Montgomery Advertiser on Alabama Craft Beer Movement
Here is the main article in today’s Montgomery Advertiser. It is THE front page article and carries over to page 13A.
Coming to a head
Beer drinkers make inroads
By Kym Klass • and Rick Harmon • April 20, 2008
Mike Johnson pours a sample beer during a meeting of the Auburn Brew Club.
Two years ago, a bill to raise the level of alcohol in beers sold in Alabama was so dead that the House presented it the Shroud Award for the “deadest bill” of the session.
Now, the same bill has passed the House, and proponents believe it has the votes to pass in the Senate if it can be brought up for a vote.
Sen. Larry Dixon, R-Montgomery, said he doesn’t know of any other bill that has been given the Shroud Award and “come back.”
“This would be unique in that way, if it were to pass,” he said.
The proposal’s transition from dead bill to potential law mirrors the transition of Free the Hops, the non-profit, beer-loving statewide organization that brought up the legislation.
During the past three years, Free the Hops has gone from a grassroots group that believed it had ideas for good laws to a more sophisticated organization with a plan on how to transform these ideas into laws.
Free the Hops emerged in 2004 because some of the state’s most dedicated beer connoisseurs believed Alabama’s beer laws were so outmoded that the state had become out of sync with the rest of the country.
The group wanted to make at least four major changes. It wanted:
– A law allowing the sale of gourmet and imported beers with alcohol content as high as 13.9 percent.
– Alabama to join 46 other states by legalizing the home brewing of beer.
– To get rid of the state law making it illegal to sell bottles or cans of beer in anything larger than 16-ounce containers.
– To reform Alabama’s restrictive laws on brew pubs — requiring they be in historic buildings located in counties where beer was brewed before prohibition. That law haslimited the number of brew pubs in the state to three.
The group believed these changes would not only help beer drinkers to enjoy exotic brews, but have a huge economic impact on Alabama, where the laws made it possible to sell only a handful of what were usually selected as the top 100 beers in the world.
The group knew its beer. It didn’t know the Alabama Legislature.
What went wrong
Dan Roberts is Free the Hops’ legislative liaison, which like all the organization’s positions is unpaid. He said when the group initially tried to get the alcohol-content law passed in 2006, the members were naive enough to believe that simply because they had a good idea for a law it would become a law.
“We found a sponsor, and then it was like we threw a huge hail Mary pass to see where it went,” he said.
“And, of course, it went nowhere.”
The group found its road to enacting the legislation blocked by a series of obstacles.
One was that legislators had their own agendas.
“I don’t mean this in a negative way,” Roberts said. “It’s just that legislators had their own issues, their own priorities, their own things they wanted to do — and as far as I know not a single one of them was elected with the priority of changing Alabama’s beer laws.”
You might not think that would be a problem. If a proposed law were a good law, legislators would read the bill, study it and pass it.
But Roberts said it really doesn’t work that way.
“Each bill is competing with so many other bills,” he said. “There are probably more than 1,000 at the beginning of the session, and maybe 200 get voted on.”
So legislators don’t have enough time to study every bill.
Free the Hops found this out the hard way. The group’s members complained that many legislators who voted against their bill knew almost nothing about it and that many had never even heard of the bill before it came to a vote.
That may not have been as big a problem if the bill hadn’t dealt with alcohol, but any bill in Alabama that deals with alcohol is controversial, and there were groups working hard to defeat “alcohol legislation” that they believed would only hurt the state.
Alabama Citizens Action Program is one of those groups. The group is opposed to any expansion of alcoholic sales in Alabama, said Joe Godfrey, executive director-elect.
“And this expands, but it also increases the amount of alcohol in a container of beer,” he said.
The controversy led to plenty of charges from both sides, but Free the Hops had a hard time getting out what it considered the facts.
Some opponents argued that the higher alcohol beer would corrupt teenagers.
“Teenagers will drink anything they can get their hands on,” Godfrey said. “Parents may not know it, but the kids could get it out of their stock. If the kids think it is cool, they will want to get it.”
Tyler Strickland pours a chocolate bock.
Rep. Thomas Jackson, D-Thomasville, is a sponsor of the bill, and said he believed it is unlikely that teenagers will try a get drunk on beer that can cost about $40 a six pack.
But Godfrey said the additional cost of gourmet beers wouldn’t be a factor.
“A lot of them (teenagers) will get hold of it without having to pay for it,” he said. “Teenagers today, with the iPods and everything, they have money. They are not limited by money.
“The bottom line, is that the more alcohol there is, the more alcohol problems you’re going to have. It all multiplies. The Free the Hops is saying that all they want is higher-octane beer … but it opens the door to so much. It does have an impact.”
Jackson said most of the opposition was based on hypocrisy and he found it foolish to believe that teenagers would somehow get drunk on extremely expensive gourmet beer, but wouldn’t try to get drunk on cheaper beer.
“This (the gourmet beers) is not something the kids are going to come in and get at the 7-11,” Jackson said.
Some also argued that gourmet beer would lead to more DUIs, but Rep. Mac Gipson, D-Prattville, said when police arrest people for DUI, he suspects they usually don’t find gourmet beer bottles in the car.
The solution for Free the Hops seemed obvious: Tell legislators the real issues.
But the organization soon faced another problem: Legislators had no real reason to listen.
At that time the group only had about 50 members.
Roberts said a legislator pays more attention when he is talking to someone he represents — a voter from his area.
The organization called legislators, but with so few members in their group the results weren’t encouraging.
“They might listen on the phone, but you almost had the impression they were thinking ‘this guy isn’t even one of my constituents, why do I even care what he is thinking?’” he said.
There are some people and groups legislators pay attention to who aren’t voters.
Beer distributors, who have a lobby, would gain nothing from passage of a bill allowing independent beers and expensive imports into the state.
“Budweiser really has the market in Alabama, and all the beers Anheuser-Busch Companies brews and that Birmingham Budweiser, the distributor, sells are under 6 percent, so all allowing beers with more than 6 percent into the state did was create competition for them,” Roberts said.
“So it didn’t surprise me that they opposed it. It did surprise me how effective they were. They knew what they were doing and had more money than we did. We didn’t really stand a chance.”
Birmingham Budweiser did not return several phone calls asking for a response.
Faced with all these problems, the bill literally became a joke.
Each year, to add a bit of levity to often grueling legislative sessions, legislators choose a bill for the Shroud Award. A witty, sometimes sarcastic act is drawn up presenting a legislator and the bill with the award, which usually goes to the bill given the least chance of passage. In a short ceremony, the act is read and the sponsor is presented a small coffin-like box with a tiny suit inside as an acknowledgment of the “deadest” bill.
Even some members of Free the Hops thought it was funny.
Most didn’t, Roberts said, and some were angered by it.
“I thought it was pretty funny, and felt it was pretty heartening because the language they used in the resolution — it was a joke resolution so there were a lot of puns — at least showed the knew a little about beer, so at least that was encouraging,” he said.
But there were some who didn’t like it at all, he said. They had worked hard to get it passed and thought the resolution was disrespectful.
It was demoralizing.
“But it was a learning experience for us,” Roberts said. “In the long run I think it helped us both because it got us publicity, and because it showed us some of the things we needed to do.”
Back from the dead
Roberts said the group learned it would need more resources to make its good idea a law in Alabama.
In 2007, the organization used some of its limited funds to hire a lobbyist.
“That really helped out a lot,” Roberts said. “It helped with the logistics, finding out things such as how to get the bill on the calendar. It helped because he knew who we needed to talk to, who might support it, and who we needed to convince.”
Hiring that lobbyist still doesn’t sit well with some members.
John Little is not only a Montgomery attorney but one of the South’s most talented home brewers. For him, the fact Alabama should legalize home brewing like most of the rest of America is a no-brainer. He knows many professionals who brew beer who have declined to come into Alabama from the 46 states where brewing is legal.
“The fact you would have to hire a lobbyist to have a real chance to get a bill passed, even if it is a good, common-sense bill is just outrageous,” he said. “You shouldn’t have a system that is so hard that you can’t get something passed without raising the money to hire your own lobbyist.”
But Free the Hops found something more important than a lobbyist — voters.
“One of the things we learned in 2007 is that a lobbyist is good for a lot of things, but that nothing beats constituents,” Roberts said.
Jim Whitfield judges an oatmeal stout.
In 2007, the Free the Hops bill failed by three votes.
But the group’s membership was on the rise, and so was its organizational skill. By having events throughout the state, the group increased its membership from between 50-100 members in 2006 to more than 900 members this year. It also began mobilizing them.
The group has what it calls a “working membership” because most of its members have full-time jobs and limited time. Still, it found between 200 and 300 of its 900 members had time to work on trying to pass the legislation.
Roberts said the organization found members who lived in the districts of legislators who were unsure of how to vote — and had them make a call or write a letter.
“We’d ask them to explain to their legislators why it was good legislation and to point out the facts to them that could lay to rest any concerns they might have,” he said.
Roberts said that education was the organization’s most effective weapon.
“Most of these legislators don’t drink fine beers, so we have to explain the bills to them,” he said. “But most of them are very reasonable people, and once we do explain it, the ones who are reasonable come around to our side.”
Roberts said he respects the views of those who oppose the bill.
“There are those people who are just against alcohol of any kind or any bill having to do with alcohol, and if that is the way they feel, I can respect that,” he said. “Our goal was to convince the others, people who weren’t against all alcohol, that this was a good bill, and I think we’ve been successful in doing that.”
Roberts believes the group is winning over the Legislature.
“I really think that reason is on our side,” Roberts said. “If someone is willing to sit down and listen to us, our argument makes a lot of sense.”
And unlike last year, this time the organization has the facts to back up its argument and is making sure legislators hear them.
“I think Georgia changed its beer laws in 2004, North Carolina in 2005 and South Carolina just did it recently, in 2007,” he said.
“So we can look at those states that have recently done it and then look at the drunk driving statistics and see that there has been no change. You can look at the underage drinking statistics, no change. The only major change you see is economic impact.”
Ales well that ends well
While Free the Hops believes it has the votes for the bill to pass in the Senate, there is still a good chance it won’t pass — this year.
“It will have a hard time because there are so many other things,” Dixon said, referring to the number of bills that are backed up in the Senate. “The problem is all of the bills that are in front of it.”
State Sen. Parker Griffith, D-Huntsville, sponsored the bill in the Senate and said he believes the Free the Hops legislation has gained strong statewide support.
He said passing the bill is particularly important for the international community in his district; people who are used to gourmet beers can’t understand why you can’t get them in Alabama.
While he believes the bill may have the votes to pass, he agrees with Dixon that it may not come up for a vote.
“We’ve been deadlocked here in the Senate regarding some gambling bills, and it has shut down the Senate for about six sessions — which means nothing is allowed to move because the gambling bills are being filibustered,” he said. “We’re hoping we’ll break the logjam.”
But he said it is Alabama’s desire to put on a progressive face to the rest of the world, and changing the state’s beer laws could help.
Jackson, one of the bill’s sponsors, is another who agrees with the assessment that the bill could pass in the Senate, but might not be voted on.
The bill he sponsored passed in the House several weeks ago, and he said it will pass in the Senate “if they get off their personal issues.”
But he said it would take someone who knows a lot more about the Senate than he does to say whether anyone should expect that to happen.
For Free the Hops it is no longer becoming a question of whether their legislation meant to drag what they believe are outmoded beer policies into the 21st century will pass. Now, it is just a matter of when.
The group believes this year or later, it will happen.
But the organization also believes getting a law passed shouldn’t be so difficult.
“It’s been a learning process, and we have learned how to get things done,” Roberts said. “But one of the things we learned was how difficult a process this is. We learned it isn’t easy for any grassroots organization to get something done in the Alabama Legislature.”
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