Hops and change

MOST Americans may not realise it, but their country is a little freer, and perhaps slightly tipsier than it was last month. On July 1st it became legal to make beer at home in Mississippi. Alabama lifted the threat of prosecution for homebrewers in May. It is now legal to craft your own suds in all 50 states.

Benjamin Franklin is said (probably apocryphally) to have called beer “proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy”. Jimmy Carter signed a law exempting home-made beer from excise tax in 1978, in effect legalising homebrewing at the federal level. But it has taken 35 years for the most puritanical states to swallow the bitter pils of legalisation. Outfits such as the American Homebrewers Association (AHA) have been lobbying state legislatures to loosen up for decades. It took five years of legislative ferment to get the law changed in Alabama, for example.

Opponents have an image of “an old country guy back in the woods” says Richard Force, an avid homebrewer in Alabama. In fact, Mr Force is a data analyst for a medical technology firm. He recently won “best in show” at a Mississippi homebrewing competition, he notes, for a smoked beer with “a wonderful, roasted ham flavour”.

Craig Hendry, the head of a pressure group called “Raise Your Pints”, has been homebrewing illegally in Mississippi for the past 12 years. He agrees that the hobby attracts “a different group of people from the regular Miller Bud Coors drinkers”. They are not in it to save money, Mr Force says: “If you just wanted to drink beer, it would be much cheaper to buy a 30-pack of Natty Light at the supermarket.” He reckons he spends about $1,500 a year on his habit, though he insists that he seldom drinks more than one beer a day. Travelling to contests costs money.

It was the economic arguments, both men agree, that won over wavering legislators. Many homebrewers ultimately set up shop commercially. Jefferson County, home to Birmingham, Alabama’s biggest city, had only one brewery in 2008, Mr Force notes; there are three now, with another two in the hopper, as it were. Given that the county declared bankruptcy two years ago, the extra revenue these new ventures bring in is as intoxicating to local officials as their wares are to patrons.

But homebrewers’ long stagger to freedom is not yet complete. For one thing, it remains illegal to make your own beer in the “dry” counties of many states, including Alabama and Mississippi. And even in places where homebrewing is legal, a host of subsidiary regulations still gum up the taps, points out Gary Glass of AHA. There are often limits on how much you can brew, where you can consume your handiwork, whom you can serve it to and so on. Idaho even insists that homebrewers use only ingredients grown within the state. It is possible, it turns out, to make beer from those famous potatoes.