‘New Rules’ Limit New Jersey’s Craft Breweries

New Jersey has imposed, to use a term Bill Maher has embraced on his HBO show, NEW RULES to limit the amount of activities that the state’s craft breweries can engage in. And the New Jersey’s distributor, restaurant and bar organizations are most likely behind this.

Here’s the deal…

Almost six years ago New Jersey legislators passed a law allowing small breweries to serve their brand in-house as well as sell beer to go from their breweries. That law has allowed the state’s craft brewers to flourish and led to all kinds spin-off beer-related community activities held at many of those New Jersey breweries…activities that are now being limited by the Division of Alcoholic Beverage Control.

Apparently those same small breweries have become “too active,” at least in the eyes the state, which felt the need to limit their obviously successful endeavors.

According to New Jersey “under a special ruling signed Friday by the director of the Division of Alcoholic Beverage Control, David Rible, New Jersey’s microbreweries are limited to holding 25 on-site activities annually, such as trivia nights and live performances.”

Also breweries can no longer “provide take-out menus from area restaurants, host more than 52 private parties a year or show sports on TV unless it counts as one of their 25 special events.”

In his ruling, Rible noted that he was trying to clarify “significant confusion” over what microbreweries can do under a 2012 law that gave them greater latitude to serve their beers on-site and increased the volume of beer that customers could purchase to drink elsewhere.

Rible went on to explain that the primary purpose of New Jersey’s Limited Brewery License  (which costs thousands of dollars less than restaurant, liquor store and bar licenses) is “the manufacture of malt alcoholic beverages and the distribution of these products” through the normal supply chain, “not the operation of a retail outlet for its products.”

So clearly it’s the normal supply chain, New Jersey’s distributor networks, its restaurants, its bars and the lobbyists who represent them, who are behind this new “special rule.”

Organizations who opposed the 2012 law to begin withs and whose campaign dollars have bought them access to New Jersey’s political class are calling in favors…favors like “new rules.”