WLP001 California Ale Yeast
WLP002 English Ale Yeast
WLP007 Dry English Ale Yeast
WLP028 Edinburgh Scottish Ale Yeast
WLP029 German Ale/ Kölsch Yeast
WLP036 Dusseldorf Alt Yeast, platinum strain – May/June
WLP051 California Ale V Yeast
WLP300 Hefeweizen Ale Yeast
WLP380 Hefeweizen IV Ale Yeast
WLP400 Belgian Wit Ale Yeast
WLP500 Trappist Ale Yeast
WLP550 Belgian Ale Yeast
WLP570 Belgian Golden Ale Yeast
WLP802 Czech Budejovice Lager Yeast
WLP810 San Francisco Lager Yeast
WLP820 Oktoberfest/Märzen Lager Yeast
WLP830 German Lager Yeast
WLP833 German Bock Lager Yeast

Also stock up on US-05 and Saflager S-23 dry yeasts. For Saison, get the Wyeast Saison yeast.

Liquor laws and loopholes: A brief history of how Alabama regulates alcohol
By Harvey H. Jackson
Star columnist and editorial writer
10-26-2008

On Nov. 4, residents of Blount, Cleburne and Randolph counties will vote on a matter that some there likely consider more important than the presidential contest that’s also on the ballot. They will decide if liquor will be legal within their counties’ borders. (Cleburne’s case is a little more complicated; has to do with a muscadine winery. But complicated is what Alabama liquor law is all about — as we shall see.)

When and where to allow liquor and how to regulate it are issues that have long divided Alabamians. The motives of both “wets” and “drys” reflect the shifting coalitions and interests that have dominated state politics for decades. The many votes that have been taken on these questions also reveal how Alabama has changed over the years and point to more changes that are sure to take place in the future.

So it seems to me to be worthwhile to consider how we have gotten to this point — liquor-wise.

Which is what I am gonna do.

Although there were temperance groups running around before the Civil War, making and selling whiskey was too important to many local economies for people to get serious about actually passing laws to stop the stuff. Besides, prohibition was a Yankee movement, inspired by New England Puritans, and what good Southerner wanted to get mixed up in that sorta thing?

But after the war, when Southerners began to talk of a New South where factories and plantations would flourish, things began to change. Industrialists wanted a sober work force in the mills and the mill towns. Planters wanted docile, sober sharecroppers. White folks, church folks who were already wary of black folks, wanted (as a Methodist publication put it) to “keep the passion inflamer out of the hands of the savage race.” And reformers who believed that Christians should make life better for everybody else wanted to protect families from the evils of strong drink.

This powerful coalition — big agriculture, big business, social conservatives — was similar to, and in some cases the same as, the coalition that in 1901 wrote the Constitution that governs us today (and any similarity to the modern Republican Party is not coincidental). Led by Gov. B.B. Comer, a major mill owner and staunch prohibitionist, they pushed for and got a statewide vote to amend the Constitution and dry Alabama up.

But Alabama did not vote dry.

By an overwhelming majority, voters rejected prohibition. Turns out, Alabama was changing. Cities such as Birmingham and Mobile, counties such as Baldwin, and larger towns such as Selma and Huntsville had residents who came from traditions where liquor was not something to outlaw. In addition, there were politicians who wanted the revenue that liquor brought in. And there were those Alabamians who simply did not like someone making these decisions for them. Ironically, if the Constitution had not stripped the vote from African Americans, Black Belt planters might have been able to stuff the ballot boxes with enough votes to win, but having taken that option away from themselves, the measure lost.

However, the prohibitionists were not done. Aware that the Alabama Constitution offered ways to bypass the popular will, they introduced a prohibition law in the Legislature and the coalition passed it.

So it was that in 1915, four years before the 18th amendment brought prohibition to America, Alabama went dry.

Sorta.

Enforcement was spotty, bootlegging paid good money, and hundreds (maybe thousands) of our residents became criminals, either through the making or the consumption.

Then came the Great Depression and politicians found it illogical to outlaw a profitable, revenue-generating business. So Congress once again asked states to vote on national prohibition — this time to repeal it.

And Alabama’s anti-liquor coalition split.

The bone-dry churches and social conservatives railed against repeal. One Methodist Bishop declared that only “the rakes, the roves, the prostitutes, (and) the brothel keepers” were for it. But he was wrong. Businessmen, industrialists and even Black Belt planters either supported repeal or stayed out all together.

So Alabama went wet.

Sorta.

Into the anti-liquor coalition came counties, rural mostly, that had favored statewide prohibition. Having lost that one, they sought permission to outlaw liquor locally — county by county. And the Legislature, still heavily influenced by rural representatives, let them. The result was a flurry of wet-dry votes that produced a patchwork quilt of counties where it was illegal to sell it and counties where it could be sold under an equally patchwork set of circumstances.

“Wet” counties had “state stores” with their distinctive green fronts.

“Damp” counties sold beer and wine, but not the hard stuff.

And there were counties with “foreign” populations that were allowed to serve draft beer while no other counties could. (Draft beer was considered a honky-tonk drink, and since honky tonks were where men got in fights over women who weren’t their wives, the reasoning was that if you keep out beer on draft you minimized the chance of that sort of mischief. Laws that prevented liquor from being served to anyone standing up followed the same logic, for whoever heard of fighting sitting down?)

The problem, of course, was liquor revenue. Dry counties needing money argued that since their residents crossed county lines to buy and drink, they should get a share of the income. Wet counties, with less legislative clout than they would have later, had to let them have it. So, in effect, the state of Alabama subsidized county dryness with county wetness.

Dry counties also became home for one of the legendary alliances never to have existed — ministers and moonshiners.

There is no clear evidence that these two groups ever sat down and worked out an agreement. But what was never formalized surely existed. Bootleggers voted “dry” to drive out legal competition. Church folk voted dry to drive out the legal evil, and thus secured the market for the illegal evil.

Planned or not, it worked.

Until 1978.

That year, Gov. George Wallace called a special session of the Legislature, and on his agenda was a bill to help some friends in north Alabama. They wanted property taxes paid by the Tennessee Valley Authority to go to the counties where the property was located rather than to the state. Wallace proposed splitting the pot 80 percent to 20 percent, with counties getting the bigger share. But when it was learned that some of those TVA counties were also getting wet-county money, the bill was amended to strip all dry counties of their liquor revenue subsidy.

Dry counties rose in protest, so Wallace, to keep his legislative coalition together and focused, restructured the deal. TVA counties would get 75 percent of the money; the state would get 20 percent; and the rest would be split among dry counties. So now it was the TVA that subsidized prohibition.

Meanwhile, Alabama was changing. The population was shifting from rural counties to towns and cities. Court decisions forced the state to reapportion the Legislature to give urban areas more representation. Growing towns began to need more revenue to pay for services town-dwellers expect. One obvious source was liquor taxes. But towns in rural counties were unable to overcome anti-liquor votes outside municipal limits.

So they pressed the Legislature for help and got it in the form of the “municipal option law.”

In its first manifestation, this legislation allowed dry-county towns with populations of 7,000 or more to hold their own wet-dry vote. Later the law was modified to allow towns of 4,000 or more to hold a similar vote if there was already a wet municipality in the county. Then the law was readjusted to allow smaller towns to vote on the issue — with legislative permission.

And if none of these applied, you could open a golf course.

Right.

In 1992, a former legislator from one of those dry counties that had a wet municipality approached friends on Goat Hill for help. He was developing a golf course community but was having little luck because golfers did not want to invest in a country club without a bar. So legislators came up with “community development districts” — did you see that one coming?

According to the plan, if the county was dry but there was a wet town in it, then if a developer had a development with 200 residential sites, an 18-hole golf course and a country club with membership requirements, the developer could get it declared a “community development district” and let the liquor flow.

Finally, in the last Legislative session, a group of legislators pointed out that these laws and loopholes really did not make much sense and might even be denying some residents the right to vote on issues pertaining to their economic wellbeing (not to mention their social activities and the condition of their livers). So a bill was introduced that would allow cities of any size in dry counties to vote wet or dry.

Representatives from dry counties rose in protest, noting that Alabama had some 180 municipalities, and if this was allowed and if those towns went wet there would be no more dry counties.

Supporters pointed out that in Alabama, in reality, “there’s absolutely no such thing as a dry county or city” anyway. All there was were “a bunch of bootleggers out there getting rich.”

Though the arguments pro and con were ancient, the debate was heated, but when the vote was taken the measure passed the House and went to the Senate. And if you remember the last session, whatever went to the Senate stayed in the Senate.

So Randolph and Cleburne and Blount counties will be voting as so many counties before them have voted.

And likely as not, more patches will be added to the Alabama liquor-law quilt.

GABF: Party at the End of the World? Economy sucks, but craft beer choogles on, by William Brand

Oct. 11, 2008 (Contra Costa Times) — The news this weekend is as grim as it has been for a long time and as I stood at the doors of the Colorado Convention Center last night looking out at the gigantic crowd of beer drinkers at the second session of the Great American Beer Festival, the title of a Jimmy Buffet album kept running through my mind: Party at the End of the World. The Parrot Head was talking about Tierra Del Fuego at the southernmost tip of South America, but I was thinking about all of us today, at this moment, about the rows of bank-foreclosed houses - theres one on my block - of the crisis in my industry - newspapers. News people I know who have been pushed off the edge of the world into unemployment. And I wondered if this fine, beery weekend in Denver is the last dance. Are we like those party-going flappers who danced in the new year in 1930 unaware mostly that their world was gone? Are we headed into oblivion too? Is the world of fine beer gonna disappear into a sea of cheap, light lager. The operative word being cheap. Whew. Hell of a time for a party, huh? A craft beer crash? Not quite yet, it appears. But nobody is talking about double digit craft beer sales growth this year.

Brewers Association Director Paul Gatza, citing the most recent survey figures from IRI, the Chicago-based sales reporting company and the associations own survey of 250 craft brewers, says craft beer volume sales are up 6.5 percent this year. Thats down from nearly 11 percent last year. But total beer sales are up a scant 0.4 of one percent and import sales are down 2.9 percent, the first drop for imported beer in 17 years. Wine and spirits have hit a wall as well. Wine sales are 0.5 of one percent and spirits up 1.8 percent. Prices, of course, have risen, and dollarwise, craft beer sales are up 11 percent. The chart below shows sales increases in supermarkets by regions across the country, with the West trailing the rest of the country percentage-wise. Last dance? Doesnt look like its started yet. I asked both Brewers Association founder Charlie Papazian and Stone Brewing (Escondido, CA) founder Greg Koch about the future of craft brewing in coming months and years. They both were cautiously optimistic. Its too early to tell whats going to happen, Charlie said. Craft brewing volume is still growing. Im convinced that craft beer will survive even in a down market. Beer is an affordable luxury, he said. People might not want to pay $30 for a bottle of wine, biut $10 for a six pack of the really good beer is a price most people will still pay, he said. Greg Koch agrees. Quality will win the day, he said. Good craft beer is a bargain. People will still buy good beer. Its up to craft brewers to keep the quality high. Looking back to the Great Depressionof the 1930s, Charlie, whose books on homebrewing make him an international guru of homebrew, also believes that homebrewing is going to surge even as the economy sags. Theyll get into homebrewing because its a way to get cheap beer, he said. But once they get into, they find out they can make really good beer and theyre off. More craft brewers are born.

Access to market remains a difficult proposition for small and independent brewers. Large brewers through their distributors dominate the decisions determining which beer brands get shelf space and how much shelf space they get. Distributors also significantly influence restaurateurs and the choices they make about what beer is served on the limited number of draft beer tap handles.

To the beer drinker it may seem logical that availability of a particular beer brand is based on consumer demand or profitability. But this is often not the case. Many beers receive shelf space or are delegated a tap handle because of the financial muscle a company can apply to force a decision upon the seller. Small and independent American brewers are often denied access to market due to these dynamics; regardless of consumer demand.

I just read the September issue of the Alabama Lawyer and found this very short summary of the 2008 Alabama Legislative Session informative:

There were 1,606 bills introduced in the legislature. Four hundred ninety-five passed one of the houses but only 205 made their way into law. From the total of 205 bills, after subtracting those that were only local bills affecting only one county, “Sunset” bills which continued a state regulatory agency and bills affecting only one segment of the community, 29 bills remained and I have listed them below.

Browsing the list of those 29 bills in the full article shows that none of them were very controversial.

“California Brewing Company wins silver for their labels”

Abra Marketing, a Redding based design firm and creator of California Brewing Company’s labels, recently won silver in the prestigious Summit International Awards.

The 14-year old Summit Awards is one of the premier creative industry competitions and included thousands of submissions from 25 countries.

Judges included professionals from some of the worlds most respected advertising and marketing agencies.

The History of Lazy Magnolia Brewing Company

Lazy Magnolia Brewing Company is the brain-child of Mark and Leslie Henderson. Born and raised in Mississippi, the couple met in college and moved to the Gulf Coast in 2000 to pursue careers in engineering. The first steps toward the founding of Lazy Magnolia happened one Christmas when Leslie bought mark a homebrew kit because she couldn’t think of anything else to get him! Mark reflects that this was very similar to the time his little sister bought him a Cabbage Patch Doll for Christmas—she really didn’t buy it for him.

Mark only got to brew one batch of beer before Leslie took over the brewing operations leaving Mark to design new equipment, tools, and gadgets to make the brewing process go smoother. It didn’t take long for this hobby to take over the house and all of their free time. “We were brewing twice every weekend, and we were giving away almost everything that we brewed to friends,” laments Leslie. The house was completely taken over with 5-gallon glass jugs, copper heat exchangers, and bubbling buckets of beer as they explored dozens of variations on their own special recipes.

Friends and family were so impressed with the homemade creations that they encouraged the couple to go pro. Many even offered to invest in such a venture.

What a great experience!!! The 2008 National Homebrewers Conference in Cincinnati was a blast.

We left Auburn early Tuesday morning and put the kids on a bus in Birmingham to visit their grandparents and aunt/uncle/cousins in Memphis. We met a Birmingham brewer for breakfast and a good chat and then made our way to Huntsville. Priscilla dropped me at Rick’s and went to visit Tonya. After some homebrew sampling and lunch, Rick, Brant and I took our time loading the van with kegs and the RCB portable bar and headed down to Dan’s office around 5, where we had a great pre-RCB meeting meeting with Dan, Ridley, Quacker and Craig. The RCB monthly meeting was at Bramon’s, and there has never been so much beer at a RCB meeting. Beer from 40 kegs was sampled and given a pass/fail/last resort score.

Priscilla and I spent the night at John and Debbie’s, and on Wednesday morning I kept my tradition of having a beer in the shower whenever we stay at their house. After a short 6-hour drive filled with great conversation, we arrived in Cincinnati in time for the Pub Crawl. I managed to spend less than $200 at the Party Source, but picked up some excellent commercial examples of some styles I want to study in the near future. The best stop on the pub crawl was the German Brewpub, where we convinced the accordian and drum band to play German heavy metal and ended the night with Sweet Home Alabama and Freebird. It was great to meet and share some beer with Tim Saurrwein of the MALT homebrew club in Maryland (http://www.maltclub.org/).

After the opening toast of the NHC on Thursday, it was RCB’s time to provide beer in the Hospitality Suite. We emptied 11 kegs and could have emptied more if we’d had them taken off the truck.

Wednesday and Thursday were just the tip of the iceburg. I just haven’t been able to get around to writing about Friday and Saturday yet. That’s were most everything happened. Maybe I can find the time soon.

Friday - Pro Brewers Night

Saturday - Club Night