alcohol beverages generally

Moonshine. A word that typically conjures up thoughts of illicit high-octane liquor, clandestine stills, mason jars, potential blindness and bearded mountain men with colorful nicknames. Producing moonshine without a license is still illegal in the United States, but a large and growing number of licensed distilleries are now producing their own interpretations of moonshine. And despite moonshine’s negative associations from the past, TTB seems to have no issue allowing the word to appear on distilled spirits labels, as evidenced by the scores of moonshine labels approved so far.  There is also an upsurge in approvals for moonshine’s cousins, such as white dog, white whiskey and white lightning. As far as we know, there are no specific TTB requirements to label a product “moonshine.” Apparently, moonshine can be a whiskey, a specialty product with flavors of apple or blackberry (for example), a high poof neutral spirit distilled from apples, peach brandy and even tequila. Although it appears that you can call just about any distilled spirits product “moonshine,” we think it is unlikely that TTB would allow the word on beer or wine labels anytime soon.

Under the new and important Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), FDA was supposed to commence food facility re-registrations yesterday. This was mandated by section 102 of the FSMA law, enacted in 2011. This piece of the FSMA puzzle is not off to a propitious start. It was bad enough that there was not much guidance or clarity about how this would work, before the October 1, 2012 to December 31, 2012 re-registration period began. But it’s even worse that the brief window for required and biennial re-registration began yesterday — and yet there is still no means by which to accomplish what is required. The renewal website was briefly available last week, for a few hours, then it froze, then it disappeared, to be replaced with an oh so calm assurance that:

Biennial Registration Renewal for Food Facilities will not be available on October 1, 2012.  We therefore will not be accepting food facility registration renewals at this time.

Natural Products Insider has explained:

FDA is delaying the registration renewals that are mandated under a 2011 law after the Grocery Manufacturers Association and numerous other trade associations recently sought guidance in meeting the registration requirements. “It would be extremely inefficient and costly for companies to re-register shortly after October 1st based on the...

TTB announced a big policy change — about gluten free — just before the Memorial Day holiday weekend. For many years before the announcement, plenty of companies have tried to make “gluten free” claims, but we still didn’t see any approved TTB labels referring to “gluten free.” A few weeks back, we thought we had one, when we heard a lot of buzz about Omission beer as above. But alas, even the Omission label has had a big omission when it comes to this particular claim. All this is about to change in a big way, as result of this TTB Ruling, released late last week. As a result, we may begin to see various gluten free claims on TTB labels in the very near future. To show the earlier TTB policy, a fairly recent TTB rejection is here, and it may help explain why Widmer did not come out and say it louder or earlier. TTB’s caution may well have been justified; Brewbound has explained:  “The release of Omission Beer comes just a few months after a study published in the Journal of Proteome Research found that eight commercial beers currently labeled as ‘gluten-free’ contained as much gluten as regular beer.” Brewbound further explained that there are plenty of other beers that seek...