Make it yourself

The $20 permit required for home brewing was an inefficient and needless regulation that ought to have disappeared. Applying for licenses was confusing, and there was no indication that any applicants were actually denied. It was, in other words, a perfectly terrible regulation: difficult to follow with little positive benefit. Will many take advantage in this change of law? Probably not. But the deregulation paves the way for greater appreciation of alcoholic beverages, just as making painting easier would.

Taking advantage of these deregulations — that is, brewing your own — requires an investment in time and effort to learn and understand what is being made. It requires doing more than just picking something at random — that’s what a restaurant menu is for. It requires research, thought and preparation. It demands a focus toward observation, similar to the mindful eating described by Miriam Geronimus’s Feb. 17 column. These deregulations will encourage people to gather more information, and, according to economics, society becomes better off when more people better use more information. All this leads to the reiteration of a stock idea that I always seem to use in writing about alcohol: a focus on quality over quantity will make us happier and longer living.

The deregulations are not perfect and will likely only be taken advantage of by a handful of people. But those people are also those who will happily talk about alcohol, and it’s the active talkers and doers who define and shape the general culture into which everyone joins. These people will talk because they invested time, money and effort. These people will be proud of the fruits of their labor, and even prouder of their mistakes. They’ll talk about accidentally dry-hopping the fermenting beer, question whether adding honey to the wort last minute was a good idea and fuss about how malty the resulting mix is. It gets awesome.

What’s happening with the change in regulation is, on a small scale, a reflection of the powerful impact liquor laws have on markets and particularly consumer demand. In 1880, the British decided to fiddle with how they regulated beer. More specifically, the Free Mash Tun Act shifted beer taxation from taxing the ingredients used to taxing the concentration of sugars in beer wort. The law disincentivized the production of more complex beers, shifting production towards cheaper styles such as the famous British “bitter” (so named for its sole characteristic, despite being much less bitter than the styles it was replacing, such as India Pale Ales). The double whammy of an increase in prices and a decrease in supplies drove consumers to the cheaper bitters, causing consumers to eventually adjust to the inferior product. Thus began the stereotype of the British lout drunk on cheap pints of bitter. As the British example shows, the demand for beer — and alcohol in general — is somewhat driven by availability.

In our little college market, we ought to enable the forces which will shift demand in desirable directions. The majority of people look for trusted sources of expertise and follow their advice. Alcohol is just the most college-relevant example of this wider trend. These two legal changes will empower those leaders of opinion, for lack of a better term, because now they can more fully explore their areas of knowledge — in this case, better beer.

The more we can free people to explore and develop their expertise, the better off we will all be. Leadership emerges somewhat spontaneously from expertise, and the kinds of leadership we see are merely a factor of the environment that leadership exists in. When you are limited — either by regulations or market forces — to only drinking more or less, you explore only how much you can drink. But when you are free to explore it as an interest, your conversations and actions will reflect a preference toward complexity and quality, which will influence your friends and their friends as well.

Christopher Troein is an economics major from Windsor, England. He can be reached at ctroein@princeton.edu.