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Westbound immigrants, pioneers and entrepreneurs alike arrived in Kansas City with a thirst for progress and beer. Breweries both small and mighty seized opportunity in a climate of ceaseless social change and fierce regional competition. Muehlebach Brewing Company commanded the market, operating in Kansas City for more than eighty years. Built in 1902, the iconic brick warehouse of Imperial Brewing still stands today. Prohibition made times tough for brewers and citizens in the Paris of the Plains, but political Boss Tom Pendergast kept the taps running. In 1989, Boulevard Brewing kicked off the local craft beer renaissance, and a bevy of breweries soon formed a flourishing community. Food and beer writer Pete Dulin explores Kansas City's hop-infused history and more than sixty breweries from the frontier era to the twenty-first century.

Like most cities during Prohibition, Kansas City had illegal alcohol, bootleggers, speakeasies, cops on the take, corrupt politicians and moralizing reformers. But by the time the Eighteenth Amendment was repealed, Kansas City had been singled out by one observer as one of the wettest cities, as well as the wickedest. A grocer managed a still in the basement of his store. A raid on the Tingle Oil Company found two hundred drums of oil and the largest illegal brewery ever found in the state. This seedy underworld transformed the Heart of America into the Paris of the Plains. Author John Simonson resurrects forgotten stories by revisiting places where they occurred and telling the salacious history of booze in Kansas City.