From Flickr user Minnesota Historical Society

Legislation allowing a Brooklyn Center brewery and other Minnesota beer-makers to serve their brews directly to customers at their establishments cleared a state Senate panel Wednesday, after a concerted social media lobbying effort by Surly Brewing Co. helped soften opposition from the powerful liquor lobby.

…

Brooklyn Center-based Surly is seeking the change as it plans a $20 million brewery, restaurant and entertainment center. Owner Omar Ansari told lawmakers the expansion would boost state tax revenues by allowing his company to employ 85 construction workers and 150 permanent workers at its new complex. He also pointed out that Wisconsin and other states allow brewers to serve beer where it’s made.

This is the type of thing that makes sense, helps local business grow, provides more jobs, and supports good beer.

From flickr user afiler

After yesterday’s news about the insane ABV restrictions on breweries in Mississippi, we were a little disheartened by the idea of beer regulations and the lack of common sense behind many of them.  But completely restoring our faith in common sense is this news out of North Dakota:

North Dakotans who make wine and booze already can get a state license to sell their beverages, and a Minot lawmaker wants people who make home-brewed beer to be able to do the same. …

Ruby says the license would let home beer brewers sell their suds. They could offer beer tastings and set up stalls at trade shows. They could also sell their beer to wholesalers for wider state distribution.

Good news?  We think so.  It means more revenue for the state, better beer for residents, and new opportunities for hombrewers.  This is the type of policy that could easily lead to at least one great new brewery — it will let homebrewers raise the capital, learn the business, and build and audience without needing to drop hundreds of thousands on equipment.  It lets breweries grow more slowly, and makes them an easier investment.

Every state should adopt something like this –  true nanobrewing that can lead to great things.

From flickr user Stu Seeger

We’re not even from Mississippi, but we want people to have access to quality beer.  But apparently, Mississippi’s Lt. Gov. Phil Bryant and state Sen. Dean Kirby think people should be stuck with beer that’s less than 5%, the lowest in the nation.

We know not just how badly this affects the people who want good beer, but how badly it affects people who want to make good beer. Take, for example, Mississippi’s lone craft brewery, Lazy Magnolia Brewing Co.

Leslie Henderson, who co-owns Lazy Magnolia Brewery with her husband, Mark, said if the alcohol content ceiling was raised to 8 percent, it would mean a sizable jump in her sales because she could add to her product line of gourmet and craft beer, whose alcohol content by weight hovers in the range of 7 percent and 8 percent.

“I would estimate our business would have been approximately 25 percent greater (the past year), which is on the order of about $750,000, just in revenue. I would say at least 50 percent of that goes to pay some sort of taxes. That’s a lot of tax dollars that are lost.

“There are existing customers that want (craft beer) from us, but we can’t produce it for them. Most of our sales by percentage, particularly because we’re in five states, are outside of Mississippi. It has certainly held us back as far as expansion goes,” she said.

Seems easy, right?  Get with the times, up your alcohol content to something reasonable, then profit.  So why is Lt. Gov. Phil Bryant, Sen. Dean Kirby,  and the Mississippi legislature acting outright nonsensical?

“We’re rather resigned to defeat at this point,” Henderson said. “It’s frustrating, especially when all we want to do is create jobs in Mississippi and give more money to the state. We’re not coming to Jackson asking for anything. We’re begging them to let us give them more money. I think they really need my money.”

Butch Bailey, a Hattiesburg forester who serves as president of Raise Your Pints, shares Baria’s and Henderson’s frustration with the legislation being lost in the anxiety of election-year politics.

“No one’s ever given me a good reason why we should not pass it,” he said. “‘It’s an election year.’ That’s all I ever hear, but there’s never an explanation behind it. My response as a citizen of Mississippi is I think they should stand up and do the right thing. Stop worrying so much about your political bosses or your party bosses and the tough election. Do the right thing for the state that will raise revenue.”

This is completely absurd.  Why are they holding this up?  What mythical votes do they think they’re going to loose from keeping good beer out of Mississippi?

“If you go to places like Oregon and Colorado, it’s treated the way fine wine is. These are gourmet products, and there are thousands and thousands of Mississippians who enjoy it the same way and travel out of state to buy it. We want to buy it here. To get that, we have to remove this ban.”

Bailey said about a third of all beer styles are banned in Mississippi as well as 70 percent of the top-rated beers in the world.

“We don’t think that’s fair. They’re legal in almost every other country, and in 49 out of 50 states. So it’s basically Mississippi and Saudi Arabia that ban these products.

“We think Mississippians are mature and intelligent enough to make the same choice people in Alabama and Louisiana and Tennessee can make.

“This isn’t anything radical. We’re not going away until we get this done. This is a commonsense, win-win situation for everybody involved. We’ll fight until this happens,” Bailey said.

So here’s what you can do right now — as in this minute.

You can email Dean Kirby and tell him to stop being irrational at dkirby@senate.ms.gov, or you can call him at 601-359-3246.

As for Lt. Gov. Phil Bryant, who apparently has his sights set on the Governor’s office, you can call him at 601-359-3200.  Do it now — they need to know this isn’t right.

From flickr user Travlr

When we last checked in with Tampa, Florida’s Cigar City Brewing, they were fighting the good fight against distributor monopolization.

They’re back in the news again, and after fighting the good fight for the permanence of their own tasting room, they have a victory to show for it.  From the St. Petersburg Times…

The Tampa City Council Thursday gave initial approval to a controversial wet-zoning that pitted an award-winning local brewery against neighbors who opposed the business’ beer-tasting room.

Council members voted 4-3 in favor of Cigar City Brewing’s request to make the temporary approval for its tasting room on W Spruce Street permanent.

What swayed the city council weren’t threats from prudish constituents or dollars from big-brewer lobbyists, but jobs.

Thursday’s vote came after more than two dozen people, most of them supporting the brewery, said the council should allow the tasting room to stay. They said the tasting room was an integral part of how the brewery markets its beers. Taking the tasting room away, they said, would hurt the business.

“I’m asking the City Council to let me keep my job,” Cigar City production manager Doug Dozark said.

The line of supporters also included patrons, other business owners and even competitors who said Cigar City’s ability to thrive in the recession, going from two to 23 employees, is something the city should support.

Craft beer is good for the economy, plain and simple.  The more we can argue that, the more we can change draconian and outdated policies across the country, leading to more beer and more jobs.

From flickr user smohundro

Sorry, Four Loko, your ride is over.  The FDA has decided to ban seven types of caffeinated alcohol — some of which bear a distant resemblance to beer  — effectively forcing manufacturers to significantly alter their recipes or pull the products completely.

From CNN…

The move follows a year-long review by the FDA, which gave the companies 15 days to either reformulate their products or face possible seizure under federal law, said Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, the agency’s principal deputy commissioner. Experts have said the caffeine used in the beverages can mask the effects of alcohol, leaving drinkers unaware of how intoxicated they are.

“FDA does not find support for the claim that the addition of caffeine to these alcoholic beverages is ‘generally recognized as safe,’ which is the legal standard,” Sharfstein told reporters. “To the contrary, there is evidence that the combinations of caffeine and alcohol in these products pose a public health concern.”

One familiar name was impacted by the decision: Rhonda Kallman, brewer of now-banned Moonshot, played a very significant role at Sam Adams and was an early force in the craft beer world.

We’ve written before about Jimmy Carter’s loosening of homebrewing regulation in 1979 and how it helped people like us pick up the hobby.  But blogger E.D. Kain dove in and looked at the numbers.  What did he find?  That Jimmy Carter may be responsible for the craft beer movement of today.

He writes:

If you’re a fan of craft beer and microbreweries as opposed to say Bud Light or Coors, you should say a little thank you to Jimmy Carter. Carter could very well be the hero of International Beer Day.

To make a long story short, prohibition led to the dismantling of many small breweries around the nation. When prohibition was lifted, government tightly regulated the market, and small scale producers were essentially shut out of the beer market altogether. Regulations imposed at the time greatly benefited the large beer makers. In 1979, Carter deregulated the beer industry, opening the market back up to craft brewers. As the chart below illustrates, this had a really amazing effect on the beer industry:

Pretty interesting stuff, based off the work of Rob Carlson.

I doubt there was decent beer in that beer bong.

They will be if John Kerry has his way…

US Senator John Kerry says he wants to give the country’s 1,500 small beer makers a tax break.

Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat, introduced a bill to the Senate on Wednesday that would reduce the excise tax for small breweries from $7 to $3.50 per barrel for the first 60,000 barrels of beer produced each year. For every additional barrel up to 2 million, the bill would lower the excise tax from $18 to $16.

Lower taxes are great, and it will absolutely help craft brewers invest in brewery expansion. At the very least, it should help smaller, struggling breweries keep their doors open while they get on their feet.

Hopefully a more streamlined bureaucracy is next on the list — if we want to expand the number of craft breweries operating in the country, it’s necessary on both the state and federal level.

From flickr user jimbowen0306

A while back we wrote about the insane beer raids in Philadelphia based on an anonymous tip.  If you missed it, you can catch up here.   The fallout from the raids and the public blowback were political — hearings were held, testimony was heard, points were made, but Pennsylvania still has stupid controls on alcohol.

But PA-based beer blogger Lew Bryson didn’t let up, and went to the fallout hearings.  He’s written about it at great length, and it’s worth highlighting if only because of his continued activism on the subject.  One of his great notes from the hearings came from the testimony of Leigh Maida, co-owner of the raided bars and the victim in all of this…

She went on to make some general comments. Beer sales have changed, she said. There used to be huge sales of a few brands of beer. Now there are huge numbers of brands (over 2,800, by the PLCB’s count). Brand registration discourages craft beer. The availability of rare craft releases in Philly and Pennsylvania drives tourism, good press, and jobs, she said, rightly. The system needs an overhaul. She was clearly upset that an “anonymous complaint” could “manipulate a state agency;” she suggested that it would be smarter to prioritize what is investigated. “Nuisance bars and underage drinking? Sure,” she said. “That should be a priority of those whose living this is, too.”

That paragraph touches on so much about what’s wrong with the Pennsylvania controls on beer.  It’s outdated and unjustifiable, it’s destroying the potential economic benefits the explosion in craft beer has brought with it (and this is in Philadelphia, which has a fantastic craft beer scene), and, even without those, the enforcement was just asinine.

But the best part of Maida’s testimony came with this exchange…

“Are you a licensed tavern?” Leigh: “Yes.”
“You ordered these beers from a licensed wholesaler?” Leigh: “Yes.”
“Did you have any reason to believe it was not legal?” Leigh: “No.”
“Was it delivered by a God-fearing member of Teamsters Local 107?” Leigh: “Yes.”
“Please give me a feel for the bar. Is it true that if I went there on a Sunday morning, I would find the Sisters of St. Joseph from St. Anne’s Parish there for brunch?” Leigh: “Yes.” And Brendan leaned in and added: “They’re there on Saturdays, too.” Which brought down the house.

After we’d recovered our composure, O’Brien concluded: “To say what has happened to you was unfortunate would be an understatement. As a resident, I’ll thank you; as a legislator, I’ll apologize.
You have set us on a path to correct this.”

Let’s hope so.  If you have the time, go read Bryson’s fantastic work — it’s worth it.

As a follow-up to this morning’s post, I though it was worth pointing to the appropriately named “Why The PLCB Should Be Abolished” blog.  They have the same instincts, but better insight than I do to the situation, and the entire post is worth reading.  But a few key excerpts…

This violation is approximately equal to a parking ticket — unregistered brands, for crying out loud? — but they put fifteen officers on it for three hours, and who knows how much preparation time. Meanwhile there are countless nuisance bars, there are bars serving mislabeled liquor, there are bars all over Pennsylvania where patrons are being overserved…and they blew hundreds of dollars of our money out their butts following up an anonymous tip that someone was serving “unregistered brands”?

[...] this is clearly a violation of PA liquor law. Just take a look, right here, and you’ll see it’s number 9 on the list of UNLAWFUL ACTIVITIES. There’s not even any wiggle room here: “It is unlawful to sell, offer for sale or deliver any brand of malt or brewed beverages unless such brand has been registered by the manufacturer or franchised agent thereof with the PLCB.” Period. If sale or offer of an unregistered beer has taken place, a crime has been committed. If you sell a beer without the proper paperwork being filed and approved and the $75 fee paid, you’re in the deep stuff. It doesn’t matter that many many bars and distributors across the Commonwealth are doing it all the time — and they are, I know it, they know it, and God bless them, because the beer’s good — it is breaking the law.

Well… Why? Why is there a law?

Go read the whole thing.

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.