Beer Radar

The blogs were buzzing this weekend about the raid on three local beer bars over unregistered beer. I teamed up with Daily News reporter Bob Warner for a full report here.

There’s one fairly esoteric angle to this story that we didn’t tackle - one that was raised in some very thoughtful emails from Resurrection/Local 44/Memphis Taproom co-owner Leigh Maida. Namely, the increasingly popular practice among tavern owners of cellaring beers for later sale.

Among the beers that the State Police confiscated in the raid were a handful of bottles of Heavyweight Lunacy. South Jersey’s Heavyweight Brewing, of course, has been out of business for several years. Presumably the bottles were purchased years ago, when Heavyweight beers were, in fact, registered for sale in Pennsylvania. But that brand is no longer registered, for obvious reasons,which apparently makes them illegal.

(By the way, I don’t think this is an over-zealous interpretation of the law by the at the numbskulls at the Bureau of Liquor Enforcement. The law says the beer you sell must be registered, period.)

That law puts puts EVERY vintage bottle in EVERY bar at risk. As Leigh notes, her husband, Brendan Hartranft, has a thing for Orval, and he’s been aging bottles of the brand for years. What happens if Orval goes out of business or stops exporting its beers to the U.S.? Under the current rules, it appears it would be illegal to sell those beers - even though they were properly registered when they were purchased.

I know of several bars that are holding beers whose breweries are extinct. There are hundreds of “retired” beers out there. It’s a point of pride - like, this is the only place you’ll ever see this particular beer. In some cases, these treasures are worth thousands of dollars. But unless their names are properly registered, they’re presumably illegal.

The same thing goes if the brand name changes - a not uncommon occurrence as importers edit labels over the years.   No aged bottle of Zotten, either, once Weyerbacher re-issues the brand, as announced, as Verboten.)

And how about all of those one-time-only anniversary beers we love? Not to pick on Weyerbacher, again, but I’d imagine that bottles of Decadence - issued for the brewery’s 10th anniversary in 2005 and, at 13% abv, intended to be aged - would be illegal to sell.

Allow me to finish by pointing out one obvious fact here: The same Pennsylvania law does not apply to wine.

So the wine cellar at Le Bec Fin is a treasure. But the beer cellar at Local 44 is a crime scene.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 8th, 2010 at 9:03 am and is filed under Regs, Beer etc.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.