The 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals struck down a Reconstruction-era ban on home distilling Friday.
A federal appeals court in New Orleans ruled Friday that a nearly 158-year-old prohibition on home distilling violates the US Constitution, handing a decisive victory to hobbyists who argued the government had no legitimate basis to treat their kitchen experiments as federal crimes.
The 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the nonprofit Hobby Distillers Association and four of its 1,300 members, who had challenged a law enacted in July 1868 during the Reconstruction era. The original statute was designed to prevent liquor tax evasion in the years following the Civil War. Anyone caught violating it faced up to five years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000.
For more than a century and a half, that threat sat quietly over a surprisingly large community of Americans, including at least one member of the Hobby Distillers Association who had been working on an apple pie vodka recipe.
What the court actually decided
Circuit Judge Edith Hollan Jones, writing for a three-judge panel, dismantled the government’s justification for the ban on two fronts. First, she found that the prohibition did not actually generate tax revenue. It did the opposite, by preventing distilling from happening at all and therefore eliminating any taxable activity in the process. Laws that regulate the manufacture and labeling of commercially distilled spirits, by contrast, create the conditions under which taxes can actually be collected.
Second, and more significantly, Jones rejected the broader logic the government had used to defend the law. Under that reasoning, Congress could potentially criminalize any activity conducted at home that might escape the notice of tax collectors, including remote work and home-based businesses. Jones found no limiting principle in that argument, and said accepting it would effectively hand Congress a general police power over private life that the Constitution does not grant.
The ruling upheld a July 2024 decision by US District Judge Mark Pittman in Fort Worth, Texas, who had initially found the ban unconstitutional but put his ruling on hold to allow the government to appeal.
Who fought for this and why
The Hobby Distillers Association, a nonprofit with roughly 1,300 members, brought the challenge alongside four individual distillers whose personal and creative stakes in the outcome were concrete. The organization’s lawyer, Devin Watkins, framed the ruling as a meaningful statement about where federal authority ends and private life begins.
Andrew Grossman, who argued the appeal on behalf of the group, described the decision as a victory for individual liberty and noted that the plaintiffs could now pursue their interest in home distilling without the shadow of federal prosecution hanging over them. He added, in a line that has already made the rounds, that he was looking forward to sampling what they produced.
Neither the US Department of Justice nor the Treasury Department’s Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau offered any response to the ruling on Friday. Whether the government will seek to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court remains an open question.
What changes now
For the first time since 1868, Americans can distill spirits at home without risking a federal felony charge. The practical implications are not trivial. Home distilling has occupied a legal gray zone for generations, practiced quietly but never openly, with hobbyists operating under the constant risk that what they were doing could land them in serious legal trouble.
The court’s decision removes that federal risk entirely, though state laws governing distilling vary and may still apply depending on where someone lives. The ruling does not touch commercial distilling regulations or the broader framework governing the alcohol industry.
What it does do is establish a clear precedent that Congress cannot use its taxing power as a pretext to criminalize private activity when doing so produces no tax revenue and serves no coherent regulatory purpose. That principle, the court argued, matters well beyond the question of what someone is allowed to ferment in their own home.