From Flickr user G20Voice

A coordinated raid on three bars in Philadelphia last week has underscored the long-standing stupidity of the laws that regulate beer in Pennsylvania and paired it with the stupidity of the Pennsylvania State Police.  In short: a random person with a grudge called the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board to report three beer bars that had “unregistered” beer.

The police raided the bars with an incomplete and inaccurate list of what was actually registered (stupidity fault: PLCB) and confiscate beers based on both outright omissions (stupidity fault: PA law.  In one case, Russian River Brewing had an unregistered Pilny the Younger confiscated, because the California brewery hadn’t sent in the paperwork.) and a rage-inducing lack of common sense (stupidity fault: PA State Police.)

The alleged offense: Although the bar owners had bought the beer legally from licensed Pennsylvania distributors and had paid all the necessary taxes, the police claimed that nobody had registered the precise names of the beers with the state Liquor Control Board – a process that requires the brewers or their importers to pay a $75 registration fee for each product they want to sell in Pennsylvania. [...]

In fact, according to Maida, more than half the beer removed by the State Police was properly registered – but the cops couldn’t find it on their lists because of “clerical errors” or “blatant ineptitude” between the police and the Liquor Control Board, with whom the officers were conferring by telephone. [...]

Maida said that the State Police also confiscated bottles of Duvel, a popular ale imported from Belgium that is widely advertised and available in at least 200 bars throughout the city and suburbs. The beer appears on the PLCB list as “Duvel Beer,” while its label reads “Duvel Belgian Golden Ale.”

“No actual investigating was done,” Maida said in an e-mail to the Daily News. “The police sent a shoddily typed list to the PLCB, some drone fed it into the machine verbatim and returned what came back, without . . . even trying to offer us the benefit of the doubt by double-checking on some of the so-called unregistered beers.”

So, even if you pay your taxes — and register the beer — you damn well better have the exact wording on the label or the cops will storm your bar and take it away.  That’s insane.

There are clearly hoops to jump through when you’re looking to buy or sell beer in Pennsylvania — a state, by the way, that has legalized a number of casinos, but not sales of six packs in liquor or grocery stores — and bars and breweries should be careful.  But there were a few failings here.  First, the PLCB and the State Police can’t keep records straight.  If there are such stringent controls, and the Police will come confiscate whatever confuses them, it’s outrageous that there’s such idiocy to begin with.

Second, coordinated raids based off of a “citizen complaint?”  Really?  Can anyone just call the PLCB and get a dozen cops to raid random bars?

Lastly, if anyone has any type of legal education at all, one of the first things you learn is that discretion, while not written anywhere in the Constitution, is one of the basic pillars of the American justice system.  It’s why cops can let you out of a speeding ticket, it’s why judges can be inordinately harsh while sentencing serious criminals, and it’s what should keep stupid stuff like this from happening.  It’s the unstated institutionalization of common sense, and it failed epically in this case.

There should have been a public investigation, a fair hearing, and a public sentencing. Instead, the Police coordinated an armed raid on bars for selling beer that, among other things, was actually registered and they confiscated it anyway.  Pennsylvania has serious issues, and while energy is probably better spent worry about things like schools and health care, from those of us out-of-state, it’s hard not to question why there are such serious problems to begin with.

Jimmy Carter has gone down in history for many things, but the thing most relevant to this post is that, in 1979, Carter legalized hombrewing in the United States.  Sort of.

Carter, a well-known beer lover and brother of Billy Beer namesake Billy Carter, eased federal hombrewing regulations enough that people like you or I could pick up the hobby and make enough beer to experiment and enjoy the process.  But he ultimately let states decide how they wanted to handle homebrewing within their own borders.  That meant in some places — Alabama in this instance — homebrewing remained illegal, and remains so to this day.

But this week, the Alabama Senate voted 13-6 to legalize brewing for personal use.  The bill will now move on to the state House and, hopefully, the Governor’s office, where homebrewing will finally become a legal hobby for beer lovers across the state.

Congratulations to those from Alabama who have wanted to start homebrewing or those who have been doing so as rebels.  And a tip for anyone living there: there’s about to be a huge demand for homebrewing supplies, and homebrew supply stores are probably very rewarding investments.

After the American Olympic hockey team surprisingly upset the home-ice favorite Canada yesterday, many Canadians did what many Americans do after a shocking athletic defeat (or victory, for that matter): they got drunk.  Really drunk.  So drunk that beer sales were stopped in Vancouver.

How big a deal was yesterday’s Team USA-Canada men’s hockey game?

Well, can you remember the last time Canadians cut off the beer?

With a crowd anticipated at perhaps 200,000 roaming the city’s streets, some of them fans of the archrival Americans, officials here ordered downtown beer and liquor stores to close early.

They had done the same on Saturday night when the hordes drawn here by the Olympics and the unseasonably warm weather made passage impossible on some sidewalks and clogged most available transportation options.

Officials said that “an unprecedented number of intoxicated people” forced the decision, which is amazing.  Canadians tend to be polite and kind, and they’ve had far more success these games than when they last hosted.  But don’t mess with their hockey, or a whole city will drink itself stupid out of disappointment.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Suman Chakrabarti under a Creative Commons license.

Slate writer Deborah Blum has a fascinating article about her discovery — or re-discovery, I guess — of a prohibition-era program by the US government to poison industrial alcohols…

Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.

Although mostly forgotten today, the “chemist’s war of Prohibition” remains one of the strangest and most deadly decisions in American law-enforcement history. As one of its most outspoken opponents, Charles Norris, the chief medical examiner of New York City during the 1920s, liked to say, it was “our national experiment in extermination.”

The logic behind “let’s kill a few people to scare the rest off” baffles me.  Whatever your political affiliation, governments are, at their core, there to protect the safety and welfare of the citizens, whether they’re engaged in illegal activity or not.  Layered on top of that is the absurdity of the 18th amendment itself — instead of just stupidly banning alcohol, they stupidly decided to poison people to reinforce the message.