Cheers, and thank you to an American homebrew hero, President Jimmy Carter. His legacy will live on in every batch of beer brewed.
— American Homebrewers Association
Rest in peace, James Earl Carter Jr.
In my estimation, the former president was a far more complicated human than he has been portrayed by defenders and detractors alike, perhaps even a genuine Georgia peanut belt intellectual. Even as an atheist, I consider myself a fan of Carter’s and voted for him in 1980.
But this is a beer column. It has been handed down to us as an article of faith that one of Carter’s signal achievements was legalizing homebrewing, thus launching the craft beer revolution.
Yes and no; maybe. To be sure, Carter signed the product of the legislative sausage grinder (H.R. 1337) in 1978, but the bill’s back story deserves a clear-headed explanation of the sort offered right here at the Washington Beer Blog: The Truth about Jimmy Carter and the Craft Beer Revolution.
H.R. 1337 was a simple, slam-dunk tax bill that revised the IRS code … (it) was amended to provide individuals with an exemption to the beer and wine excise tax. It was not illegal to make beer, but it was illegal to not pay taxes on the beer once you’d made it. No realistic mechanism existed for an individual to pay such taxes.
You’d need to start a company and sell the beer to pay the taxes. Because homebrewers, by definition, were not looking to sell the beer, there was no reason for them to pay an excise tax, except that the law required it.
The amendment to H.R. 1337 allowed “any adult to produce wine and beer for personal and family use and not for sale without incurring the wine or beer excise taxes or any penalties for quantities per calendar year of: (1) 200 gallons if there are two or more adults in the household and (2) 100 gallons if there is only one adult in the household.”
Essentially, by clarifying homebrewing’s tax status and providing an exemption for home use, the bill’s effect was to legalize (perhaps more accurately, decriminalize) homebrewing from the federal perspective.
Senator Alan Cranston (D. CA) created and sponsored H.R. 1337’s homebrewing amendment. Representative William Steiger (R. WI) co-sponsored the amendment.
It is known that the Los Angeles-based Maltose Falcons, America’s oldest homebrewing club (founded in 1974, pre-decriminalization), aggressively lobbied Cranston —...Read more
