Jimmy Carter became craft beer ‘hero’ due to signing 1978 law

Tylor Sorensen
Thu, January 2, 2025 


ROCKFORD, Ill. (WTVO) — In 1978, there were about 100 breweries that controlled most of America’s beer output. That year, President Jimmy Carter signed a law that legalized homebrewing and paved the way for the craft beer revolution.

Prohibition ended in 1933, but homebrewing was still off-limits, allowing breweries like Yuengling, Anheuser-Busch, Miller, Schlitz, Pabst, and Coors to dominate the market, controlling around three-quarters of America’s beer volume.

Carter signed HR 1337, which allowed homebrewing for personal use, allowing Americans to brew up to 100 gallons per person and 200 gallons per household.

Those homebrewers eventually started small breweries that transformed the industry. Many craft brewing operations, such as Boston Brewing Co. and Sierra Nevada, began as microbrew operations.

Now, there are over 10,000 breweries nationwide, and that number is growing.

Some of those are located in the Rockford area.

In 2013, Reed Sjostrom opened Prairie Street Brewing Co., at 200 Prairie Street, a building that once housed the Rockford Brewing Company.

“I kind of kicked around some ideas and it kind of dawned on everybody that, hey, this was a brewery here in Rockford, so why not lean into that and kind of lean into the history and make it a brewery again,” Sjostrom said.

Tom Morgan started Cheezhead Brewing, at 414 Pleasant Street, in Beloit, just five years ago.

“I think the thing that draws people here is we’re about a half destination [attraction], where people come because they like to go to brew pubs and breweries. And then we’re half like Cheers, where people come in sometimes by themselves or not knowing exactly who they’re going to meet,” Morgan said. “But if they don’t know each other when they come in, they tend to know each other by the time they leave.”

The irony of Carter’s revolutionary law was that the President himself was a Southern Baptist and did not drink much alcohol at all.

“Cheers, and thank you to an American homebrew hero, President Jimmy Carter,” the American Homebrewers Association said in a statement on Sunday.