since draft beer was not pasteurized, kegs were shipped under refrigeration. bottle beer for the most part moved in insulated box cars. in severe weather, the beer was kept from freezing by charcoal heaters in the cars. do some googling on Manufacturers Railway of St Louis or Anheuser Busch and you might find a lot of information. MRS was and i believe still is a wholly owned subsidiary of Anheuser Busch but i don't know what changed with the recent merger or buyout of AB. MRS had a large a fleet of cars in dedicated service for their parent company and was quite an operation at one time. they did all the switching inbound and outbound for what was then the world's largest brewery along with serving quite a few other industries such as Nooter Boiler in the south end of downtown St. Louis. lots of street trackage with a fleet of spotless alco locomotives.
grizlump
My Dad always bought his beer in cases of 24 bottles. They were deposit, and he returned them the next time he picked up a case. As I recall, deposit bottles were the most common packaging for beer. Cans came along later, and with them, the opener. Not that you're going to model it, but for many years beer cans had no pop-tops, so you needed a "church key" to open one. On one end, there was a triangular wedge with a sharp point that would punch a triangular hole to drink from, and another on the far side of the can to let the air out. On the other end of the opener was a hook for opening bottles. Twist offs weren't invented yet, either. (Wow, I really just went through a description of an opener, like I was talking to some guy from Alpha Centauri. But, there may be readers who have never even seen one of these things.)
Soda did not come in cans until years later. When Coke and Pepsi first made the switch, people who hadn't seen the new packaging were aghast to see kids on the beach drinking what they thought must be beer! What else comes in a can like that but beer?
The middle of the 20th century was the transition from ice-bunker reefers to mechanically-cooled cars. This is the Wikipedia link to reefers. It's fun reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refrigerator_car
The infamous ruling by the Interstate Commerce Commission which led to the decline of the "billboard reefer" was in 1937. After that, the brightly-colored beer reefers many of us love started to disappear from interchange service. The beer companies weren't all that upset - they loved the advertising, but these cars were all too attractive as targets for thieves as well. This ruling, however, is not in effect on my railroad, so ice-bunker beer reefers may still be seen pulling into town.
Preiser, by the way, makes a package of HO scale beer kegs, barrels and bottles.
It takes an iron man to play with a toy iron horse.
By the '50's, cans and "churchkeys" were fully-established alternatives to the smaller bottles for both beer and soda. (No Boy Scout would drink beer - or be caught dead without a churchkey!) Sodas were shipped in 24-can full boxes (I still have some of my rolling stock packed in 1960-issue Diet Coke boxes. The boxes have outlasted the locomotives and cars they originally contained.)
Pull-tab aluminum lids didn't come along until some years later. In the 1950s, cans and their lids were steel.
In smaller towns, beverages were unloaded onto trucks at the local team track. A lot of those trucks carried the cases, both cans and bottles, in external racks that tapered inward from the bottom. The two-wheeled hand truck used to move them from curbside to store was carried, inverted, on hooks on the back of the truck. IIRC, the drivers tended to be rather muscular...
Chuck (Modeling Central Japan in September, 1964)