Having a Salena Zito Moment

I hang out at the Knoxville Brewfest

This weekend I want to the Knox Brewfest at the  Knoxville World’s Fair Grounds.  As the name suggests, it was a collection of most of the local micro-breweries, each with a booth offering samples.  (There were also a few bigger operations, like Sierra Nevada, Abita, and Paulaner).  I wore my Hamm’s Beer Hawaiian shirt, which was a surprisingly big hit. 

And there were some lessons, about which more later.

Hamm’s doesn’t really exist anymore except as a sometimes-produced minor product of Coors, which bought the trademark after it passed through the hands of numerous other companies.  But it’s not forgotten!

The beer was good and the crowd was cheerful.

Mostly me, and my friend Jim (who I’ve known since junior high) were reflecting on the vast improvement in the world of beer in America, and particularly in Knoxville.  As late as, oh, 1990 or so, you could go into almost any bar in Knoxville and if you asked what kind of beer they had you’d get an answer like this:  “We’ve got everything!  Bud, Bud Light, Miller, Miller Light, Coors, Coors Light – anything you want!”

It's easy to take the craft-brewing revolution for granted, but it brought about huge changes and for the better.  Nowadays, the beer scene in America tends to be better than that in Europe.  No, really.  In fact, one of my former research assistants, who practices law in Belgium now, brought over a couple of Belgian friends who wanted to see Tennessee.  I met them for lunch at Barley’s in the Old City, to hear a bluegrass show and eat pizza and drink beer.  They were very impressed with the fifty or so taps that Barley’s offers.

Back home they said, the bars are usually owned by the breweries and only sell their own brews ,so you might have only three or four varieties, all from the same label.  Nothing like this.

Ah, yes, I said, deploying my expertise as a teacher of alcoholic beverage law.  In America that arrangement is called a “tied house” and it’s specifically illegal.  Producers and distributors of alcohol can’t own retail facilities (except for things like brewpubs and distillery tasting rooms), and retail facilities can’t discriminate in favor of one producer or another in exchange for payment or favors.  Competition policy for the win.

But while craft brewing is now a booming business, it started out as a labor of love by hobbyists who just wanted better beer.  These individual efforts, as I mentioned in An Army of Davids, led to a boom in employment and a vast improvement in quality over the watery 1970s brews that had come to predominate.

The same thing is happening now with craft distilling.  And in both cases, the regulators – to their credit – have generally been pretty accommodating.  The Tax and Trade Bureau of the Department of the Treasury (or “TTB” as it’s known in the industry) can be slow to respond, as it’s got far more businesses to deal with than it had a few years ago, but when you get them they tend to be quite reasonable.

This deregulatory story started (like airlines and trucking deregulation) with Jimmy Carter of all people. Despite his (often true) reputation as a bossy micro-managaer, he was an engineer and a rationalist.  That worked out poorly in foreign policy, but led him to undo a number of irrational regulatory structures, one of which was the limit on home beer production.  Carter signed a bill legalizing homebrewing in 1978, and those homebrewers were the nucleus of the craft beer movement a decade or so later.

So chalk that up as a win.  Beyond the industry, the brew festival marks a whole culture.  I remember being excited when Knoxville got its first microbrewery, the Downtown Grill & Brewery (then called the Great Southern Brewery).  The DGB is still in operation, owned by some guys I went to high school with, but there are now so many flourishing breweries in town that I probably couldn’t name them all off the top of my head.  (Actually, I’m sure I couldn’t.)  A whole bunch of people circulate among the various breweries around town.  And people in that culture seem to be pretty happy.

The crowd was diverse, especially as to ages, running from early 20s to probably 80s.   That’s unusual these days in most settings, where age segregation is a thing.   Everyone was cheerful – well, there was beer, and tacos and barbecue and such from food trucks – and friendly and outgoing, with lots of strangers opening up conversations.  It was a Salena Zito kind of place.

As I’ve said before, if you spend most of your time on the Internet, America can seem like a pretty grim place.  But it’s not that hard to get out and have yourself a Salena Zito moment, in the America that is still America.  I think I need to do it more often . . . .