Article from Reason by Zuri Davis.
New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy has taken issue with his state’s new regulations on microbreweries, saying he isn’t sure that they were the “right, sensible step to take.”
The Division of Alcohol and Beverage Control (ABC), which answers to the Department of Law and Public Safety, passed a special rulingin September that imposed new terms on licensed microbreweries. The enhanced regulations say the business cannot hold more than 25 special events each year. That includes trivia nights, televised sporting events, and classes for art and exercise. Breweries will receive just 12 special permits a year to sell their products offsite at beer festivals, music festivals, civic events, and the like. They’ll also be limited to hosting 52 private parties per year—and they must notify the ABC 10 days before each event.
When the ABC decided to let the micobreweries serve beer onsite, the ruling states, it didn’t intend to give them the “same privileges as a sports bar or restaurant.” To rectify that alleged error, the agency now wants to set rules for “what constitutes an appropriate tour and what constitutes permissible activities.”
As you’d expect, microbreweries have spoken out against the decision. A petition addressed to Murphy, his lieutenant governor, the president of the state senate, and the speaker of the general assembly notes that the ruling “severely harms the way breweries may interact with their customers and communities in their tap rooms”; it also argues that there is no “‘one size fits all’ mold for a craft brewery.”
Read the entire article at Reason.
Image Credit: Uri Tours (uritours.com) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
wpDiscuz
Does this have the fingerprints of the major breweries? Think about that for a moment and then think about who owns the major breweries. They aren’t Americans.
Good grief, don’t these germs have anything useful to do? I thought they were supposed to solve important problems — not regulate the length of our toenails.
New Jersey,or East California, will do anything to hamstring small businesses. Be there in November. VOTE or the same thing will happen in your state!