A Victory for Homebrewers

The Wall Street Journal Law Blog recently reported on an Alabama bill that repealed the Prohibition Era restriction on the homebrewing of beer in the state. The enrolled bill, HB9, allows “a person . . . [to] produce at his or her legal residence beer, mead, cider, and table wine . . . for personal use.” Alabama was the last state in the nation to prohibit homebrewing.

Beer turns up in the law more often than you might think. Here are a couple examples of recent legal scholarship analyzing the brew –

• What’s Brewing in the Old North State: An Analysis of the Beer Distribution Laws Regulating North Carolina’s Craft Breweries, 88 N.C.L. Rev. 2198 (2010).
• Green Beer: Incentivizing Sustainability in California’s Brewing Industry, 5 Golden Gate U. Envtl. L.J. 481 (2012).
• Beer, Liquor, or a Little Bit of Both? Getting to the Bottom of Properly Classifying Flavored Malt Beverages in the United States and Australia, 39 Ga. J. Int’l & Comp. L. 471 (2011).