Exactly How Much Homebrew Beer Will Land you in JAIL?

a lot of people don't know this but there's only so much beer that someone can brew at home before they break the law and potentially get charged with the crime and haul off the jail that's right there are federal and state limits on the amount of beer that someone can brew for personal consumption and it's illegal to exceed either one of these limits someone who knows this better than anyone is martin keane from the homebrew challenge youtube channel starting in june of 2019 he brewed a batch of homebrew beer per week for 99 weeks straight that's almost two years straight he also filmed edited and published a youtube video for every one of these batches of beer and here's the thing martin potentially committed a crime when he did this and then published the evidence on the internet in fact as you'll learn later in the video he potentially committed several crimes to find out more about martin's project i hopped in my camper van and traveled to raleigh north carolina to meet with him see his studio and ask him about his process and the first thing i asked about was whether or not he broke the law this this is just between us right all right so martin wasn't super keen on getting into the details with me right away so i did my own math first the average size for a batch of home brewed beer is five gallons if martin brewed five gallons per week for 99 straight weeks that means he'd have roughly brewed about 250 gallons of beer per year so how does that stack up against federal and state limitations on the amount of beer that can be brewed a home well let's just say it's not looking good for old martin according to the united states code of federal regulations 25.205 a single adult living alone in their home may only produce 100 gallons of beer per calendar a year yikes said martin committed crime or what because according to my math teamworth doubled that let's read on cfr 25.205 goes on to say that up to 200 gallons of beer can be brewed per calendar a year if there are two or more adults residing in the household okay well martin is married and his wife lives in the house as well of course but that still doesn't get us there before we come to a final verdict on this let's assume for a second that the men in black have better things to do than drop in on a guy who has brewed a couple hundred gallons of beer because this kind of thing is much more likely to be regulated at the state level anyway so let's see what north carolina law says well some good news here according to nc nc18b-306 there's no explicit limit on the amount of beer that can be produced at home in north carolina so the final verdict is martin going to jail well he has a secret that he never told anyone until after he finished his 99 beer challenge i have a confession i stopped brewing five gallon batches long ago sometimes i even fess up to that i'm brewing a three gallon batch okay so he only brewed about 120 gallons of beer per year and seems to be off the hook from an alcohol production standpoint but there is one last problem he still may be actually criminally insane you see if you don't make youtube videos or brew beer you probably have no idea how much time it takes to do either level on both at the same time i brew a lot of beer i make a lot of videos and i can tell you first hand that the 99 beard challenge was absolutely mental so while i was in raleigh i took a tour of martin's studio to see exactly how he pulled off this monumental feat and here are the top five things that i learned number one like i already mentioned he brewed two and a half gallon batches of beer as opposed to five which saved heat up and transfer time during the brew day typically brewers brew about five gallons at a time but with the frequency mark was brewing at he didn't need to make five gallon batches to keep his kegerator full number two martin used clawhammer's 240 volt controller and a 5500 watt heating element it's literally three times more powerful than a standard 120 volt brewing controller this controller could actually be used to provide enough heat for a large hot tub so reaching mash and boil temps happens way faster with this kind of juice number three he optimized his brew days by doing shorter boils and shorter mashes i did take some shortcuts that i didn't really point out for example i would often not mash for the full 30 minutes and really my biggest dirty secret was the boil times i would talk about 60 minute ball additions and whatnot but i've got to tell you most of the time doing 30 minute boils saves a lot of time generally brewers will mash and boil for about an hour each during the brew day martin cut that in half and did 30 minutes each this will impact the final product and recipes need to be adjusted accordingly number four martin has cameras absolutely everywhere in his studio that are all linked together in synced and recorded on a single card and he shoots at high resolution and in 60 frames per second this makes it possible to zoom in and slow down footage without losing quality and the fact that everything is synced to one card greatly simplifies the editing process and speaking of editing number five he took a laptop with him everywhere he went and when he had down time he fired it up and started working martin's 99 beer challenge is so crazy that it has to be some sort of a world record i think that martin might be literally the only homebrewer on the planet to have brewed all 99 bjcp beer styles sure there are a lot of veteran brewers out there that have logged a hundred or even hundreds of batches but did they hit all 99 styles it seems like one would have to be very intentional to do that and that's exactly what martin did so hats off to martin for creating and then crushing this challenge among a large list of questionable characters martin is one of the craziest guys i know and i definitely mean that as a compliment if you're interested in checking out his challenge click on any one of these playlists alright thanks for watching

Channel: Clawhammer Supply

Views: 40,213

Keywords: beer, brewing, homebrew, legal, is brewing legal?, legalities of brewing, brewing beer, how to brew beer, beginner homebrew, beginner brewing, beginner beer, investigation, detective, true crime, crime

Id: IRn3_XEtYMI

Length: 5min 58sec (358 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 11 2022