alcohol. Americans drank it up. The headline in the next day’s New York Times: “Nation Has Beer Shortage; 1,000,000 Barrels Consumed; Rush Brings in Big Revenue . . . St. Louis Going Thirsty.”


Sullivan is celebrating the 75th anniversary at the Publick House today and hoping the reaction to the wider rollout of Southampton Ales will be positive as well. Of course, his brewery isn’t serving 3.2 beer. Many of his varieties are three times as strong in terms of alcohol content.