Should Beer Be Required to List Ingredients?

Update: Commenters have made the point that a bottled-on date would be even more useful than ingredients.  I completely agree, and I'm actually working on a piece about that now.

 This meme has been floating around for the past few months:

An online petition to change that — asking Anheuser-Busch and Miller Coors to post their beer product ingredients online — is being spearheaded by influential food blogger and nutritional activist Vani Hari, creator of FoodBabe.com.

At issue: It's the Treasury Department — not the Food and Drug Administration — that regulates beer. So the beer giants are not required to post ingredients on their labels or on their websites. [FoodBabe creator Vani] Hari says even though the law doesn't require it, consumers have a right to know what's in the beer they drink. And she wants the beer giants to post it on their websites.

Source

Hari has been on the case for awhile and when her concerns first surfaced, they were uninformed and attracted some sniggering.  On the other hand, I see absolutely no reason why we shouldn't know what's in our beer.  Most people won't care, and some people will be incensed by uncontroversial ingredients (like Hari's objection to isinglass).  Others will (correctly) complain that listing ingredients like corn won't reveal whether it's GMO corn, and still others will (correctly) note that ingredients don't reveal the whole picture about how beers are maltreated.  And yet all of those quibbles are beside the point.  The only reason breweries would oppose this is to conceal what they're putting in your beer, and that seems reason enough to compel them to reveal all.

Sunlight is good.

Politics and Brewing

A little more than twelve hours ago, the US government embarked on a semi-shutdown.  It was purely the result of politics, but that doesn't make the real effects any less real.  Now, despite the fact that I am a known [choose epithet of preference: pinko commie, defeatocrat, liberal], I have attempted to eschew all political discussion at this site.  Politics divide and beer unites, and I don't want the one to sully the other.  Nevertheless, politics does sometimes intrude on the happy world of beer, unavoidably.  Indeed, a fair amount of the beery terrain we now inhabit is a result of politics. 

Source: White Beer Travels

Unlike wine or cider, beer is a constructed potable.  We formulate a recipe and make a product.  There are a lot of ways, both from within the brewhouse and without, to affect the beer that gets made.  I spent two and a half years in Utah, where politics had a decided effect on brewing.  This was the 1980s, as old stalwarts like Wasatch and Squatters were getting their start, and they were prohibited by law from making beer in excess of 4% (or 3.2% by weight).  It forced brewers to learn how to brew things like four percent IPAs and bocks--which they did, admirably.  Now, that law didn't create a national tradition of weirdly low-alcohol beers, but it might have.  Throughout time politics have created weird circumstances that changed the course of beer and beer styles.  I don't expect the current shutdown or even the debt ceiling fight to affect American brewing.  It does give me the opportunity, however, to illustrate how politics have constantly shaped beer.  We may wish to leave politics out of beer, but sometimes politics barges in anyway.

Belgian beer tax.    One of the keys to understanding Belgium’s ales is a bizarre 19th century tax law.  Rather than levy a fee based on the amount of beer produced or the strength of the beer, the government tax was assessed on the size a brewery’s mash tun.  Breweries responded, of course, by using tiny mash tuns--no matter how much beer they were brewing.  To get some kind of efficiency out of their wee tuns, brewers used extremely thick mashes, and after brewers had packed as much grain as they could into the tun, it left little room for water.  As a consequence, breweries had to draw their mash water off and add new water to the grain bed several times for every batch.  When you read 19th century descriptions of the brewing process, it's astonishingly baroque.  The mash regimes took hours.  The legacy of this law is still evident in the turbid mashes lambic makers use.

Flourishing Hoegaarden.  While we're talking Belgium, let's have an example about what happens in the absence of politics.  You may wonder why a town the size of Madras, Oregon is such a famous burg in the annals of brewing.  The reason is this: in the early 16th century, tiny Hoegaarden fell between regions ruled by Liege and Brabant, a tax-free seam that gave it an exporting advantage that lasted through the end of the 18th century.  During that period, beer exports buoyed an energetic collection of hometown breweries—as many as 38 in the mid 1700s. 

Reinheitsgebot.  This most controversial of beer laws has a hugely political backstory.  In the official telling, the Bavarian government enacted it to ensure that beer was free of funky and unhealthful adjuncts.  Less charitably, it can be read as a sop to bread-producers, ensuring bakers had enough tasty wheat to work with.  Because wheat breweries could still get an exemption from the government, there was an element of graft in the whole thing, too, because granting weissebrauerei brewing rights became a form of patronage and a lucrative source of revenue.  "Purity" is probably not the best word to associate with the law.

American Prohibition.  This is a gimme, right?  What was more politicized than a nation banning booze?  It put half the country's breweries out of business and opened the way for the massive consolidation that began in the 1940s.  (There were 684 breweries in 1940 and 229 twenty years later.)

Great British Gravity Drop.  Before the World Wars, Britain was known for strong beer.  (I refer you to the ten million pre-war log books Ron Pattinson has assembled documenting the fact.)  The wars forced the government to ration grain, and beer got weaker.  This was actually much more pronounced in WWI, when average gravities plummeted to just 1.030 (7.5 P).  In WWII, they never dropped below 1.034.  And in between the wars, they rose.  But an interesting thing happened as a result of all those years of low-alcohol beer: drinkers started to like it that way.  It's a legacy that now defines British beer.

The effects of these policies are everywhere evident.  Hoegaarden remains a famous brewing city (though it was touch and go there for a decade).  Germans remain wildly suspicious of adjuncts.  The US developed a monochromatic beer culture based on a single type--which may have actually created the conditions for this crazy brewery revival we now enjoy.  And Brits still think 5% is a strong ale.

We could go on--and perhaps you will, in comments (though I'll watch them closely--go to one of the kajillion politics sites if you have a comment on Obamacare).  The upshot is that beer does not exist in a vacuum from politics.  Today, when we're thinking deeply about what happens when the political system intrudes in our lives, and so it's a nice moment to recognize that legacy in the beer world, too.

Drinking With Dad Law?

With thanks to commenter Jack, this is a really fascinating development in Colorado:

DENVER — A Colorado proposal to allow people between 18 and 21 to drink alcohol with their parents is up for its first review.

The so-called “Drinking With Dad” bill from a Republican senator would allow parents to buy alcohol for their children at Colorado bars and restaurants if they were 18 and older but not 21 yet.

Sen. Greg Brophy is planning to introduce the bill on Wednesday. He says he thought of the proposal because he and his wife recently took their daughter to dinner to celebrate her 20th birthday, and she couldn’t have a drink with them.

A similar law exists in Wisconsin.

I had no idea.  A good idea?  Something Oregon legislators should take up?

Regulating Liquor: the Role of Distributor

Part two in the Oregonian's series on Oregon's liquor laws looks at the little-understood middleman in the equation, the distributor.  Most of this article revolves around wine distribution--about which I'm completely clueless--but does touch on the larger system.  Author Harry Esteve rounds up some of the more interesting aspects of the laws:

• Retailers must pay cash when they receive alcohol, which gives distributors a distinct advantage: they "buy big volumes on credit, then sell it for cash, giving them weeks of float with other people's money."
• Beer distributors have exclusive territories (eliminating competition), which they can bequeath to their heirs (remember Cindy McCain?).
•  Retailers can't pick up alcohol from producers--it has to be distributed--and they can't even shift inventory between stores.  That also has to be distributed.
• Vintners have to ship their wines to Salem for storage until they're taxed and "released" for sale.  Even wine sold at a winery must go to Salem and them come back.

Other relevant facts:

• "A few decades ago, the number of distributors hovered around 20,000 nationally, with fewer than 1,000 wineries. Today, the United States boasts some 7,000 wineries, while the number of distributors has dwindled to fewer than 500."
• Distributors have an impressive lobbying infrastructure to protect their status (and their man in Oregon, Paul Romain, is one of Salem's most powerful lobbyists).

Esteve paints a stark portrait, concluding with a quote by grocery lobbyist John LiLorenzo to wrap everything up:  "These are Byzantine rules that have a purpose.  The purpose is to guarantee that a privileged group always makes money, just by being there. That's what this is all about."

I think it's worthwhile to add a caveat or fifteen here.  If we were to start from scratch, would we grant distributors so much power in the alcohol equation?  Probably not.  Some of the laws seem unnecessarily protectionist or baroque--that system of shipping wines to sit in Salem before they can be sold at a winery is astounding.  But there are a few reasons we would keep the distributor in the picture.

Not every country uses distributors.  In England, breweries can own their own pubs and distribute to them.  This has its own unintended consequences.  The business model for breweries pens out if they own their own pubs, but it's much harder if they're selling to pub chains or grocery stores.  Little guys struggle there.  And they have their own tax issues.  In the museum at Burton upon Trent, they show the office of the tax collector that was housed inside the Bass Brewery.  The law was so complex they required a government employee on site at all times.  How do you think that would go down in America?

But beyond that, distributors can help small producers.  It wasn't always the case.  Early in the microbrewing era, small breweries had a hard time getting distributors to carry their product because retailers didn't understand or want it.  But now that equation has flipped.  Even very small breweries find distribution.  There's a reason even little hole-in-the-wall convenience stores have obscure local micros--distributors.  The state of Oregon has also been good to update its rules to adapt to the changing market.  Now breweries can self-distribute if they brew below a certain amount--a figure raised to 5,000 barrels a couple sessions back.  (Hats off to Darron Welch at Pelican who helped shepherd that along.)

When I first started writing about beer in the late 90s, small breweries had an ambivalent relationship to distributors.  At the time, distribution was a lot harder to get, and little guys like Hair of the Dog were not getting to bigger stores.  Now the opposite is true.  Little guys, who couldn't compete in price wars and quantity discounts--as is now happening in Washington--are happy to have distributors getting their product to market. (I know there are people in the industry who read this blog, and if you'd like to further illuminate the issue, I'd welcome on- or off-the-record comments.)

I doubt many Oregonians think there's nothing to fix in the state's liquor laws.  It's probably time to tinker with the laws governing distribution.  But as with any complex system, the issues aren't black and white.

How Should Oregon Regulate Alcohol?

The Oregonian kicked off an excellent three-part series yesterday on the thicket of regulations that govern the distribution, taxation, and sale of liquor in Oregon.  Every state has its own strange thicket of regulations, all built on certain goals and assumptions, and until very recently, Oregon's seemed to be untouchable.  But then a funny thing happened: the people of Washington state decided to modernize their laws, bringing them more in line with California, and Oregon is now the West Coast's odd man of booze.

The whole series is going to be worth a read, but today I want to tackle some of the issues raised (and not raised) in part one.  Political writer Harry Esteve penned the series, and he used three main informants about how the system works--A to Z Winery in Dundee, Galaxy wine distributor, and the Oregon Liquor Control Commission.  (Esteve has written about the OLCC before, and it's worth noting that A to Z has long been an OLCC foe.)  Esteve does a fantastic job of illuminating why a bottle of wine costs as much as it does.  It's not because the winery (or brewery) is getting rich.  It's because so many people get a piece of the action along the way:

Each time it's handled, the price of a bottle goes up. The storage warehouse gets its cut. The state gets its cut. Distributors tack on anywhere from 15 percent to as much as 40 percent or more. And retailers tack on their margin.  On a recent delivery trip, Galaxy applied its markup to a bottle of A to Z pinot gris and then sold it to Safeway for $8.99. Safeway put it on sale for $11.99, a 33 percent markup. 

This is a theme he address more fully in today's column (which I'll comment on tomorrow).  The paper also published a great infographic that breaks down the cost of a bottle of wine by percentage:

• 2% - Taxes
• 4% - Bottles, corks, and labels
• 5% - Winery profit
• 7% - Grapes
• 9% - Wine production
• 18% - Sales, marketing, administration, shipping
• 25% - Distributor markup
• 30% - Retailer markup

All of this is fantastic info, and info I'm pretty sure is completely lost on the average consumer when she sees a $30 bottle of Oregon pinot noir made just down the road.   Where Esteve falls down a bit on the job, though, is in buying the OLCC's gilded rationale for its own existence:

Yet it's also one of a dwindling number of states where the government exerts near dictatorial control over an alcohol system designed 80 years ago to prevent the likes of Al Capone from horning in on the trade....

"What's interesting is the OLCC has done such a good job of preventing the abuses that came up during Prohibition," [Cassandra SkinnerLopata, OLCC chair] says. Other countries, and even some other states, continue to see health problems from "adulterated" liquor, including blindness and paralysis. Counterfeit brand-name liquor continues to be a problem, she says. 

 Well, yes, in 1933, Oregon was worried about bootlegging.  But that's not what it was principally worried about.  Here's the full rationale from the 1934 Liquor Control Act that established our system of liquor laws:

(1) The Liquor Control Act shall be liberally construed so as:

(a) To prevent the recurrence of abuses associated with saloons or resorts for the consumption of alcoholic beverages.

(b) To eliminate the evils of unlicensed and unlawful manufacture, selling and disposing of such beverages and to promote temperance in the use and consumption of alcoholic beverages.

(c) To protect the safety, welfare, health, peace and morals of the people of the state.

(2) Consistent with subsection (1) of this section, it is the policy of this state to encourage the development of all Oregon industry.

I have bolded the relevant portions to illustrate the point: the state of Oregon may have been compelled by the 19th amendment to allow liquor sales, but they damn sure weren't going to make it easy.  The OLCC may now see their role as one entirely about law enforcement, but the very clear foundation of the statute is to gum up the production and sale of booze.  Oregon passed its own version of Prohibition in 1916--years before the country did it--and we were still in a mood for restricting alcohol.

This is relevant history, because the OLCC defends its existence on the dubious notion that they're preventing criminality.  But as citizens, we have a right to point out that that's not really why the laws were drafted in the first place.  They were drafted to stifle alcohol sales, and for 78 years they've been doing a bang-up job.

Law and Beer

I was recently working on an article about new breweries for Draft Magazine, and it took me to Alabama, where a couple of guys are trying to open Avondale Brewing in Birmingham. Alabama, population 4.7 million, currently has six breweries. In general, the South has trailed the rest of the country in good beer production, and I've always assumed there was a cultural explanation for this. But in talking with Coby Lake at Avondale, I learned that state law plays a huge role.

For example, until last night, it was both illegal for a production brewery to have a tasting room and for a brewpub to sell its beer off-site. Seriously. An organization called Free the Hops led a charge to change this, and it managed to get through the Alabama legislature yesterday. (Good thing for Avondale, too--they were building a bar in the brewery on the hope that the law would pass.)

That's not all. Until 2009, it was illegal to brew beer stronger than 6%, and it's still illegal to sell beer in bottles larger than 16 ounces. And last but certainly not least, it's illegal to homebrew in Alabama, one of only two states where that's the case (Mississippi's the other).

Imagine where California, Oregon, Colorado, Wisconsin, or Pennsylvania would be if they still had laws like this. Laws have a huge effect in shaping how business evolves, and in turn shape how craft brewing evolves. Now, as the Yellowhammer State starts to loosen these 19th century laws, what do you think the effect will be? How a burst of new breweries? In addition to Avondale, seven more are planned--which would more than double the current total.

You Say "Rocket Fuel," I Say "Session"

Last week, after I composed my ode to barely-alcoholic Oakshire Willamette Dammit, I got a comment from the Irish blogger The Beer Nut.

Anyway, a session beer at 4.9% ABV?! There's no way you could pass off rocket fuel like that as a session beer in a British pub.

It's true, we have vastly different standards. To find a beer with an alcohol percentage beginning with the number four is a trick. I haven't done a study, but I'd say 90% of the beer brewed on the West Coast is 5% or higher. At a minimum. Personally, I'd love a selection of tasty session ales with ABVs starting with threes and fours. Unfortunately, breweries don't seem to be able to stay in business selling them to me (and, of course, Ted Sobel). So we go with the flow and call our bruisers "sessions."

A second example of this--a more pointed example--comes from Brighton, England via Alan McLeod.

Brighton council bans super strength beer to combat street drinking

Super strength beer will be banned from an off-licence as part of an ongoing campaign against street drinking.

The idea is to curb the knife fights, brawls, and general mayhem caused by these super-strength beers. And not a minute too soon, I say! What are are these diabolical brews, these menaces threatening to rend this Southern English city to pieces? Oh, you know, beers with more than 6% alcohol. Hide the children!

No Sin in the Lottery Dollars

Last year, amid fireworks over the beer tax, the pro-hike camp liked to make a lot of hay about the evils of drink. If you'll recall, they attributed to beer enormous human wreckage: teenage drunken driving, addiction, even the scourge of meth and child abuse. Why do you suppose it is, then, that the state is now encouraging bars to keep their share of lottery profits?

Director Dale Penn said cutting gambling commissions would be "too risky" for the Lottery and the bars and taverns that offer video gambling. He said Oregon's ailing economy and loss of business to bars by the state's smoking ban have taken a toll on gambling sales.

If too many bars and taverns go out of business, he said, the lottery would have fewer places for people to gamble.

"Increasing overall sales is the method to maximize revenue for state programs," Penn wrote. "To do so requires a strong retailer network, not a reduced fragmented group."

And if they can't gamble, the state loses lottery revenues--a significant source of revenue for a state with a patchwork Frankenstein's monster of a funding system. I'm not opposed to lottery revenues--it's a voluntary expense and means we don't have to raise taxes or cut spending elsewhere. But there's no way to argue that this doesn't encourage all the evils the beer tax was puportedly designed to reduce.

So which is it, Oregon: is beer so sinful and harmful it should be taxed heavily, or is it an important part of the state's wholesome revenue streams? You can't have it both ways: either you're mucking around the sinful swamp with the beer drinkers, or you're standing on dry, high moral ground eschewing all that dirty money.