{"id":7093,"date":"2016-09-26T07:00:05","date_gmt":"2016-09-26T11:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/?p=7093"},"modified":"2016-09-25T17:21:25","modified_gmt":"2016-09-25T21:21:25","slug":"the-magic-of-freedom-from-the-liquor-monopoly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/?p=7093","title":{"rendered":"The Magic of Freedom from the Liquor Monopoly"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Adam Pagnucco.<\/em><\/p>\n

Montgomery County is witnessing an historic craft beer renaissance.\u00a0 New small breweries are popping up all over the county offering an incredible array of IPAs, Belgian tripels, pilsners, ESBs, saisons, stouts and even rum rye<\/a>.\u00a0 Politicians and customers alike are celebrating, even if they might be a wee bit late to work on the following day.\u00a0 But this renaissance has been caused by one factor that few so far are talking about.<\/p>\n

These breweries are exempt from having to sell their products through the county\u2019s Department of Liquor Control.<\/p>\n

\"brookeville-beer-farm-1\"<\/p>\n

Montgomery County Executive Ike Leggett and members of the County Council at a ribbon cutting for Brookeville Beer Farm.\u00a0 Photo courtesy of Delegate David Moon.<\/em><\/p>\n

Until recently, there were three small breweries in MoCo: Growlers in Gaithersburg, Rock Bottom in Bethesda and Gordon Biersch in Rockville.\u00a0 The latter two are part of chains.\u00a0 While each establishment could sell to individual customers, they had to go through the Department of Liquor Control (DLC) to sell to restaurants and retailers.\u00a0 For the most part, it wasn\u2019t worth the bother.<\/p>\n

That changed in 2014 when a group of craft brewers wanted to open Denizens Brewing Company in Downtown Silver Spring.\u00a0 The condition they imposed was that the DLC must not be allowed to carry their beer.\u00a0 Denizens co-owner Julie Verratti told the Sentinel<\/a>, \u201cThere\u2019s no freaking way in hell I would ever trust my product to the Department of Liquor Control.\u201d\u00a0 According to the article<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Veratti said the main reason she does not trust the DLC to deal with her product is because she believes the warehouse employees would not properly handle it.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not their product so they don\u2019t give a sh**,\u201d Veratti said. \u201cThey don\u2019t care if it sits out and I doubt half the people in the warehouse have knowledge of how to handle beer.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Paul Rinehart, founder of Baying Hound Aleworks, whose brewery had to go through the DLC prior to the change in law, called using the DLC as a distributor \u201cnot fantastic.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Rinehart said when using the DLC his brewery \u201cran into issues where our product would get lost\u201d and would often hear from clients that their product orders had been either delivered incorrectly or not delivered at all.<\/em><\/p>\n

Despite the DLC upgrading their inventory system to Oracle, which rolled out on Feb. 1 and has its own problems, Rinehart said he has no plans to use the DLC to distribute again.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m just afraid of my product getting lost again,\u201d Rinehart said.<\/em><\/p>\n

The result of Verratti\u2019s advocacy was a 2014 state\u00a0bill<\/a>\u00a0that allowed micro-breweries to bypass the DLC and sell craft beer directly to restaurants and retailers as well as on-site customers.\u00a0 This was the key reform that enabled Denizens to grow in MoCo.\u00a0 Once again, from the Sentinel<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Had it not been for the change in law that gave breweries the ability to deliver their product directly to their customers, Julie Veratti, co-owner and director of business outreach for Denizens, said her brewery would not have distributed inside the county at all and instead would have just distributed the product to Washington, D.C. Denizens opened for business after the change of law came into effect.<\/em><\/p>\n

And so MoCo micro-breweries are now free of DLC entirely.\u00a0 Disasters like DLC\u2019s week-long meltdown<\/a> in last year\u2019s holiday season do not affect them at all.<\/p>\n

The result of all this is a BOOM in craft brewing.\u00a0 Since the DLC exemption was passed, Denizens<\/a> (Silver Spring), 7 Locks<\/a> (Rockville), Waredaca<\/a> (Laytonsville) and Brookeville Beer Farm<\/a> (Brookeville) have opened.\u00a0 A fifth brewery attempted to open in Rockville but encountered permitting and zoning issues with the city government<\/a> and moved to Baltimore.\u00a0 The chart below shows all active licenses and permits pertaining to MoCo microbreweries.\u00a0 Fifteen of eighteen originated in 2014 or later.<\/p>\n

\"moco-brewery-licenses\"<\/p>\n

The lesson to be learned here is that removal of the county\u2019s liquor monopoly leads to economic growth and job creation.\u00a0 Those are important considerations for a county that has seen its private sector jobs base shrink between 2001 and 2014<\/a> and has just raised property taxes by 9 percent.\u00a0 The state\u2019s Bureau of Revenue Estimates has found that the county could create more than 1,300 jobs and nearly $200 million in annual economic activity<\/a> by tossing its liquor monopoly into the dustbin of Prohibition.<\/p>\n

Will the county embrace economic prosperity and job creation?\u00a0 Or will politicians continue to defend the monopoly while cutting ribbons for breweries who are exempted from it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Adam Pagnucco. Montgomery County is witnessing an historic craft beer renaissance.\u00a0 New small breweries are popping up all over the county offering an incredible array of IPAs, Belgian tripels, pilsners, ESBs, saisons, stouts and even rum rye.\u00a0 Politicians and customers alike are celebrating, even if they might be a wee bit late to work … Continue reading The Magic of Freedom from the Liquor Monopoly<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[151,1449],"tags":[1545,1439],"class_list":["post-7093","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adam-pagnucco","category-department-of-liquor-control","tag-adam-pagnucco","tag-department-of-liquor-control"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4mKJE-1Qp","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7093","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7093"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7093\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7108,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7093\/revisions\/7108"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7093"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7093"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7093"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}