Some days the archive gives you nuance. Intellect. Thoughtful insight into something new. And some days, it gives you a man standing in a House office with a pencil, stirring beer he just made legally, while the government's own chemist predicts everyone in the room is going to regret it.

Today is the second kind of day.

In 1926, Congressman Fiorello LaGuardia of New York invited reporters into his House office and made beer. Legally. During Prohibition.

The trick was malt extract — recently approved as a "food" by the government's own Dry Czar — mixed with ordinary near beer, the basically non-alcoholic stuff sold legally on every street corner. LaGuardia combined the two, stirred the mixture with a pencil because nobody in the room had thought to bring a spoon, and watched a thick, dark foam rise to the brim of the glass and overflow onto the floor.

The result was a palatable beer, somewhere around 3 percent alcohol, assembled entirely from products you could buy without breaking a single law.

LaGuardia handed out glasses to the newspaper men in the room. They drank it. One attendee, identified as a former brewer with fifteen years at a Washington brewing company, pronounced it "delightful." When LaGuardia asked what it tasted like exactly, the man wasn't sure — he thought it resembled something called "meuncher."

LaGuardia, apparently enjoying himself, then announced he would make pilsner. "All you do is add a little salt," he told the room, and passed the new mixture around to newspaper men and photographers until he'd used up every ingredient on the table.

The government's own prohibition chemist, Dr. J.M. Doran, was less impressed. "I'll bet they didn't drink more than a glass of that stuff," he said. "If they did, they'll wish they hadn't." He suggested LaGuardia should have mixed in lemon extract instead, which apparently had considerably more alcohol and would have at least produced an effect worth complaining about.

LaGuardia had invited the entire House Liquor Traffic Committee to witness the demonstration. They were, according to the paper, all bone dry. Only one member showed up. Representative Green of Florida watched for a few minutes and declined to taste anything.

The Anti-Saloon League called the whole demonstration a violation of the law. LaGuardia's position was the opposite: every ingredient was legal, every step was legal, and he had simply proven that Prohibition could be defeated using products the Treasury Department had approved itself. "Mr. LaGuardia is simply advertising a bootleg idea," argued Wayne B. Wheeler of the Anti-Saloon League. "It is as illegal as making anything else into a bootleg substitute."

LaGuardia disagreed, on the record, with a glass in his hand.

The guy doing kitchen chemistry in a House office with a borrowed bottle opener and no spoon in sight was running the largest city in the country eight years later. Fiorello LaGuardia became Mayor of New York in 1934 and held the job until 1945. The airport bears his name.

Prohibition was proving dangerous, expensive, and at least for us, very entertaining.