MOBILE, Alabama -- Mobile County prosecutor Keith Blackwood is, according to posts made to his now-defunct Twitter account, a libertarian, a cigar aficionado and somewhat of a foodie. He's also a criminal.

That’s because Blackwood has, on occasion, brewed his own beer, a hobby that is perfectly legal in 48 states -- 49 if Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant signs a bill recently approved in the state’s Legislature.

It’s also legal under federal law, has been since the 1970s. President Barack Obama famously has a homebrew setup in the White House.

In Alabama, though, making your own beer is a violation of Title 28 of the legal code, which makes the manufacture of any alcoholic beverage illegal.

Before he disabled the account recently, Blackwood regularly tweeted about his hobby. He shared recipes (Pliny the Elder uses a yeast called California Ale), posted pictures (fermenting wheat beer looks like spoiled milk, it turns out), and solicited ideas. “Anyone have a great rye IPA recipe? Looking for a spring brew. Rye seems springy,” he tweeted last month.

His passion was apparently known to fellow Assistant District Attorney Matt Simpson, who tagged Blackwood in a tweet about Auburn considering a "brewery sciences" graduate degree.

I wanted to interview Blackwood to ask him about his philosophy on beer and, considering his job as a prosecutor, about the pastime’s fraught legal status. Blackwood politely declined, referring comment to his boss, District Attorney Ashley Rich.

After I called him, he told Rich about his hobby and about its publication on Twitter. She was displeased.

It’s worth noting here that making beer at home, a misdemeanor, is rarely investigated and prosecuted. Lt. Mike Cook, the Alabama Alcoholic Beverage Control Board’s district supervisor for Mobile and Baldwin counties, said that he doesn’t think that his office has ever investigated someone for homebrew.

Rich said that she didn’t even know that making beer in your kitchen was illegal until Blackwood told her it was. When he did, she said, she was shocked that Blackwood not only did make his own beer in violation of the law, but he talked about it openly on Twitter, the most public forum the Internet has to offer.

“We don’t get to pick and choose the laws that we want to follow,” she said.

Rich said that Blackwood was “disciplined,” but she declined to specify what the punishment was.

The brewing blues. Dropping the hammer in Blount County.

After the interview, I looked over the statutes governing liquor in Alabama again and noticed the paragraph right after the one that makes homebrewing illegal:

“It shall be unlawful for any person to … in any manner change the character or purity of alcoholic beverages from that as originally marketed by the manufacturer, except that a retail licensee on order from a customer may mix a chaser or other ingredients necessary to prepare a cocktail or mixed drink for on-premises consumption.”

I’ve often said that it’s a crime to buy a bottle of nice scotch and then drink it with water. I thought I was joking.

Putting bad guys in jail is a stressful job, so I asked Rich’s office if she or any of her staff ever likes to unwind with a whiskey and Coke when they get home after work. She declined to comment.

Even though Alabama’s law seems to make criminals out of amateur mixologists, Cook said that the ABC has never interpreted it that way. He said the law is used to discourage bars from watering down their booze or selling bottom-shelf Evan Williams as Jim Beam.

To homebrewers, though, it’s just as absurd to bust someone for mixing yeast, hops and barley together in his own home.

Kade Miller found out just how much prohibition can cost when he was arrested in 2010 after Blount County sheriff’s deputies found brewing equipment in his house.

Miller, an Iraq war veteran and longtime homebrewer, said he had saved up $15,000 during his service overseas to go to brewing school and open his own brewpub.

After finishing brewing school, he bought larger equipment and began scaling up his recipes through trial and error at his house.

Deputies, executing what he called a questionable search, saw the equipment and raided his house. The deputies confused his industrial equipment for a hard-liquor still, Miller said, and charged him with felony possession of a still. Although he never sold any of the alcohol produced from it, the Blount County Sheriff’s Office seized his $8,000 brew setup, he said.

More than two years later, Miller said, the case is ongoing, though he hopes to be able plead guilty to possession of excess alcohol in a dry county, a misdemeanor. Fines, court costs and lawyer’s fees will probably run him close to $20,000 before it’s over, he said.

While he hasn’t been able to accomplish his dream of opening his own brewery, he has managed to get a job as a brewer for a Montgomery brew pub.

Blount County District Attorney Pamela L. Casey declined to comment on Miller’s case because it has not been adjudicated.

Despite his experience with the Blount County District Attorney, Miller said he’s sympathetic to Blackwood’s situation.

“As a public servant, why shouldn’t he be afforded the right to homebrew?” Miller said. “He’s not selling it, not throwing wild parties, not feeding it to underage kids. What’s the problem? It’s ridiculous.”