Home brew at local beer festivals - how?

What sort of laws are involved getting your booze sold at a beer festival? Anyone done it?

It's illegal to sell homebrew whether it's at a beer festival or not. No if and or buts. In order to sell your beer (it wouldn't be homebrew any more) you have to be legit, licensed and taxed. If you you are interested in that then you need to begin your jounery here.

Not sure about England but in the US, you just can't...

OOPs i saw birmingham and thought you were here in Michigan, not the other place.

I just found this on a UK site.

Can I sell my Homebrew in the UK?

There appears to be some links in there to get you started.

So when is homebrewtalk.com gonna set itself up as a licensed distributor, and allow paid forum members to use the license to sell their beer at public events to raise awareness?

Here's more.

And this looks like the info on setting up the licenses and taxes.

turtle said:

So when is homebrewtalk.com gonna set itself up as a licensed distributor, and allow paid forum members to use the license to sell their beer at public events to raise awareness?

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It doesn't work that way.

turtle said:

So when is homebrewtalk.com gonna set itself up as a licensed distributor, and allow paid forum members to use the license to sell their beer at public events to raise awareness?

Click to expand...

When the homebrewing laws that prohibit the sale of homebrew change, or pigs fly, whichever comes first.

So let's get on changin those laws...is there a politician in the house?

Besides, not everyone wants to do this for money. A lot of us like this hobby way to much to ever want to turn this into a job....It's one thing to get up at 10am, get brewing by noon, and drink all day while standing around with your friends to brew 5-10 gallons of beer, that doesn't necessarily have to be the same recipe every time, and have to maintain consistancy from batch to batch. And to start at 5 in the morning mucking out several hundred pounds of stinking grain from the mlt from yesterday's backbreaking brew day, and spend another 10 hours a day doing it again. Not to mention it's no different from any other business, people think breweries must be places of drunken bachanalia, but it's no different than any other factory or places of business, random drug tests (someone posted on here that he couldn't believe that when he applied for a job there they made him piss in a cup) deadlines, taxes, licensing, inspections, budgets ad nauseum.

Brewing professionally has as much in common with what we do as building model airplanes has with being an airforce mechanic. It's a matter of scale and responsibility.

If you want to get an idea of the reality of trying to start one, read Brewpastor's great thread Don't Try This at Home - parts 1, 2 and 3.

If I start my own brewery, I'm not gonna drug test myself, and I'll damn sure drink when I want to.

turtle said:

If I start my own brewery, I'm not gonna drug test myself, and I'll damn sure drink when I want to.

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Good luck with that.....It's one thing to get so drunk you leave out a hop addition, or forget to sanitize or pitch yeast on a batch of homebrew, and another thing to dump tank on a hundred thousand dollar's worth of beer for a drunken mistake. Did you happen to watch Sam Caliagione's brew master series on Discovery? They had to dump a couple of batches, and even withhold a bottled batch because of a breakdown on the line, and that was not because of drunk brewers.

To us that's 20-30 bucks down the drain if a batch goes south....but it's several grand and your reputation if it's a commercial brewery.

So what you're saying is, I should just keep drinkin and smokin and homebrewin, cause it's freaking awesome and there's no reason to poop up the hobby by turnin it into a job.

turtle said:

So what you're saying is, I should just keep drinkin and smokin and homebrewin, cause it's freaking awesome and there's no reason to poop up the hobby by turnin it into a job.

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You got it buddy.

There's actually a thread about that here.

I ruined a vocation by deciding to become a minister. I enjoyed being a leader in my church, and even being a seminarian was fun; all the "authority" without the responsibility (and people stabbing you in the back)....But there some reasons I'm not doing church work now....