A walk down the aisles of almost any neighborhood liquor store showcases a wealth of variety that hardly seemed possible when I made my first legal purchase [mumble-mumble] years ago. You’ll see 50 bourbons where there used to be five, vodkas from as far and wide as Russia’s Stoli to Tito’s from Texas. If you’d have told 21-year-old me that someday I’d enjoy scotch from Japan, I’d have looked at you like you were a crazy person.
You’ll find, as General Motors used to say about its array of cars, a spirit “for every purse and purpose.” Things are already so good that PJ Media’s own Chris Queen writes a continuing series on bourbon, and it will be a sober night at my house before he runs out of material.
We truly live in a Golden Age.
So how do I put this without veering into completely over-the-top hyperbole?
Forget it. I can’t.
That’s because no matter how good we have it now, our Golden Age of Spirits will soon transmute into a Platinum Age Wrapped in Gold-Pressed Latinum Sprinkled with Diamonds.
All because of a recent decision by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court in New Orleans.
It’s a long-standing stain on our national honor that there’s any law at all standing between liberty-loving Americans and our frontier spirit for distilling spirits when and as we like. But for the last 158 years, the Reconstruction-era Revenue Act of 1868 made it functionally illegal to distill spirits at home.
We’d run up huge debts fighting the Civil War, and liquor taxes made up a sizable portion of Washington’s revenues. So the Revenue Act — hence “revenuers” in federal law enforcement — effectively made it impossible to legally operate a home still. The theory being that big distilleries were easier to tax.
Under the Act, even a hobbyist had to operate a bonded distillery, meet facility and equipment standards, submit to constant oversight, and here’s where we get to the 100-proof, cask-strength truth: pay excise taxes.
It took sixteen decades to set right, but on Friday, the 5th Circuit sided with the nonprofit Hobby Distillers Association in its suit to make home distilling legal for personal use, the same way home-brewing beer and wine was deregulated under President Jimmy Carter.
“Writing for a three-judge panel,” the New York Post reported on Saturday, “Circuit Judge Edith Hollan Jones said the ban actually reduced tax revenue by preventing distilling in the first place, unlike laws that regulated the manufacture and labeling of distilled spirits on which the government could collect taxes.”
“Without any limiting principle, the government’s theory would violate this court’s obligation to read the Constitution carefully to avoid creating a general federal authority akin to the police power,” she added.
The comparison to home-brewing should leap out at you, because the 1978 H.R. 1337 (which became Public Law 95-458) unlocked America’s long-suppressed genius for making beer.
Home brewing and local and regional beers were the norm before Prohibition. But when Prohibition ended, only a few giants like Anheuser-Busch had survived. Before 1978, federal law still treated homemade beer and wine as taxable alcohol, so home brewers spent decades underground. The giants — and their lowest-common-denominator beers — largely snuffed out any local competitors before they even had a chance to come back.
After 1978, everything changed. The best and most interesting home brewers honed their skills and business talents and quickly evolved into microbrewers. Today, Americans enjoy a wider selection and variety of beers than ever — and quality, too.
If the 5th U.S. Circuit Court decision stands, I suspect we’ll soon see similar genius and ambition revealed in the world of spirits. Yesterday’s underground distiller is unleashed to become tomorrow’s micro-distiller of something marvelous and unique.
I can hardly wait, but not even the 5th Circuit can repeal the aging process.
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