Help beer help you

[the_orf]

In December 2006, a gathering of local Texas brewers got together and began an organized effort to obtain the same rights to make & sell their good that their compatriots in the wine industry have. To wit, they want to be able to sell their own beer, on their own premises, directly to consumers. A Star-Telegram article covered this effort.

Currently, Texas still follows prohibition-era laws, written by baptists & teetotalers in the 1930s, designed to stop Al Capone-types from playing the heavy with Mom & Pop stores, and also to prevent moonshiners and bootleggers from selling their bathtub gin through the back window.

Nowadays, those same laws prevent legitimate businesses like Saint Arnolds or Live Oak from selling their own beer to anyone but a distributor. Even if you go on a tour of the facilities at some place like Independence Brewing in south Austin (first Saturday of every month!), you can't buy any beer there. You can see them make it, watch them bottle it, and have a free taste if they give it to you (and they will). But if you want to take some home with you, you have to go buy it at H.E.B. or somewhere else--at a marked-up price to cover the distributor's costs to distribute it from the brewery to the store, and the retailer's cost to stock it.

All that the brewers seek with this legislation is to do same things Texas wineries already do: sell their own goods, in small amounts, directly to the consumer. This would be better for you in the form of lower prices; and for the brewers, in the form of better serving their customers; and even for the distributors, in the form of leading to greater awareness and demand for microbreweries' high-margin products. (The distributors are of course lined up against this legislation already, because they don't see the future increase in sales as helping them, they only see the immediate relaxation of the stranglehold they currently have on breweries' distribution options.)

This change would also help YOU, the improvisor, because it would be a big thing for ME, as a prospective brewpub-with-a-theater-space owner, to be able to sell my Orf-brewed beer in bottles at Central Market while also selling it in pints to patrons who come to see a comedy show at my hypothetical future venue. More beer sales=more overall income. More overall income=better subsidizing of theater=more performance options for you.

To help, you can do a few things. First off, we're looking for a representative to introduce the bill to the legislature. If anybody personally knows their rep, or thinks they know of a rep who might be amenable to this cause, please tell me who it is.

Two, even if you don't know your local congressman, write him or her a letter expressing your dismay that you can't buy locally-made beer at the source, and that the distributors are preventing you from spending your hard-earned money on local products because they don't stock the small-scale-produced beverages you desire.

Three, drink good locally-produced beer: Live Oak, Real Ale, Saint Arnold, mine, etc. This doesn't necessarily help the legislative issue, but it sure is enjoyable to do.

Thanks for any assistance!

-Orf
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Keep Austin Beered.

[shksprtx]

I'm all about this, but what about brew-pubs? Are they exempt from this law by virtue of having an on-premises license?

One of my favorite places in Lubbock used to be the Hub City Brewery, a bar that served their own home-brews in addition to the usual bar fare...they had some amazing, award-winning beers, and prices that would put any Austin watering hole to shame, but how did they manage to get around these laws?

[shksprtx]

Please disregard the previous. I now kick myself for skimming over the last paragraph or two of Orf's original post.

Move along...nothing to see here...