Malted Musings

What the hell is happening in Pennsylvania?

This question is asked mostly with tongue planted firmly in cheek, because unless you don’t actually get out of bed in the morning, and have maintained that routine for a solid week, it’s been tough to miss what has transpired in the Pennsylvania beer world.  I’ve been watching these events transpire with puzzled amusement and even a sense of schadenfreude at anything where the public’s scorn for government bureaucracy is not pointed at one of New York’s elected officials.  For those of you who actually have been hibernating, here’s a brief rundown;

On Thursday March 4th, authorities from the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board exercised a search based on a complaint against three Philadelphia area bars.  The three bars in question were Resurrection Ale House, Local 44, and Memphis Tap House and they were accused of having unregistered brands in violation of a 1987 statute whereby any brand sold in the state requires label registration and the paying of a 75 dollar fee.  On the following Monday, Orliglio Beverages, a distribution company in Philadelphia was also raided for the same reason.

Ignoring for the moment whether or not these laws make sense, there is clearly an issue when the authorities don’t know enough about the law they’re enforcing to be able to tell whether or not a given brand is or isn’t registered.  If the authority in charge of registration doesn’t have a grasp on this, how can bar owners and distributors be expected to?  In 1987 registering brands might not have been a terribly onerous proposition.  Beer shelves were filled with row after row of macro products with a few regional brands likely also vying for some space.  That is hardly the case anymore, with loads of microbreweries from around the country offering beer aficionados quality and selection that haven’t been seen before.  Indeed, there are reports that the authorities returned some beer to the bars after realizing that some of the confiscated brands were in fact, legitimately registered.

Confused yet?  Imagine being the bar owners.  Now the distributers may be a different story… laws are laws and even if they’re stupid, that doesn’t mean that you can choose to not follow them.  I think I should be allowed to punch any idiot on the LIRR who is blabbing away on their cell phone about the hot date they had last night, but that action would undoubtedly end up with me getting a visit from the appropriate authorities.  As in the case at the bars though, it isn’t clear that the authorities knew which brands were or weren’t appropriately registered and so you end without any resolution to the situation and a bunch of gun-toting cops with their dicks in their hands and egg on their face.

This raises a further question… why are raids necessary in the first place?  This isn’t like a Capone-era warehouse, filled with bootlegged Canadian whiskey… these are legitimate businesses that import products, pay customs fees, taxes and the like and generally try to comply with local laws and regulations.  They have manifests of products received and taxes and registrations paid, any of which could be used to determine whether any laws were broken without calling in the big guns.  In the event that they don’t, an inspection and a fine are usually all that are warranted to sort a situation out.  Since there is obviously confusion over the list on both sides of the thin blue line, and the PLCB website itself states, ”With respect to documents available from this server, neither the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, nor any of its employees, makes any warranty, express or implied, including the warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose, or assumes any legal liability or responsibility for the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of any information, apparatus, product, or process disclosed, or represents that its use would not infringe privately owned rights.”

Since the State of Pennsylvania doesn’t have any confidence in their own registration process, it seems like a terrible waste of PLCB resources as well as a squandering of the already tepid support for PA beer laws that do exist.

This last point is worth mentioning because it seems like this is exactly what is happening.  In this political climate, elected officials are trampling over one another to denounce the raids as an overreaction, and those denouncements seem to have actually brought this long-simmering issue to a head.  Public hearings have been ordered and, at least on this issue, both Republicans and Democrats seem to be united.

A further issue that has less to do with the law itself but rather with it’s application.  As is generally agreed in this case, the raids were inspired by an anonymous tip and all the bars that were identified were owned by the same owners.  This fact alone should have at least suggested to the authorities that they were being dragged into a business dispute.  Even a cursory examination of online sites listing beer brand availability would show that a number of Philadelphia bars are selling and marketing non-registered brands, yet these locations were not being looked at, either because no complaints have been received against them or because the PLCB is too inept to know how to actually enforce their own rules.  This situation reminds me of a case in New York last year, where an Upper East Side bar, Mad River Bar & Grille, that served as a home bar for the University of Wisconsin Badgers was selling New Glarus Spotted Cow, a beer that is not licensed for sale in New York.  This raid was also based on an anonymous tip and resulted in a $20 000 dollar fine for the offending bar (and likely a smile for the bar’s competitor who called in the complaint, but that’s just supposition on my part).

So where does this leave Pennsylvania beer lovers?  Right back where they started.  The beer registration laws do nothing to increase public safety (ostensibly the reason for registration in the first place) and do a whole lot to place a burden on businesses who are perfectly willing to collect and pay taxes on beer through officially sanctioned channels but will continue.  Until the PLCB and Pennsylvania lawmakers realize that the beer registration laws are archaic and punitive, I fear that we’ll see a repeat of this farce in the coming months and years.

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