It’s time we take a look at laws regarding breweries everywhere

The craft beer revolution is upon us. Any publication will tell you that. There’s a lot of work to be done, but for now the craft beer industry is no longer a niche industry. In 2016 brewery is something that, with the right amounts of preparation, planning, market study, and measured risk taking (let’s not downplay ANY of that, by the way), can be a viable business. This is good news for all of us! The more successful local businesses, beer makers or not, the more we can support and put our dollars back into our local communities.

The Indiana craft beer movement kicked off a while back: most will attribute that to the opening of the Broad Ripple Brewpub in 1990, with John Hill’s influence reaching throughout multiple craft breweries in Indiana and beyond. The writing of Rita Kohn surely helped, giving the growing industry a voice that to this day has yet to be matched. We’ve seen this movement grow for nearly 30 years in to the third-fastest growing industry in the state. 3 Floyds, Sun King and Upland are some of the largest employers in the state. Craft beer is here.

Which is why I get so flippin’ mad when I see yet another story about craft breweries running into outdated laws, some they never knew existed, that at this point are only hurting their businesses.

I point you towards a Lafayette Journal & Courier news story from last week, where Lafayette Brewing Co. owner Greg Emig, also the president of the Brewers of Indiana Guild, discovered that he had been wrongfully filling growlers of LBC’s beers in their downtown Lafayette brewery. See, in the fall, the Guild got word of an outdated law on the books that prohibited carryout of alcohol in economic development zones. Buried under layers of code, the law wasn’t really enforced (and probably forgotten about).

Until October, when the Alcohol and Tobacco Commission decided it would start enforcing the law no one knew about at the Harvest Homecoming festival in New Albany.

“We’re totally accustomed to the ATC being really rigorous during that time. Everyone understands that,” Roger Baylor, former owner of New Albanian Brewing Company, told the LJ&C. “They came swooping in at Harvest Homecoming because someone was carrying out a growler and said, ‘Well, you know you can’t do that with your permit.’ We’d been doing it for six years, and no one ever said anything when we went through the permit process. All of a sudden, boom.”

Indiana isn’t the only state running into these problems: a 2011 Wisconsin law prohibits anyone in the state who owns a liquor license from opening a brewery. The purpose of the law? That remains unclear, yet it’s a major hurdle for folks like Jeff McCabe, owner of the Milwaukee Ale House and Milwaukee Brewing Co. 

“Small towns across the country are creating breweries that are the size of Lakefront Brewery [also out of Milwaukee] and they are able to produce and export. But there are some real hurdles to brewing beer in Wisconsin,” McCabe told the Milwaukee Business News. 

Imagine a Scotty’s in Indiana with no Thr3e Wise Men. It’s archaic and, at the root of it, anti-business. (You can probably say it’s anti-brewery, as many Indiana laws still come from the Prohibition era) It’s in the same vein of Indiana’s old small brewer barrel limit that limited production of craft beer to 30,000 barrels a year, a law that, with the help of a co-lead campaign between Sun King and 3 Floyds, was adjusted to 90,000 barrels last year. 

We might be in the Golden Age of Craft Beer at the moment, with more breweries operating in the US now than ever before, but there’s still a long way to go to ensure that opening, owning and operating a brewery in Indiana (and America) is as smooth a process as it is for any other small business.