The Beverage of Liberty

OK, I admit it.  Many of you suspected it all along.  My espousal of libertarian principles is really just a cover for my selfish, material interests.  An ideological superstructure, if you will.  Except, it’s not money that motivates me.  It’s beer.

I am a lover of craft beer, and a homebrewer.  And the fact is, freedom makes for good beer. Just look, for example, at the American experience.  Prohibition in the 1920s destroyed what had once been a surprisingly successful and diverse American brewing industry, leaving only a few large brewers of cheap, flavorless swill in its wake.  It wasn’t until the 1980s that innovative, interesting, flavorful beers began to reappear on the American market, driven in part by Jimmy Carter’s legalization of homebrewing in 1978.  Many of today’s most innovative professional brewers got their start as homebrewers – Alesmith’s Peter Zien, Rogue’s Jeff Schultz, Dogfish Head’s Sam Calagione, New Belgium’s Jeff Lebesch, and Sierra Nevada’s Ken Grossman, for example.

Or consider Belgium.  A lot of people still think of Germany as the greatest beer country of Europe.  And Germany does indeed produce some of the world’s finest lagers.  But that’s about it.  Belgium, in contrast, has over 125 breweries producing an incredible range of styles, incorporating everything from wild yeast such as Brettanomyces, to cherries, daffodils, you name it..  If you’ve sampled a bottle of Chimay from your local purveyor, believe me, you’ve only just scratched the most commercially-savvy part of the surface.  Part of the difference between Belgium’s celebration of diversity and Germany’s relatively narrow expertise might be cultural, I suppose.  But a big part of it is due to regulation.  Thanks to the Reinheitsgebot, brewers in Germany simply weren’t legally allowed to engage in the kind of experimentation that their neighbors to the West were undertaking.

Beer admits of a tremendous variety – much more so than wine.  The latest version of the Beer Judge Certification Program Style Guidelines (a must-read for any beer-lover) contains 80 unique styles.  And several of those are catch-all categories like “speciality beer,” admitting of an infinite number of permutations.  But those styles can only flourish in a regulatory environment that permits producers to experiment, and consumers to learn about and purchase the results of that experimentation.  And while the United States has done well, it could do much better.

A good starting place to read about the ways in which the US system falls short of a free market is Glen Whitman’s  Strange Brew: Alcohol and Government Monopoly, which discusses the “three-tier” system that dominates the US alcohol industry, and how it stifles innovation and consumer choice.  But the internet has been abuzz lately with stories detailing the pernicious effects of US alcohol regulation, including several pieces on the blatant rent-seeking of large brewers in Wisconsin, a Reason spot on Pennsylvania’s ridiculous “wine kiosks,” and another piece from Reason on laws that prohibit craft brewers from telling their Texas customers where their products are sold.

On a brighter note, though, there’s always this other Reason piece on the effects of deregulation on Japan’s craft brewing scene, this terrific Reason.TV interview with Anchor Brewing Company’s Fritz Maytag, a good New York Times piece on homebrewing, and an interesting piece from Cato on the relatively laissez-faire atmosphere toward beer distribution in…of all places…Washington, D.C.  Reason’s Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch also have a nice discussion of liberty and the American craft beer scene in their new book, The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What’s Wrong with America.  Hmm.  Come to think of it, I’m starting to notice a bit of a trend with all these Reason links.  Looks like I’m not the only libertarian with a hidden agenda.