![]() While studying at the University of Virginia in 1970, a friend’s neighbor who made “Prohibition-style homebrew” introduced Papazian to homebrewing. One of these hobbyists was Charlie Papazian. By the 1960s, even with homebrewing’s continued illegality, homebrewing clubs sprang up around the country as hobbyists tried to make beer that was different from the American light lager that was so common at the time. Unlike homebrewed beer, moonshine was often toxic due to impure ingredients and clumsy-if not negligent distilling conditions-when prepared by amateurs, making it proved dangerous. Federal regulators were concerned about people using the brewing grain not for beer, but for moonshine, a homemade and highly potent hard liquor. Homebrewing remained illegal at the federal level. When Prohibition ended in 1933, many homebrewers returned to buying professionally made beer and most homebrewing activities declined. Courtesy of Warshaw Collection of Business Americana, Archives Center. (Wink, wink.) As Prohibition approached, the brewing industry created ingredients such as this “beer extract” (aka malt extract) to encourage Americans to brew at home. In fact, breweries often included instructions of what not to do with the extract to avoid accidentally producing beer. This product could be used as a baking ingredient, but was more often used to homebrew beer. Before and during Prohibition, many breweries essentially encouraged homebrewing by marketing malt extract. The thirteen years of Prohibition, from 1920 to 1933, had been a hard slog of bootleg liquor, moonshine, and yes – homebrewed beer. But that’s just one unexpected facet in the story of how our current beer industry came to be. As crazy as it may seem now, homebrewing used to be illegal and Jimmy Carter actually played a part in changing that, contributing to the craft beer revolution. You should be offering your suds up to the man who was reported by the media during the 1976 election to be a non-drinker. The next time you raise a glass of craft beer, make sure you toast former President Jimmy Carter.
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