President Carter and Craft Beer
Historians will debate the legacy of Presidency Jimmy Carter, who served from 1977 to 1980. There is a wide range of opinions from glowing to disparaging. But one aspect is indisputable – his role in the craft beer industry.
Archeologists have discovered evidence of beer as far back as 7000 BC, during the Stone Age as humans shifted from a nomadic existence to a more settled agriculturally based society. Beer’s history is described below:
Mesopotamia – Sumerians and Babylonians
About 1800 BC, the Sumerians, a culture that lived along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers (modern day Iraq) wrote their beer recipe in ‘The Hymn to Ninkasi, Goddess of Beer.’
The hymn is shown in the adjacent image in cuneiform, for those conversant in that language:
To read it in English, click here
The commercialization of beer is illustrated The Alulu Tablet from the city of Ur from about 2050 BCE. It is a dated and signed receipt for the delivery of beer, by a brewer named Alulu. The text translates as "Ur-Amma acknowledges receiving from his brewer, Alulu, 5 sila (about 4 1/2 liters) of the 'best' beer."
Beer was also included in ancient myths, such as the poem ‘Inanna and the God of Wisdom.’ The goddess Inanna and the god of wisdom Enki get drunk together. “Enki and Inanna drank beer together. They drank more beer together. They drank more and more beer together. With their bronze vessels filled to overflowing, With the vessels of Urash, Mother of the Earth, They toasted each other; they challenged each other.”
Code of Hammurabi
Code of Hammurabi
The Code of Hammurabi is one of the oldest legal codes in human history. It was established around 1754 BCE by King Hammurabi, ruler of the Babylonian Empire. The code consists of 282 laws.
Law 108, the Code of regulated beer production and distribution, prescribed the death penalty for overcharging: “if a tavern-keeper (female) does not accept corn according to gross weight in payment of drink, but takes money, and the price of the drink is less than that of the corn, she shall be convicted and thrown into the water.” Note the tavern keeper is a woman, and thrown into the water means drowned.
And law 111, fixes the price of beer: “if an inn-keeper furnish sixty ka [a unit of measure similar to a bushel] of drink to the city, she shall receive fifty ka of corn at the harvest.”
Ancient Eqypt
Ancient Eqyptians celebrated the Tekh festival, known as the festival of drunkenness. Story is that Sekhmet, an Egyptian goddess, is consumed with bloodlust. Ra, another god, commands that a large quantity of beer be dyed red and delivered to Dendera, directly in Sekhmet's path. The goddess finds the beer and, thinking it blood, drinks it. She then becomes drunk, falls asleep, and wakes again as Hathor, the kind and gentle friend of humanity. In other words, beer saved mankind.
Monasteries (~500AD to today)
Now skip ahead a thousand (or two) years.
Besides preserving Christianity, monasteries and Catholic monks played a significant role in the history of brewing beer. Monasteries started brewing beer as early as the 5th century. The monks' emphasis on quality was driven by their belief that they were working for God, and a sub-par beer would be a major offense. They discovered hops acted as a preservative, allowing them to store and ship their beer. Additionally, boiling the hops made the beer safer to drink, especially during the plagues that struck Europe during the Middle Ages.
Up for some monastic beer? Click here is a list of sites.
German Purity Decree - The Reinheitsgebot
Brewed in Compliance with the Reinheitsgebot of 1516
Recently (in 1516), Germany passed a beer purity decree known as the ‘Reinheitsgebot.’ The law dictates that beer may only contain water, barley, and hops (yeast was unknown at the time). The law remained in effect until free trade regulations enforced by the European Union allowed non-compliant beers into Germany.
Reinheitsgebot in itself did not guarantee a good beer, and that it limited the types of beers that could be brewed and sold. (Wheat beer, Weizenbier, and most dark beers are technically in violation of the purity code.) They also point out, correctly, that the original 1516 Reinheitsgebot was in reality more of a bread bakers protection law than a beer law, reserving wheat and rye strictly for bread. However, the Reinheitsgebot did serve to keep German beer from being adulterated with other ingredients, such as wheat and rye, often found in non-German beer.
Prohibition
In the 1800s, the Industrial Revolution led to the growth of large multi-national brewers such as Anheuser-Busch, Miller (now part of Molson – Coors) and others.
In the U.S., Prohibition (1920–1933) devastated the brewing industry, forcing many small breweries to close. Larger ones survived by selling ‘near beer’ or other beverages.
When Prohibition was repealed the large brewers that had survived dominated the beer market. Smaller breweries, which had been unable to adapt or diversify, often went out of business, leading to the consolidation of the industry into the hands of a few large players.
Billy Beer
President Carter’s younger brother Billy owned a gas station in Plains, Georgia. In 1977, while his brother was President, he wanted to capitalize on his reputation as a fun-loving, beer drinking redneck. He endorsed a beer brewed by Falls City Brewing Company based in Louisville, KY. However, the beer the flopped due, at least in part, to its poor taste, and the brewery went bankrupt in 1978. I guess you could say it wasn’t a craft beer, but a crap beer.
Not relevant to this article, but I found this of interest:
James Earl Carter – President Carter’s Father, died in 1953 at the age of 58 of pancreatic cancer. Future President Carter, the oldest child (born 1924), left the navy to take over the peanut farm
Gloria Carter, Jimmy’s sister, was born in 1926, two years after JImmy. She was one of the first women inducted into Harley-Davidson’s 100,000 Mile Club, was named Most Outstanding Female Motorcyclist in 1978. She died of pancreatic cancer in 1990, aged 63
Ruth Carter, Jimmy’s other sister, was born in 1929. She did in 1993, 54 years old of pancreatic cancer.
Billy Carter was born eight years later in 1937. And he died in in 1988, 51 years old Cause of death? Pancreatic cancer.
Craft Beer and Deregulation
During the 1970s, economists, thinks tanks, and politicians supported deregulating various American industries. The goal was to increase competition and lower consumer prices by allowed the free market to set prices instead of the government. Congress passed, and President Carter signed many deregulation bills during his Presidency including:
Airline Deregulation Act of 1978
Motor Carrier Act of 1980 (Trucking Industry)
Staggers Rail Act of 1980 (Railroads)
Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act of 1980 (Banks and Interest rates)
And then a tax bill, H.R. 1337, passed in 1978, and signed by President Carter, legalized home brewing, which was still banned even after the end of prohibition. This allowed experimentation with different recipes which became the basis for the craft beer industry.
The number of breweries in America grew from under 100 at the time of the bill’s passage, to over 9,000 today!
President Carter and Alcohol
President Carter did not drink alcohol. I don’t know if he foresaw the growth of the craft beer industry when he signed H.R. 1337, as part of the deregulation movement. Nonetheless, several eulogies made reference to the beer industry including his grandson, Jason Carter, who said, “[President Carter] …deregulated so many industries that he gave us cheap flights and as you heard, craft beer. Basically, all of those years ago, he was the first millennial…”