1970s but some statewide bans remain, the last of which was mississippi. the bill to end was passed in may and went into effect last monday. the beer was championed by a local beer advocacy group called raise your pints. clarify status of home brewing as a legal, fun, and wholesome hobby. according to home brewers association, there are more than a million home brewers in the united states. even the white house has its own home brew. it s why president obama did not weigh in on the bill. we assume he s raising a pint to it. tulsa, oklahoma, will probably not host olympics after new york times ran a story about the unofficial committee to bring it there, the mayor announced he wasn t backing a bid. the mayor previously supported one but his comments end any hope of a tulsa olympics, if it ever kpigsed at all. despite the excitement, tulsa only has a third of the required hotel rooms for the city, the
these deals aren t just hot. they re explosive! sleep train s 4th of july sale ends sunday. sleep train your ticket to a better night s sleep so what should we know for today? we should know it is now legal to home brew beer in all 50 states. home brewing has been legal at the federal level since the late
importing material from europe, suddenly could. jon: i didn t realize that the prohibition laws that allowed, you know, home wine making and so forth didn t apply to beer. right. it was technically illegal to brew beer at home in this country back in the 1970 s, huh? absolutely right. after repeal in 1933 home wine making was legalized. home brewing was not for whatever reason. while the government did not really crack down on home brewing there was always that fear that could happen at any moment. so that put a child on entrepeneurship. jon: let s flash forward to today. a lot of the story are condensing. maybe people will run out to buy your book to read bit all, flash forward today, what has it done for the economy in this country, relaxation of regulation and taxation? jon, it is kind of amazing. i do track this in my book the audacity of hops, we ve gone from fewer than 50 breweries to more than 2700 now. a lot of the home brewers
became after 1978 they became the early commercial brewing superstars. it caused a explosion in home brewing and beer-tasting conventions. the great american beer festival which is held in denver every fall is the largest tasting beer festival in the world. it started with something like 22 booths back in 1982. now it is a ridiculous amount. they sell out 50,000 tickets in half an hour. jon: wow. every state has at least a couple of breweries. some like california, new york, north carolina, michigan, have dozens. it creates 10 of millions in tax revenue a year. tens of thousands of jobs as you can imagine. and some states in particular and some cities like new york, philadelphia and san francisco are using it as, using craft breweries as economic development. as the craft brewery comes in it gentry nice the neighborhood.
what happened to the american brewery industry that it suddenly exploded into the number of breweries? two things happened beginning in 1976. it was then during the ford administration there was a big push by private industry to lower the excise tax on a barrel of beer from $9 to $7 for smaller producers. this was at a time when there were fewer, as you said, fewer than 50 breweries in the united states. so the excise tax was lowered from $9 to $7 per barrel. doesn t sound like much. jon: it doesn t. that is actually more than 20%. okay. so cost of business goes down more than 20%. two years later, president carter signs into law the legalization of home brewing at the federal level. so suddenly, cost of commercial business is lower. and all these home brewers who were operating underground and you know, trepidations about sharing information, or about