Oh yeah, I'm sure that's why RR, Stone, the Bruery, Alpine, and every other CA brewery that's taken a position on this is against liberalization in any form. Either way, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about things like off-premises growler fills, which I think should decrease brewery profits by moving fills from the super-profitable on-site ones to normal distribution channels, which is clearly less profit. The only way that this could be a positive is if there's a multiplier effect on growler sales, which I find dubious, but hey maybe there is.
How do you know breweries in CA are against off-site growler fills? That's not a topic that is discussed regularly, and would require a fundamental change in the law. As far as I know, the ones listed are just opposed to using blank or de-branded growlers for their beer. And while I don't agree with them, they have their branding and quality reasons. Every single excuse I have ever heard or read from a brewery in California as to why they don't fill unbranded growlers has been asinine. In fact, using your logic, the breweries
should adopt off-premise growler fills because it would move more beer at the brewery itself, thereby being more profitable.
With off-premise growler fills in Oregon (say, at a gas station), a brewery moves more beer. While the profitability of that particular beer may be less, it's more than compensated in volume sales. It's a pretty simple idea that is reflected by the fact that breweries distribute their beer in both kegs and bottles. If your statement was true, no brewery would distribute and everyone would make a lot more money through in-house sales of draft beer only.
As I've stated in other threads, I'm pretty good friends with a lot of guys in the industry in Bend. I'll take their word for it that having The Growler Guys fill containers at the local Shell station has been good for their sales.
Either way there's 0 momentum for this as far as I can tell, even when we had someone introducing a bill at the CA legislature it didn't have this in it. It would benefit consumers, wouldn't benefit breweries, there's no movement. So why, exactly, should I think that the BA lobbies on behalf of consumers? They lobby on behalf of breweries, and sometimes that benefits consumers.
I'd argue that just about anything that benefits small brewers also benefits consumers. The conversation is more complicated than that - have you ever lobbied for anything at the state level? I have (via UCSA). I'm sure there are a lot of people who want the law to be changed, but it takes a long time and a lot of money to do so, especially if there is resistance from big breweries that do have a strong presence in the state.
As an aside, I'm not actually convinced that excise tax reduction is a good thing for consumers on net (alcohol consumption is clearly bad in general for a lot of reasons, and creating a disincentive to consume it is something the government should be doing, though I'm not sure how applicable that is to craft beer as opposed to, say, cheap vodka, which is why I say I'm not convinced, I'm most of the way to being convinced, but not all the way), but it's clearly good for breweries. And that seems to be the only thing they talk about doing.
Hey, now we're up my alley! I hate to rain on your parade but
moderate consumption of alcohol has been shown to have long-term health benefits. I could link to a bunch of journal articles, but
this page has a good summary with references.
Yeah I don't think that **** is important. Maybe it was back in 1990 but it's not now. In fact, things like GABF might actually be BAD in some ways. Either way, if we lost it now it would be no biggie.
Ok, we definitely disagree on this one.
Everything you've posted in here has been condescending. I'm just giving as good as you are. Although I've called you fewer names, so I guess there's that. I mean, like this:
Lighten up, man. The smiley was supposed to be in jest. And I think your filter is broken, because one of us is constantly expressing an angry, cynical, condescending attitude on here (and it's not me!)
I actually looked at their website, and couldn't find anything about their lobbying outside of federal excise tax reduction. As far as I can tell that's basically all they're actually trying to do, though if there's other stuff they're very bad publicizing it.
I understand that it's hard to learn about something you don't care about. That's probably the issue here.
This has been interesting. Hopefully other people found it at least somewhat entertaining and informative!
