As of this date and writing, we have 168 good surveys.

Almost all of them are submitted by people with relevant experience; 77% of the respondents have more than two years of work experience in the alcohol beverage field.

The term “craft” has become crucially important to thousands of producers and millions of consumers in recent years.  And yet it has no agreed meaning.  We intend to change that within one year from launch, and fill the term with meaning in a fair, flexible, enforceable, modern way, to save it from abuse.

– Craft Beverage Association, July 19, 2014

These surveys provide solid feedback on what the term “craft” does mean or should mean, in relation to beer, wine and spirits.

If you have not yet completed a survey, and you work in the alcohol beverage field, please complete the survey here. We would like to have at least 500 responses before drawing any major conclusions. We are off to a good start, with 152 responses in the first week.

The survey is sponsored by the Craft Beverage Association. This is a Washington, DC-based non-profit trade association that seeks to define the term “craft,” within one year from launch, in a fair, enforceable and flexible way, to fill it with meaning and save it...

In this blog, every now and then, we talk about how the label and formula system at TTB can be quite slow, despite various TTB efforts to streamline things. Some top examples are here:  101 Days (to get a spirits label approved); Streamlining; Sen. Schumer Says Labels Take Too Long; more streamlining. It is not a pleasure to observe that it can take more than five months to get an ordinary French Vodka approved (30 or so days at the TTB Lab, then 60 or so days to write up the formula approval, then 60 or so days for label approval — to say nothing about potholes and glitches along the way). Add a few weeks if you’d like to add a flavor.

For a change, today let’s give TTB a break and talk about what the submitters can do, to help speed things up. We will also cover what applicants should not do. Many of the same principles apply to both labels and formulas.

Applicants should:

1. Start early. TTB and others do a pretty good job of showing the updated average processing times (APTs), for labels and formulas, so it should come as a surprise to nobody that both processes can take a very long time. Why not...

Last week’s U.S. Supreme Court decision, Pom v. Coca-Cola, is not just about juice. It has massive implications for small brewers, big distillers and all other alcohol beverage marketers. It shows that TTB rules and other agency rules set a floor, not a ceiling, on how companies need to market their products. It shows that the government is only a part of the web of review, in concert with competitors. Just as we predicted that Pom would win this case, we now predict that some alcohol beverage companies will soon take legal action against others, even though such cases, other than trademark cases, were very rare in the past 50 years.

It was bad enough for Coke when Pom called out Coke for going quite a bit too far in posing its apple juice as pomegranate juice. It got even worse when various Supreme Court Justices suggested, orally, that Coke was trying to trick people. And on June 12, 2014 it got even worse, when the Supreme Court unanimously disagreed with Coke’s position. In Pom v. Coca-Cola, the Court said, if there is trickery on food labels, and it hurts a competitor, of course they can do something about it, even if FDA (for whatever reason) does not.

Pom and the Supreme Court have made...

There is some big news from TTB, via dcbrewlaw. TTB has recently decided to ease up on the formula requirements for malt beverages made with common ingredients and processes such as some barrel aging, as well as various fruits and spices. This should help considerably with TTB’s overwhelming workload, and the related delays.

At dcbrewlaw, Dan reports:

There is good news for brewers who are tired of waiting for formula approvals from TTB (currently 74 days):  you may not need it. On June 5, 2014, TTB issued a fairly significant ruling, Ingredients and Processes Used in the Production of Beer Not Subject to Formula Requirements. The ruling clearly spells out which Exempt Ingredients and Processes are now deemed “traditional” and, therefore, do not require a TTB formula approval.

The new ruling expands upon the rules as of 2013. Here are two good examples of products that needed formula approval under the old rules, before this week, and will continue to need a formula approval prior to label approval:  Bud Light Lime; Joose. By contrast, here are two products that would no longer need formula approval:  Bourbon County, Harlem. On each, the formula is highlighted in yellow. Read more about TTB Ruling 2014-4 at...

A short while ago I went to see why “that easy label” is still pending, after filing it while snow was still on the ground and waiting well past spring, into summer. I was shocked* and horrified to see the above. The average processing time for spirits labels is now, as of today, way past a month or two. I am startled to see it’s past 100 days. I don’t recall it ever getting past 45 days or so, back in the days of shutdowns, Rep. Gingrich fighting with President Clinton, Tea Partiers fighting President Obama, and so forth. I find myself talking about the same pending labels, over and over again, week after week and month after month.

It is starting to feel like a crisis for many spirits companies, so far as I can tell. Maybe the big ones can plan around this and tolerate this, but waits of this magnitude are devastating for most companies, from what I can see. Why all of a sudden? Wasn’t the power of the internet and computers, and streamlining, supposed to do approximately the opposite? For those highly interested, we have an internally prepared chart showing how this has gradually or not so gradually gotten worse over the past 7 years. It is available...