alcohol beverages generally

The Virginia Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control Board (VABC) will now allow Virginia Distilleries to “self-distribute.” Previously, restaurants were required to purchase all spirits through their assigned VABC Store. Now, VABC has authorized distilleries to sell directly to restaurants.

Unfortunately, restaurants will be required to physically go to the distillery to purchase the spirits (delivery from the distillery is not allowed yet), but it is still a move in the right direction for Virginia to compete with Maryland and Washington D.C.’s more favorable distillery laws.

This change occurred within the past couple of weeks. We have not seen any explicit law change, but through discussions with the VABC and knowledgeable distillers, we understand that this is an important change in interpretation of existing laws.

Peter Ahlf, of Mt. Defiance Distillery, in Middleburg, Virginia was excited about the new allowance, because now it allows for greater distribution of some of their rarer, craft spirits. He said:

Not everything we produce is available in VABC stores, so this lets local restaurants come straight to us and purchase those seasonal and rare products. We would no longer have to drive small orders to Richmond, just to have it shipped back up to the VABC store down the street.

Virginia has been slowly broadening sales allowances for distilleries. We look forward to...

For a good, edifying time, grab a bottle of craft spirits, a beach — and this book.

The book is Moonshiner to Craft Distillery: Leading Lawyers on the Business of Distilling. Aspatore Books, a division of Thomson Reuters, published the book a few weeks ago. In this book, I am pleased to be in the good company of Ryan Malkin, Gloria Materre, Alva Mather, and other notable lawyers in the alcohol beverage law field.

Here are a few excerpts from my chapter, entitled “Reflections on Thirty Years of Spirits Law Practice:  From a Few Score to a Few Thousand Distilleries.”

Almost thirty years ago I got lucky and happened upon the hitherto unknown field (unknown at least to me) now known as beverage law. The years have passed quickly, and this is a testament to how challenging and interesting this field can be. Things have moved a long way during that time, from shuffling paper forms, digging through millions of words in black binders, and a country with a few dozen large distilleries. The law has not changed a lot, but the related law practice has changed dramatically, and so has the business climate.

This area of the law is more heavily regulated than any other aspect of consumer products...

Just when it seemed like TTB labels and formulas would be slow, and get slower every year — all of a sudden things look pretty fast. The above table shows that normal formulas take two weeks or less. It’s been a really long time since the processing times have been less than a month. This is a huge benefit for producers everywhere. Over on the label side, things are also getting better. This scary looking table shows that beer, wine and spirits labels were flirting with 40 and more days of processing time, toward late 2014, until the trends started to improve (things got particularly ugly here).

As of today, TTB says the processing time for labels is right around 21 days.

I reached out to TTB to see why things seem so much better. TTB said:

Although workloads have continued to increase since FY 2015, we have recently been able to improve our processing times in part through cross-training and because new staff hired last year are reaching full proficiency.  However, the improvements you are seeing right now are also due in large part to increased use of overtime and the temporary reassignment of staff from other mission areas, which are short term fixes until we are able...