While this is a big step for craft beer in South Carolina and I’m very excited to see progress being made, I have to temper my visions of what will come from this bill.

We’re still a ways off from the scene I witnessed on Friday night at the Highland Brewery outside of Asheville, where they had a band, a trailer grill cooking meat, and kids running around while their parents sat in canvas chairs on the lawn drinking beer and talking.

Bill H.4572 is very limited. It allows for sampling at breweries and stores. You still can’t get a full pint of beer. I don’t know about you, but it’s tough to throw a party when you can only have two ounce samples.

Now, let me try to clear some of my raincloud from the sky. This is still a very important bill for both breweries and beer stores in South Carolina. It allows these businesses to have more direct contact with customers in order to develop relationships and to educate.

That is the foundation of the craft beer industry and why it continues to grow while macro sales are in decline. There’s a reason North Carolina has more than 30 breweries and there are five in South Carolina. This bill had to pass if we were to have any hope of supporting new breweries and growing craft beer in this state.

This is a time to celebrate another victory for craft beer drinkers and those yet to come over to the good side. So get thee to a brewery near you and buy a case of beer.

Here are some of the details from the new bill:

Brewery Tastings & Sales

• Tastings and beer sales must be done in conjunction with a tour of the “entire brewing process utilized at the licensed premises.”
• Samples are limited to four ounces of beer under 8% alcohol by weight and two ounces of beer over 8% ABW.
• Only four brands of beer can be sampled by a customer in a 24-hour period.
• A brewery can sell up to 288 ounces (a case of 24 12-ounce bottles) to an individual per day.

Retail Tastings

• The retailer must notify the State Law Enforcement Division of the tasting at least 10 days in advance.
• Only eight products can be sampled at a tasting event.
• No more than one container of each product can be open at one time. Not sure what that has to do with anything, but that’s cool.
• Samples can only be two ounces for a beer under 8% ABW and one ounce for a beer over 8% ABW.
• Only two of the products sampled can be over 10% ABW.
• A person can only get one sample of each product.
• A tasting can last no longer than four hours.
• A single retail establishment can only have 24 tastings per calendar quarter.

Started in 1982 by the American Brewers Association, this festival has grown into the premier beer event in the United States. Winning a medal at the GABF is one of the most prestigious awards a brewery can attain. This year, 495 breweries submitted 3,308 beers into the competition.

Breweries from Colorado, California and Oregon dominated the medals. I’m not going to accuse anyone of a west-coast beer bias, but their dominance is a little deceiving given sheer number of breweries from those states. The beer they make out there is great, but I think Colorado alone has more breweries than the entire Southeast.

Some of our Southern Breweries did represent and bring home some hardware. I’ll give a special congratulations to the Upstate South Carolina’s own RJ Rockers for winning a gold medal in the English-Style Summer Ale category with their Light Rock Ale.

Congrats to the other breweries from the Southeast that won medals:

Duck-Rabbit Craft Brewery, Farmville, NC
Gold: Duck-Rabbit Barrel Aged Baltic Porter – Baltic-Style Porter
Bronze: Duck-Rabbit Barrel Aged Baltic Porter – Wood- and Barrel-Aged Strong Ale

Foothills Brewing, Winston-Salem, NC
Bronze: Sexual Chocolate Imperial Stout – Imperial Stout

Red Brick-Atlanta Brewing Co., Atlanta, GA
Bronze: Red Brick Anniversary Ale 15 – Wood- and Barrel Aged Beer
Bronze: Numbers Ale – Ordinary or Special Bitter

Sweetwater Brewing Co., Atlanta, GA
Silver: Motorboat ESB – Extra Special Bitter or Strong Bitter

Blackstone Brewing Co., Nashville, TN
Gold: St. Charles Porter – Brown Porter

Cigar City Brewing, Tampa, FL
Gold: Humidor Series IPA – Wood- and Barrel Aged Beer

Brewzzi, West Palm Beach, FL
Silver: Boca Alt – German Style Altbier

Some other results from the medal awards that I found interesting:

• Milwaukee’s Best and Keystone Ice won gold medals and Steel Reserve won a bronze. Were the judges already drunk when they sampled these?
• Best beer name: “TPS Report” from Trinity Brewing in Colorado Springs won a gold in Experimental Beer.
• Flying Dog took home the award for Mid-Sized Brewery of the Year.

When this bill was last voted on, there was one representative that voted against it, Rep. Kenneth Kennedy from District 101 in Williamsburg Co. A unanimous vote is not necessary for passage, but it will allow the bill to go straight to a big committee vote, meaning it will skip a lot of smaller steps. This means we’ll get to drink good beer sooner, and this is never a bad thing.

Essentially, Bill 3693 will allow breweries, and now stores and restaurants, to have beer tastings and samplings. Currently, if you go to a brewery, they cannot legally allow you to even taste their beer on the premises. This is a total double-standard, as you can go to a South Carolina winery and try their wine, and you can go to a South Carolina distillery and taste their spirits.

The bill posted on the State House site has been amended and is not up-to-date. It has since been amended to drop the restrictions and added stores and restaurants, in addition to the breweries themselves.

It’s not too late to take action. You can contact Rep. Kennedy and send him an email urging him to reconsider and vote yes to this bill. If you don’t feel comfortable making an argument, just send him an email with “Please vote yes to bill 3693″ as the subject and just send that.

Below is Rep. Kennedy’s contact information. You can also get more info by visiting the forum on Beer Advocate.

Thanks for taking action!

Representative Kenneth Kennedy
District 101 – Williamsburg Co.

Email: KK@schouse.org

Addresses:
(H) 140 Society St., Greeleyville, SC 29056
Bus. (843) 426-2259
Home (843) 426-2492

(C) 328B Blatt Bldg., Columbia, 29201
Bus. (803) 734-2986
Home (803) 252-2000

I had the opportunity to visit Portland in the fall of 2007, and I must say that I was totally impressed with the people and the beer. There is so much competition and the bar has been set so high, it’s virtually impossible for a sub-par craft brewery to exist for long. You’ve got to bring the thunder to stick around.

At the same time, it’s exciting to see a new pocket of craft beer excellence is growing up just down the road from me. It is a rare time in our lives when we are at the cusp of something great, and we are aware of it while it’s happening. Look at Google, it toiled in obscurity for over 3 years before it exploded and took over the world. Who would have seen that coming in 1999? Not me. I was there, I remember. If I had, I would be a lot richer than I am today.

So congrats to Asheville and Portland. Both great beer towns that represent each coast well.

Believe it or not, I do have quite a few interests outside of beer. I’m an avid follower of the Sports Guy, Bill Simmons. A few weeks back on his podcast, he was on a kick talking with various guests about the newpaper industry and sports coverage in general. I remember he made a comment in one discussion that with all the noise and competition for attention, many bloggers turn to flaming and extreme criticism to drive traffic to their sites.

The lesson to be learned here is that if you want to be “famous” and put yourself out there, you have to have a thick skin. I don’t have a large enough presence for people care enough to have an extremely negative view of my work (yet), but I can imagine how difficult that must be. It still bothers me when I receive any criticism, even if it isn’t a personal attack.

We all want our work to be liked and respected. At the same time, you have to love what you do, and do it for those people you know enjoy what you do and get something positive out of it. You have to embrace that and separate your self-worth from any negativity that comes your way.

And believe me, there is a lot of negativity out there, even in the beer world.

I’m always looking for a good opportunity and like to keep myself flexible for such things when they come up, so I thought this might be a good avenue to get into the business, since I don’t have any “job” experience in beer. (That’s why blogs are awesome, because no one asks you how long you’ve been a doing so and so before you can start one. Then again, maybe that’s why blogs aren’t good. Either way, I digress…)

On with my story. So I go in and ask if they are looking for help on their sales team, and the general manager first asks me how much wine experience I have. Now, having none, I figured this could be a sticking point. I didn’t think, “Well, I’ve drank wine before,” would be a good answer. I simply answered that I did not have much, but I was very much into beer and I felt that with training, perhaps I could acquire similar skills with wine.

The GM went on to say (he was very nice) that they look for top-level wine people in their hires, and that from day 1 they need to be able to handle customers and make recommendations based on food pairings, etc. I wasn’t going to pretend I could do that right off the bat, so I asked, “What about beer?”

His response to this is what floored me so much. He more or less said that they really don’t care about their beer inventory. They have a wide selection of macro and craft beer, but the margins are so small it isn’t worth it for them to allocate resources to provide customer service for their beer selection. He said they “give away their beer” and they were much better off using all their resources to sell wine, which is where they made all their profit.

He went on to say that they consciously do not want their associates dedicated to that area, and “as long as they know the basic styles and the difference between an ale and a lager, that’s enough.” Maybe it’s because I love beer, but I could not imagine that a store that held such high standards of knowledge and expertise of wine for their employees would have such a low standard for craft beer.

I’m not advocating they reconfigure their store to add more beer inventory and hire a slew of beer fanatics. I understand that retailers survive by selling the most of their high margin items. However, if they do make at least some profit on beer, why not have at least one person on staff that is an expert on that area? If nothing else, it could help draw in craft beer lovers, and I’m sure they would cross sell wine when those customers come into the store.

As much as I love beer, I do like to enjoy the occasional bottle of wine. If I had a good relationship with that retailer, I would be more inclined to buy my beer and wine from them, rather than just picking up a bottle from Publix while I’m grocery shopping. Maybe my market segment isn’t big enough to justify the expense of one employee.

It all seemed a little short-sighted to me. Then again, I am a little biased. And what do I know? I’ve never worked retail.

I expected states like California, Colorado and Oregon to be up at the top, but Pennsylvania came in 5th. Pennsylvania isn’t a state that you normally think of when the top brewing states come to mind, but with breweries like Victory, Weyerbocker, Troeggs, Stoudts, and of course, Iron City, I can see why they have won so many awards.

On a more depressing note, South Carolina came in near the bottom with 8 award winners. Hey, at least we beat North Dakota. By the way, what’s up with West Virginia? They were the only state in the union to have no award winners in that ten-year span.

We southerners need to get to brewin’ cause them Yankees are kicking our ass.

Now we just have to work on Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky and Oklahoma, the Final Four of non-homebrewing states.

Yes, craft breweries do need to sell beer to stay in business, but the growing trend of brewery collaborations demonstrate how cool and macro-thinking many people are in the beer world. They are more concerned with helping each other make better beer (thus helping the entire craft industry) rather than hording their secrets trying to snatch market share away from the competition.

There will always be people in any venue that are more concerned about money than anything else, but it’s been my experience in the beer community that people genuinely want to be helpful and are dedicated to promoting the industry as a whole, knowing that if you increase the size of the pie, everyone’s slice can get bigger.

I believe this type of collaborative culture, like many things in the brewing world, started with homebrewers. Most homebrewers are always willing to share advice and lend a hand whenever possible, and I think it’s refreshing to see this spirit carrying on into commercial craft beer.

If only brewers ruled the world…

For those that may not follow the issue, in South Carolina, a brewery can be either “on-premises” or “off-premises.” This means they can produce beer and sell it through a distributor or they can sell it in their establishment (brewpub) but not both.

Allowing small breweries to sell on-premises is advantageous for the breweries because it will allow them to do brewery tours, have tasting rooms, and enjoy higher margins by selling some product directly to the customer. It’s a way to generate traffic and buzz (literally and figuratively) and draw in new customers by offering fun activities, thus creating a personal connection with the brewery and increasing brand loyalty.

It’s hard enough for these small brewers to survive, let alone grow. Why do you think we only have five breweries in the state? So keep your eyes and ears open for more news on this bill. I’ll let you know when we start organizing sit-ins…