Will brewery lobbyists ever get their ship together?

Notes on DtC wine vs. beer, Bored Ape hard seltzer, lotsa booze-biz legislative updates + more!

Apr 22, 2022

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*Looks like the Boost Mobile vs. Verizon coverage challenge, yeesh. Source: Craft Beer & Brewing*

“The beer industry needs to hire the wine industry’s lobbyists.”

That was the take from Zack Fowle of Arizona’s Wilderness Brewing Co. upon seeing Craft Beer & Brewing’s extremely revealing side-by-side comparison of which states allow direct-to-consumer sales for beer vs. wine. It’s the considered position of this boozeletter that lobbyists are an obscene scourge on representative democracy, but even in a post-Abramoff world they are an unfortunate necessity for Getting Things Done in this troubled country’s hallowed halls of gerontocratic power. Assuming no great reforms to get special-interest whispers out of lawmakers’ ears (ditto special-interest money out of their pockets) are coming down the pike any time soon, Fowle has a point: brewers are getting absolutely washed in the DtC game.

There have been some federal legislative efforts to increase parity and give breweries more access to out-of-state mail-order customers via USPS (which currently prohibits shipping booze, commercial or otherwise) but until one of them gets enough momentum on Capitol Hill to actually become law (lol), producers are forced to either forego the lucrative channel entirely, or risk operating in a patchwork/gray area that leaves them open to potential prosecution. Lighting a fire under federal lawmakers’ constitutionally empowered asses on this would require sustained, coordinated pressure from breweries’ policy advocates, and would certainly face stiff opposition from their powerful, deep-pocketed counterparts in the middle tier, whose margins have done with the status quo, thank you very much.) And of course, because each state dictates its own administration of the three-tier system, a federal shipping solution would only be the beginning of any brewery-friendly mail-order reform—you’d still have to go statehouse to statehouse to secure legislative green lights in the 40 states where beer DtC is currently blocked.

Has anybody read anything on how the American wine business managed to so effectively secure itself a legislative green-light on DtC?

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Jazmine Hughes @jazzedloon

I’m Brooklyn sober (weed, natural wine, the occasional martini)

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🤝 Behind the paywall: Benjamin Anderson on unionizing craft labor

On Wednesday I published a new episode of The Fingers Podcast with Benjamin Anderson, a Ph.D. candidate and instructor at Simon Fraser University who has researched and written about labor organizing efforts in contemporary “craft” businesses—small breweries, distilleries, coffeehouses, and so on.

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"You're not gonna get there if you're still living the twisty-mustache fantasy"

Listen now (53 min) | You know how there seem to be a lot of union drives at coffee shops, craft breweries, and artisanal bakeries these days, and you don’t really get it because you always figured that since their products were so much more delicious than their corporate counterparts, they must treat their workers much better, too? What’s up with that…

9 months ago · Dave Infante

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