Craft Breweries Fight Florida Bills That Benefit Big Distributors

As seems to be happening around
the country, Florida is enjoying a boom
in craft beer breweries that open their doors to the public.
These generally informal drinking establishments—think folding
chairs and picnic tables—tend to offer draft beer by the pint,
flight, or growler, and give customers a chance to try seasonal or
less popular beers that may not be available in local bars or
stores. Some, such as Jacksonville’s Intuition Ale Works, also sell
special, limited-run brews—such as its bourbon-barrel aged
Underdark—by the bottle. 

But selling bottled or canned beer at breweries would become
untenable under a new bill making its way through
Florida’s legislature. Senate Bill
1714 would force breweries to sell all bottled or canned
beer directly to distributors.

If a craft brewery wanted to sell its own beer on site, it would
have to buy it back from the distributor with what is typically a
30 to 40 percent mark-up, according to Reuters. This would hold
true regardless of whether the beers ever left the brewery.

Craft brewers—defined as those producing under 6 million barrels
per year—say
the new regulation is being pushed by big, national
distributors with political clout. Direct-to-consumer sales from
breweries cut into their long-established business as
intermediaries. And craft beers account for a growing portion of
overall beer sales. According to the Brewer’s Association, overall
beer sales across the country dropped 2 percent by volume in 2013,
while craft
beer sales grew by 18 percent. 

Another Florida bill, this
one in the House, would end the state’s ban on half-gallon
growler sales but come with other downsides for craft brewers.
Among these: prohibiting guest beers to be sold in brewery taprooms
and limiting vendor’s licenses to no more than two locations per
brewery. It would also prohibit more than 30 percent of beer sold
in a brewery’s taproom from having been made off-premise, which
could hurt businesses that brew beer in more than one facility but
only operate one taproom.