Important Year in Beer History

Is there any historical evidence that President Carter actually advocated for the legalization of homebrewing at the federal level, or did he just happen to be president when that particular legislation passed? People on these forums seem to give Carter a lot of credit for simply signing his name rather than the individual Congressmen who pushed the legislation.

 

1999, when I was legal to drink.

Or, 1989, when I began to drink

 

Yeah, it's pretty weird the mythology that's developed around that. It hardly made big news (one wire service story called it a "part of a minor five-part revenue bill"). I've always thought that the "Legal Homebrewing created Craft brewing" trope was something that the AHA promoted after it had established the Association of Brewers in '83.

Cranston should likely get the credit over Carter but, more to the point, no one at the time thought the two - homebrewing and the early "microbreweries" were even related. Both Anchor, obviously, and New Albion were already brewing in October 1978. Read the early articles on the new breweries in the AHA's own Zymurgy during the period, and they don't imply legalized homebrewing caused those new companies to be established.

Note, too, those last few paragraphs in the above article - whether homebrewing was illegal was in dispute. (An AP story at the time quoted an ATF rep saying "There hasn't been a home brew case made since Prohibition".) And while some early "craft" brewers did home brew, likely many also had done it while it was supposedly "illegal" - Ken Grossman's shop (opened in 1976) and many others around the country openly sold equipment and ingredients, many advertising in local media, grocery stores still sold malt syrup, hardware stores sold equipment, indie and chain bookstores stocked homebrewing books, suppliers sold mail order via classified ads in mainstream magazines, etc. The homebrewing clubs, noted in the above article, existed and were often featured in local papers' DIY articles. The fact that some of the early brewers had homebrewed seems natural, like saying someone who started a restaurant or became a chef had once cooked at home.

And a number of the early microbrewers and owners weren't primarily home-brewing hobbyists - Maytag, William Newman, Jack McAuliffe, professional winemaker Charles Coury (of Cartwright in Portland, OR), River City's (Sac., CA) owner/brewer, Jim Schlueter, had brewed at Schlitz, Redhook's first brewmaster came from Rainier Brewing Co., Yakima's Bert Grant was a brewing industry veteran in Canada and had worked for Stroh (after turning down a job at Anheuser-Busch), Chesbay in VA, started by a homebrewer, hired a Bavarian brewer. While Jim Koch now claims to have brewed SABL in his kitchen (a story that didn't appear for many years) he from a long line of profession brewers and had worked for Boston Consultants.

 

1845, the year Hopsteiner was founded. With the popularity of the IPA, who else has been there to support the hop industry and offer more diversity than Hopsteiner?

 

As I recall he did not mention it at all. The fact remains that he signed the bill. I assume he read the bill, and knew of that part of the bill addressing home brewing, and he chose to sign the bill. Giving him credit for this is just a fact, whether he was an active home brewing advocate or not.

 

Maybe it's when hops was introduced to beer? Flavor and preservative all in one.

 

The IPA thing, eh...
That whole concept's been so watered down now as to be just a marketing slogan. And it didn't really do so much to get the industry going anyway.

But for his vision, and what he actually did for hop farming and production, and even American beer archetypes: F yeah, and then some!

 

Hell yeah!

 

I’m going with 1786. The year in which the oldest currently existing North American brewery was founded. In fact, they still brew beer on the original site, or so I’ve read.

 

No 1516 *sadface

 

1842.

 

IMO we gotta dial it back a few hundred million more years to the origination of yeast.

 

Well geepers let's just dial it back to the big bang whatcha say?

 

I was thinking actually the year 366i7721, the pinnacle of beer culture in the mirror universe that existed before the big bang. After all, doesn't this modern beer culture owe everything to the quantum waves created by holophone reviews of those epic brews rippling across space time?

 

1904, when Hjelte Claussen of New Carlsberg Brewery discovered that Brettanomyces was the reason beer spoiled and ultimately made it taste like shit.

 

You fail to reference beer cultures in present time parallel universes, so I believe you still haven't provided correct time sequence.