WORDS Brent Rosen PHOTOS Jon Kohn
John Applegate’s wife purchased him a beer making kit, and it gathered dust in his garage until his curiosity and chemistry background overcame him. He finds the planning, the sitting, and the conceptualizing relaxing, the same way an accomplished home chef enjoys thinking through a dinner menu and then preparing it, ingredient after ingredient combining to form a finished product. Applegate is now trying to rediscover the brewing techniques used by monks in 64 A.D.
Brandon Brazil brought six-packs of high-gravity beer back to Montgomery when he returned from trips to Georgia. At the time, high gravity beer was illegal in Alabama, so if your taste ran toward anything beyond standard American light beer, you were out of luck. Eventually Brazil realized his expenses were far higher than they would be if he just made high-gravity beer himself.
Kevin Long discovered the joys of European beer on a trip to Austria. When he returned to Montgomery he found himself missing the full-bodied, dense flavor he had grown to love on his travels. Since no one in Alabama sold the beer he enjoyed, he decided to brew it himself.
All of these men were bootleggers. Their hobby was illegal under Alabama law; their mere ownership of beer-making materials was a felony. On May 9, 2013, Governor Bentley signed HB 9, making home-brewing legal, and now these men can emerge from the shadows. Say “hello” to the last beer bootleggers in America.
“Dear Mr. Harrison,” the letter began, ”I would like to remind you that HB9 has not passed in the Alabama Legislature during this session, and therefore what you possess for sale in the form of Beer and Wine Making kits remains illegal under Code of Laws 28-1-1 and penalties explained in 28-4-52.” This was the opening text of the cease and desist letter that Lee Harrison (pictured above left), owner of Fairview Homebrew in Cloverdale, found slipped under his door the day after the Montgomery Advertiser ran an article about the Southern Makers festival. The article included information about Harrison’s seminar on homemade beer brewing, and apparently, the ABC Board found the article too much eye-poking to ignore. In case Harrison did not receive the message, the ABC Board informed him that Tiffany Bell, the event planner for Southern Makers (and a MADE contributing editor) had removed his scheduled workshop from the Southern Makers event (for a scanned version of the letter, see our website).
A few days after HB 9 passed the legislature, I visited Harrison. He proudly pointed to the ABC letter, which now hangs on the wall of his shop, believing he received one of the last prohibitionist letters in America. While he can now, after Alabama became the 49th of 50 states to legalize home-brewing (thanks Mississippi!), view the contents of the letter with a laugh, at the time it was enough to frighten. In fact, Tiffany Bell was told that if Harrison participated in Southern Makers, the workshop would be shut down by the ABC board. While it’s hard to imagine the enforcement division of the ABC Board shutting down part of a major art festival in downtown Montgomery over a seminar, apparently, the ABC Board was willing to carry out its threats.
Amusingly, all of the home-brewers I spoke with followed the debate on HB 9 before the bill passed, and none of them could believe the bill’s opponents’ faulty logic and outright inanity when it came to home-brewing. Opponents claimed that cheap beer would flood the community, not realizing that it costs $50 dollars to make 5 gallons of beer (for those of you unfamiliar with weights and measures, that is approximately four 12-packs). Some were worried about the children, apparently not realizing it takes weeks to turn a combination of yeast, malt, hops and water into a drinkable beer. “Let’s get drunk in three weeks y’all,” is not something I’ve ever heard a teenager utter. Opponents also believed Alabamian’s were singularly irresponsible when it came to home-brewed beer, since there was no willingness to look across our borders at the examples of Georgia, Tennessee, or Florida, none of which experienced any of the home-brewing-related problems that were predicted to befall Alabama.
So what was the problem? Entrenched interests of beer distributors? Reflexive dislike for anything that further liberalizes alcohol? The ABC Board spreading misinformation to continue its stranglehold on the entire alcohol business in Alabama ? No one can say for sure.
What can be said for sure is the cost to Alabama of this misguided rule. Not only did it criminalize the harmless activity of people who spend more time checking in on home-brewing Reddit threads than they do corrupting the youth with illegal hooch, but there were economic losses as well. All of the home-brewing supplies ordered online not subject to sales tax, all of those empty storefronts that could have viably sold beer and wine making supplies, all of the purveyors of malts, hops, and brew-making yeasts unable to service the Alabama market; this represents a significant economic impact. Worse still, home-brewers are an entrepreneurial sort, and as any beer maker will tell you: today’s home-brewers are tomorrow craft brewers. And craft beer is big business.
Cade Miller is the brewmaster at Railyard Brewing Company, however he got his start just like everyone else that frequents Fairview Homebrew: making beer at home. Miller fell in love with Lowenbrau and other darker, German beers before there was anywhere in Montgomery to buy them. He began experimenting with craft beer in his home, and soon was able to clone Lowenbrau in five gallon batches. After serving our country in Iraq, Miller decided he wanted to brew beer professionally. He started out at Avondale Brewery in Birmingham, and then attended brewing school in Germany. After brewing school, he worked professionally at a few Alabama craft breweries before he was offered the brewmaster position at Railyard.
When I asked Miller about the differences between being an amateur home brewer, and a restaurant brewmaster, his answer was simple: “making the beer is no different, and the ingredients are pretty much the same, I just have much cooler equipment.” Miller talked at length about the room for experimentation he has as a professional, combining different combinations of ingredients to create new kinds of beer, much the way a chef would tweak traditional recipes when conceptualizing a new dish. Miller talked about his experiments with ancient brewing techniques; for instance, when we met at Fairview Homebrew he brought a batch of Mead. Mead is a honey wine, but the fermentation process is no different than one would use to make any sort of beer. I asked Cade where this spirit of experimentation came from, and he felt like everything circled back to his days brewing at home.
While Miller may be the only pro that currently hangs out at Fairview Homebrew, some of the other home-brewers I met have already distinguished themselves as amateurs. Jonathan Sexton, a home-brewer who started marking beer after meeting like-minded people through Montgomery’s WAKA kickball league, just won the Silver Medal in the Stout category at a Golden Triangle beer competition in Mississippi. He brought a sample of the batch, and I can say with confidence that if Leroy sold that beer on draught it would pass most aficionado’s muster. Other home-brewers in Montgomery have entered Samuel Adams’ “Longshot American Homebrew Contest,” where the winner gets a small run of beer produced by Samuel Adams based on their homebrew recipe. These competitions are a showcase for home-brewers, forming a kind of AAA farm league for home-brewers who one day want to become pros.
Now that Alabama home-brewers no longer have to tangle with the ABC Board, expect more beer making competitions, more home-brewers meeting out in the open to learn from -- and collaborate with -- each other, and more Alabama home-brewers turning their favorite recipes from home into your favorite beer at the bar. This brings a great benefit to Alabama’s economy: according to Miller, for each of the past three years, craft beer in Alabama has enjoyed triple digit growth, and craft beer continues to be a true driver for Alabama’s tourism and restaurant industries. With innovation-destroying laws no longer on the books, the only limit on Alabama’s home-brewers is their creativity -- well that, and the time their significant others will allow them to spend tasting, talking about, and tinkering with beer.
Fairview Homebrew is located in Old Cloverdale and online at www.fairviewhomebrew.com
