Critics of the craft beer bill passed in the Florida Senate on Tuesday are expressing some relief that its prospects in the House appear dubious with three days left in the regular session.
House Speaker Will Weatherford said it would take a two-thirds vote of the House (which means roughly 80 members) to bring the bill to the floor. "I think that bill has an uphill battle in the Florida House," the Pasco County Republican told members of the media Tuesday evening.
Around that same time in Tampa's Seminole Heights, Joey Redner reiterated his criticisms of the bill, which he admits is not nearly as big of a "poison pill" as Lakeland Senator Kelli Stargel's original bill that angered craft brewers and their supporters last week. That proposal would have required craft brewers like himself, once they reach a certain size, to sell their bottled products to distributors before buying them back to serve at their own establishments.
"It's not the poison pill that it was, and honestly, it's workable," Redner told CL while attending a campaign event for Hillsborough County Democrat Pat Kemp at Ella's restaurant in Seminole Heights. But that's not to say he doesn't have issues with her new bill, which would allow craft breweries that sell more than 1,000 barrels of beer annually to sell only up to 20 percent of their product that goes out the door to customers at their tasting rooms without going through the distributors.
"It actually reduces the amount of growlers that we can fill," he says. By that he means that craft breweries can currently sell growlers 32 ounces and smaller, but the new proposal says that the only growler sizes that will be legal are 32, 64 and 128-ounces.
"Let's say you're doing a limited release growler beer of a barleywine that's 13 percent alcohol. Well, now you have to pour it into a 32-ounce [container]. You might have wanted to put that in a 12-ounce or a 16-ounce, because that's too much. So it literally just says you can only fill those three sizes."
Stargel was the focus of unrelenting criticism when her original bill passed through a committee last week, causing her to tweak it over the weekend. Redner says her original proposal that he and several other Tampa Bay area brewers said would kill the growth of smaller craft breweries "has been walked back from the cliff quite a bit." But he asserted that 32 states have better laws than Florida does in terms of regulating craft breweries.
Stargel's bill, which passed the Senate Tuesday on a 30-10 vote, was strongly applauded by the Florida Beer Wholesalers Association.
“The Stargel bill gives brewers a great deal of latitude in selling directly to consumers and addresses many of the craft brewers’ concerns without completely destroying Florida’s modern three-tier system. This is a big compromise for distributors and retailers," said the group's leader, Mitch Rubin.
Being lost in all of the controversy is the fact that Senator Jack Latvala's original bill was just a few sentences — legalizing the 64-ounce growler in Florida, so it can compete with the 47 other states that offer that container size of beer. "Why do we need this bill?" asked Senator Aaron Bean (R-Jacksonville) on Monday. "Why not just do the growlers and be done with it?"
Stargel said that she read blogs and other sources of information that spoke for the craft brewers, because she said none of them wanted to talk with her directly about revising her original proposal. She said that the industry doesn't want to be regulated.
When reminded of that quote on Tuesday night, Cigar City Brewing's Joey Redner responded sharply. "Any regulation more than being federally regulated, regulated by the state, regulated by local government? Anymore than that? No, we don't. I wouldn't expect the Republican Party to be on board with one less layer of regulation. That's not their schtick, you know?"
This article appears in May 1-7, 2014.