Four New Lawyers, With Wide Alcohol Beverage Experience, Join Us Within the Past Three Months

We are delighted to announce that we have added two more highly experienced alcohol beverage lawyers in recent days:  Art DeCelle and Marshall Fawley. They join us after many years handling beer, wine and spirits issues at one of the premier alcohol beverage law practices in the U.S. A few weeks earlier, we affiliated with two other of counsel lawyers.

Our firm has steadily grown in recent years and we are now at ten alcohol beverage lawyers. Our new colleagues make us one of the top U.S. alcohol beverage law firms, significantly expanding the range of alcohol beverage law issues that we can address for clients. The firm started in 2001 with just one lawyer, focused primarily on labels and formulas. We have branched out to cover permits, trademarks, trade practices, distribution, and the other legal issues that commonly impact beer, wine, spirits, cider, kombucha, hard seltzer and other beverages.

The below-listed new lawyers join a highly experienced team of ten lawyers and several other professionals.

• Art DeCelle. Senior Counsel. Art has been working as a lawyer for over 30 years in various senior capacities such as at a leading international law firm, as General Counsel of the Beer Institute, and as a Chief...

Every time I go to Louisville I get to see Pete’s smiling face, his competence, and I even get to speak in Kamer Hall. Kamer Hall is the home of Moonshine University. Last year I interviewed Pete for Artisan Spirit magazine but it looks like I never mentioned it here.

As the article says, Pete started his distilling career with Seagram distillery in Louisville in 1978 working in distilling, bottling maintenance, plant maintenance, utilities, plant engineering and corporate engineering. He is a licensed professional engineer. In 1985 he went to work for Barton Distillery in Bardstown, KY as their engineering manager, handling all engineering related work in the Bardstown and Atlanta plants and assisted in the Carson, CA plant. His duties included selection and installation of new equipment, troubleshooting existing equipment, increasing capacity and improving operations. Pete retired from Barton in 2011 and started his own engineering company, Distillery Engineering. Since then he has helped small to medium size distilleries with everything from site selection, equipment selection, plant layout, startup, and trouble shooting.

An excerpt is below, and you can find the full article at the link.

Did you ever imagine the spirits industry would mature into something like this? Compare and contrast with early in your career.

In my early career, there...

TTB proposed to modernize the beer, wine and spirits labeling rules in late 2018, in a sweeping 132 page document. I thought it may be useful to take one narrow provision at a time, and compare the old version to the new, proposed version. Today I will look at the long-time restriction on describing spirits as “pure.”

The old version of the rule is at left, above. It’s been in place for many decades at least. The new version is at right.

I would have expected to see some changes because the rule has always seemed a tad random. It is hard to understand what the government should have against this thoroughly ordinary word. It is especially peculiar when we consider that the rules (old or new) take no issue with describing a beer or wine as pure, yet shudder at the prospect of describing spirits in such terms. Another reason to look for changes in this rule is because TTB and ATF have struggled with it time and again since the 1930s. In 2005, TTB proposed to modify the rule; the 2005 notice explained that the government first published a rule on pure in April of 1936, then had hearings in May of 1936, then reconsidered the issue in November of 1978 and December...