Homebrew and Beer Festivals

A 78 year-old law that has been largely ignored for decades is now keeping homebrewers out of Illinois beer festivals. I won't speak to any specific festival or homebrewer group, but, suffice to say, I'm not happy. Update 4/19/2012: Since the local paper has now run a story on the subject, I think I can go ahead and say that I'm talking about the Peoria Jaycees International Beer Festival, and my own homebrew club, the Homebrewers of Peoria. The statute in question, the Liquor Control Act of 1934, lays out all the licensing requirements for making and selling alcoholic beverages of any kind, but provides the following exception in Article II, Sec. 2-1:

...nothing herein contained shall prevent the possession and transportation of alcoholic liquor by the possessor for the personal use of the possessor, his family and guests, nor prevent the making of wine, cider or other alcoholic liquor by a person from fruits, vegetables or grains, or the products thereof, by simple fermentation and without distillation, if it is made solely for the use of the maker, his family and his guests...

Further exemptions are made for medicinal and religious uses of alcohol.

So hombrewing of any alcoholic beverage (shy of distillation) is totally legal without license in Illinois, provided it is purely for personal, familial, and guest consumption. So, to the letter of the law, serving homebrew at your average beer festival is, probably, illegal. The real question at hand is, should it be?

I've only heard two arguments against serving homebrew in a semi-public venue such as a beer festival. The first is some vague notion of sanitation. Homebrew is, viewed by the government, a largely uncontrolled substance that could contain anything. We're brewing at home, in our filthy, non health-inspected garages. Lord only knows what we're putting in there! And if someone gets sick from drinking our dirty, dirty beer, the festival organizers could be held liable. Oh noes!

Make no mistake, sanitation is important. However, bad sanitation doesn't lead to toxic beer. It may lead to bad beer (sometimes on purpose), but the simple fact is that nothing harmful to humans can grow in the alcohol and preservative (hops) rich environment of beer. That's why people drank it in the middle ages instead of plague infested water. Sure, there are plenty of allergies that could be related to beer; gluten, yeast, nut, etc. But anyone with such allergies should know to ask before they drink, and homebrew is no different from commercial beer in that instance. Indeed, homebrew is probably safer in that case, since the actual brewer is right there to field any questions about the beer they're serving.

The second argument against serving homebrew at public events stems from the very definition of homebrew: unlicensed alcohol. This can be attacked in several ways, from homebrewers circumventing licensing requirements, to serving untaxed alcohol, to robbing commercial brewers of sales.

Let's think about just how big a contribution homebrewers may be to beer festivals. BeerFestivals.org lists nine scheduled beer festivals in Illinois for 2012. I'll be extremely generous and assume that, 1) being early in the year, only about a fifth of festivals are scheduled and listed, for around 50 total fests, and 2) every single one of these festivals is pouring homebrew. And, in another likely overestimate, I'll say 20 unique homebrewers at each festival bring five five-gallon kegs apiece. That's 1,000 (!) people serving 25,000 gallons (!!) of beer. Keep in mind, I've overestimated everywhere I could, and this is probably off by an order of magnitude at least.

The current tax on beer is $0.231 per gallon.... actually, I'll assume that some portion of that beer is over 7% alcohol and taxed at the next higher rate of $1.39 per gallon, so let's call it an effective tax of $0.50 per gallon. Add to that 1,000 homebrewers buying a $500 liquor license, and that's about $512,500 in lost revenue for the state. In a state with a budget deficit of around $8 billion. Or, about 0.0064% of the deficit. That is pennies, and will probably cost the state more than that just to process and enforce.
 

Is the availability of homebrew driving down demand for commercial beer at festivals? Hard to say. You're likely paying the same token or ticket for a sample of homebrew as commercial, so it's not like it's free. (The brewer does not see any of that money, by the way, so we're not selling our beer.) I would argue that, while a given attendant may drink one less commercial sample for each homebrew they try, overall attendance will be higher when homebrew is being served, increasing sales across the board.

I don't have any numbers to back that up, and the truth is probably more complicated, but there's obviously a balance point somewhere and commercial losses to homebrew are not as drastic as those big brewers might assume.

I hope this hasn't seemed to ranty. There's just no reason to keep homebrewers out of beer festivals. We love to share our beer with as many people as possible, get feedback, and improve our craft. The more outlets for this, the better. Most independent, local breweries are started by former homebrewers. Letting us into festivals could even lead to more good commercial beer on the market!

Illinois is just the latest state to get hit with this. Overeager liquor control boards across the country are noticing that the homebrew laws (usually written just after the end of Prohibition) are needlessly strict and haven't been enforced. Oregon went through this last year, Wisconsin is in the process. The laws on the books were much more strict than Illinois' (forbidding the very removal of homebrew from the home in which it was brewed), and, being much more beer-friendly states, the laws were changed. I have no such high hopes for Illinois.