The Hops are Free!

Many of you know that I have been following the efforts of the Free the Hops grassroots organization for a couple of years now. For those that don't, a quick summary...

Until this morning Alabama was one of two remaining states (Mississippi being the other) that limited the alcohol content of beer to 6%. In practice, this meant that you could not get any of high quality "gourmet" beers here, for example the types of beers that European monks have been brewing for 600 years. To illustrate how deeply this affected supply, 98 of the top 100 beers on the beeradvocate.com rankings were not available in Alabama.

All that changed this morning when Governor Riley signed the Gourmet Beer Bill into law!

It took four years for the bill to get past the Alabama Senate. The Senate has rules which allow a single legislator to filibuster a bill indefinitely, and the Gourmet Beer Bill fell victim to that fate in the last three years. As you can imagine, there's no shortage of opponents to anything having to do with increasing availability of alcohol in the deep south. Despite the loss of tax revenue to neighboring states, despite the damage done to local businesses who could not sell these products, and despite the fact that teenagers aren't going to go and get drunk on gourmet beer that can easily cost $5 a bottle, these opponents have successfully blocked this legislation for the past four years. Until now!

As for me, I'm looking forward to having a larger selection of my favorite American and European beers arriving in town very soon. And hopefully, enterprising business folks will see this as an opportunity to open some brewpubs and microbreweries in this state, something which has been almost non-existent until now.

There's still much work to do. There are other antiquated restrictions still in place. For example, brewpubs in Alabama must meet the requirement of being located in a historical building. They must also be located in a county in which beer was brewed for public consumption prior to the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1919.

I'm sure Free the Hops is already thinking about their legislative agenda for next year to tackle some of these other issues. But the 6% limit was the big one, and thanks to their efforts and a large grassroots movement, the hops are free in Alabama!