Free Republic

It is now legal for home brewers in Minnesota to sell their beverages and concoctions to the public, as long as they are brewed in the basement of a building. Gov. Tim Pawlenty signed the "basement brewing" bill Thursday. Early laws allowed home brewing for personal use, but prohibited people from selling their drinks. Many had concerns about moisture and mildew often found in basements. Under the new law, the Minnesota Department of Agriculture will review spaces and issue permits to those that pass muster. This law covers the brewing of everything from beer to drink syrups, bitters, kombucha and...

Some interesting tidbits are coming out of the American Chemical Society conference in San Francisco this week. First we heard about a product made from renewable materials that could substitute a large portion of the crude oil currently used to make tires. And now comes word from a scientist at the University of Orleans in France that he has constructed a compact, relatively inexpensive, low tech plasma gasifier that can take all sorts of waste materials and turn them into a variety of different drop-in fuels, including diesel, gasoline and kerosene. The plasma gasifier is based on what is known...

Happy Friday!!!! Beer lover here. Not a connoisseur, but a little above a warm PBR you might say. I have been thinking for sometime about brewing my own. I have the room, time and enjoy a good hobby as much as the next Joe...and I figure since I can change the head gaskets in my car, recharge the A/C in the old truck and know my way around the kitchen pretty well, I can do this. I was looking around the web and there are kits and forum sites, etc, but I figured asking for some general advice in a...

"Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific technological elite" - Dwight Eisenhower WASHINGTON -(Dow Jones)- President Barack Obama's climate czar said Sunday the Environmental Protection Agency will soon issue a rule on the regulation of carbon dioxide, finding that it represents a danger to the public. The White House is pressing Congress to draft and pass legislation that would cut greenhouse gases by 80% of 1990 levels by 2050, threatening to use authority...

OK. I have a bunch of empty Grolsch bottles and have been thinking about doing some moon shining of sorts. Any Freepers ever home-brew? Beer? Hard cider? Curious about experiences and recommendations, and since Freepers are the smartest people in the world, figured it needed a thread!

SAN FRANCISCO, September 22, 2008 (LifeSitNews.com) - Last year, after horrified Americans bombarded the beer company with complaints, decision makers at the Miller Brewing Company chose to pull the company logo from an offensive advertisement for the Folsom Street Fair, an event which includes full nudity and public sadomasochistic sex acts.  Miller, however, has now flip-flopped on their decision and is once again endorsing the homosexual event, having paid for a full-page advertisement in the 2008 Folsom Street Fair Program Guide.The brewers landed themselves in hot water last Fall after their logo appeared on the highly controversial front page of the...

WEED, Calif. — This town is in a tempest over a bottle top. The federal government is telling the owner of a small brewery here that the pun he's placed on caps of his Weed Ales crosses a line. The U.S. Treasury Department's Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau says those three little words allude to marijuana use.

Small brewers line up to pay premium prices for scarce ingredients Double-whammy shortages of two main ingredients are threatening to send the price of beer significantly higher, just in time for the national drinking holiday known as Super Bowl Sunday. * * * In September, Martin paid $4 for a pound for hops. By late October, he said, it was $50 a pound. Likewise, barley prices have almost doubled in the same period. Just a few weeks ago, George Peterson, owner of Central Coast Brewery in San Luis Obispo, Calif., spent $160 to brew a batch of beer equal to...

Interesting that almost every homebrewer can tell you when homebrewing was once again legalized. Through the efforts of Senator Alan Cranston from California, President Jimmy Carter signed a bill in 1978 that brought legal status to homebrewing in 1979, most homebrewers are unaware of the particulars that ended homebrewing during Prohibition. In actuality, however, it was not homebrewing per se that was criminalized, it was the way that malt syrup (extract) could be labeled and advertised that was altered…

Homebrewers...don't make another batch of beer until you see this unusual use of malt extract and a most unusual ingredient! Don't tell your friends about the "secret ingredient" until they've had their share.

January 24, 1935: First canned beer goes on salehttp://www.history.com/tdih.do?action=tdihVideoCategory&id=52350 Canned beer makes its debut on this day in 1935. In partnership with the American Can Company, the Gottfried Krueger Brewing Company delivered 2,000 cans of Krueger's Finest Beer and Krueger's Cream Ale to faithful Krueger drinkers in Richmond, Virginia. Ninety-one percent of the drinkers approved of the canned beer, driving Krueger to give the green light to further production. By the late 19th century, cans were instrumental in the mass distribution of foodstuffs, but it wasn't until 1909 that the American Can Company made its first attempt to can beer....

PORTLAND, Maine - Like most small breweries, Gritty McDuff‘s went through a lull as sales of craft beer leveled off in the late 1990s. Now Gritty‘s and the craft beer industry as a whole are enjoying a resurgence, with sales growing at their fastest pace in a decade. At Gritty McDuff‘s, production last year rose nearly 30 percent to more than 250,000 gallons. The 1990s were a boom time for the industry, with sales rising fast and even doubling in 1994. But growth slowed by the end of the decade, and hundreds of microbreweries and brewpubs went out of business....

The President has spoken several times about Biodiesel, and then I find out a friend in Maine has a neighbor who makes it in his garage. Of course I was intrigued.If I had a diesel car I'd probably make it myself.Anyway, it seems pretty interesting.

MANCHESTER, Pa. (AP) -- Plentiful supplies of good beer almost tapped out the home brewing trend five years ago, but wine and women saved Mr. Steve's Homebrew Supplies in Manchester. The home brewing hobby led to the resurgence of commercially available higher quality beers in America in early 1990s. At one point it seemed like everybody and his brother was opening a brew pub or microbrewery, said Steve Stoppard, who owns his York County shop with his wife, Christi. Suddenly the national market was saturated with the likes of Pete's Wicked Ale and Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, and Pennsylvanians could...

Raise the drinking age to 25?

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