Slate article on home brewing and "innovation"

"While this law ensured the quality, tradition, and purity of beer in Germany, it also stifled experimentation and innovation by prohibiting brewers from testing other ingredients. The Belgian monks, by contrast, were free to develop complex and innovative beer styles during the last few centuries by adding fruits, spices, wild yeast and bacteria, and other cereal grains, like wheat, to their ales."

Total bullshit. The Reinheitsgebot only applied to Bavaria. In Northern Germany they brewed beers as equally weird as in Belgium: with fruit, spices, all sorts of wild yeast lactic acis bacteria. And it wasn't the monks but secular brewers in Belgium that came up with all the weird styles.

 

Yeah, lots of misinformation in that article.

"Anheuser-Busch and MillerCoors—sell 95 percent of all beer in the United States..." is way off - for 2010 it was under 77%.

"...after 1960 there were only a handful of giant, consolidated mega-brewers." Well, "handful" is not a very specific quantity, but even in 1962, there were still over 150 US brewing companies in business. I'd say that the remaining 35-40 old line breweries left by the time the early craft breweries opened in the late 70's through early '80's is still greater than a "handful".

I'm also dubious of the emphasis put on the legalization of homebrewing (mostly due to revionist history by the AHA/Brewers Association) as an important factor in the beginning of the craft brewing industry in the US. While some of the early craft brewers did homebrew, the earliest one were obviously doing it before legalization - such as Jack McAuliffe and Ken Grossman (who also ran a HB shop pre-legalization). But many of the early pioneers were not primarily homebrewers - there's Fritz Maytag, Bert Grant, William Newman, even Jim Koch (from a long line of professional brewers), etc.

Also, While technically homebrewing was "illegal" on the federal level (I've read it was a clerical error that left it off the Federal Alcohol Administration Act), supplies, equipment, books., etc had been sold openly during Prohibition, and that continued to be so right up until Carter simply signed that Transportation Bill that contained a little noticed or opposed amendment that legalized it. The ATF at the time claimed that they had no record of any federal cases against homebrewers after Repeal and wire service stories in 1978 said the law was "widely believed to be ignored anyway".

 

Is that "hey, I would love to drink some more of that!" or "I actually didn't spit it out of my mouth immediately"? What kind of expectations did this guy have for the students' beers? And is it really possible to brew a great homebrew your first time around?