Colorado Beer and Wine Grocery Store Liquor License
Posted on February 12, 2008
Filed Under News and Information, Opinion |
The fighting over Colorado’s liquor laws are taking shape now with the introduction of Senate Bill 08-149 last Thursday, February 7, 2008 in the Colorado legislature. The bill, sponsored by State Senator Brandon Shaffer (D-Longmont, CO) and House Representative Jack Pommer (D-Boulder, CO), would effectively allow grocery stores to sell beer and wine in a portion of their stores. I read through the bill and although it gets the ball rolling, it appears there are significant loopholes in the bill that will not allow for local brewery and wine sales. Some of this is probably me being naive and also me not fulling knowing how distribution laws work in this state.
Some of the things this bill will allow for:
- Allow a liquor-store owner to have three liquor licenses. Up from the limit of one.
- Allow a retail liquor store to allocate 5% of their store to selling nonperishable food items.
- Limit beer and wine sales in grocery stores to 5% of the licensed premises. Of that 5%, at least 20% has to be devoted to “craft beers” and at least 20% reserved for “boutique wines”.
The flaw I see in this law is based on how they define “boutique wine” and “craft beer”. According to their definition in the bill, a “boutique wine” means “a vinous liquor produced by a small domestic producer that qualifies for a credit against federal excise tax.” A “craft beer” means “a malt liquor manufactured by a domestic brewer that qualifies for a reduced federal excise tax rate.”
It is all well and good that they want to push craft beer and boutique wines, but in doing so, they leave open the option for these new liquor-selling grocery stores to work with distributors who may not “push” the sales of our local, Colorado-produced products. The state General Assembly threw out phrases like, “Colorado is a state that is rich in its supply of home-grown and home-produced products” and this law will “improve the availability of and access to locally produced beers and wines”, but they did not put in the wording into the bill that these new license should allocate a certain percentage to locally produced items.
Another aspect to the liquor laws that I am not too familiar with is how wholesale distribution works. It would then seem logical to me, that the bill introduce wording that these grocery stores be able to work directly with the brewers and breweries in the state to facilitate the selling of craft beer and boutique wine. Eliminate the middle man sort of speak. I can see a distributor not wanting to work with local producers, whether it be a grudge or monetary reasons, and completely shutting the door for smaller beer and wine produces in access to the grocery stores. Imagine if a distributor had a falling out with New Belgium and didn’t allow for the sale of their products. I thought I read something a while back about a similar thing happening to Bell’s Brewery in Illinois.
Also what happened to making the Super Targets, and the Super Wal-Marts, and the Super K-Marts, and the Super Sears Grands ineligible for these licenses? That seems to have gotten swept under the rug. And who is going to enforce the square footage limitations on these grocery and liquor stores?
An interesting aspect of the bill that I may not be reading correctly is that it “allows the appropriate licensing authoity to deny a grocery store license when the authority determines that issuance of the license will cause an undue concentration of a similar class of licensed retail establishments and will require additional law enforcement resources.” Does this mean that the local license authority deny a grocery store a license due to a liquor store being right next door already? Interesting if they could do that. Or worse, the authority could deny the liquor store a renewal since the grocery store now has one?
While I am still in favor of allowing sales in grocery stores, I feel the law makers need to tidy up their bill a bit if they want to really help the availability of locally produced beer and wine. If not, here is the opening for the smaller liquor stores to specialize in locally-produced items that I wrote about in a previous post.
On a good note, it sounds like sales on Sunday might be a done deal. That being said, you never quite know what goes on behind closed doors in politics.
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