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(Courtesy Surly Brewing)
Last week, Surly Brewing’s CEO Omar Ansari took to social media to announce that he was putting the company’s annual Darkness Day festivities on hold indefinitely until local legislators adopt more reasonable distribution laws.
Darkness Day began almost spontaneously more than a decade ago, when fans of Surly Darkness Imperial Stout, which is only released once a year, congregated outside the brewery in the early morning cold to purchase the beer on the day of its release. And over the years it has grown into one of craft beer’s most anticipated events, a melding of serious beer and heavy metal music.
But the problem was that as the event and brewery grew Darkness fans who gathered at the celebration couldn’t purchase the Imperial Stout to take home due to state distribution laws that limit large breweries (those making more than 20,000 barrels a year) from selling 64-ounce growler fills and 750ml bottles at their brewery taprooms.
In an attempt to get around those prohibitive laws, Surly moved the event from its Minnesota production facility to an amphitheater in Somerset, Wisconsin in 2018.
But that move cut the soul out of an event that had traditionally taken place at its brewery compound and the festival’s crowd dwindled even though attendees could now purchase Surly Darkness to go at that out-of-state location.
So now Surly has pulled the plug on its annual event until new laws are put in place allowing them to sell bottles of Surly Darkness at its Darkness Day festival…
This from the Omar Ansari February 27th communiqué…
“The craft beer industry is changing, and we need to change with it. Craft breweries outside of our state are growing through more options to sell beer, including directly to their customers. These opportunities are limited in Minnesota.”
“The Minnesota Craft Brewers Guild is working to change our current laws and give consumers more choices. Currently, laws prohibit breweries that brew more than 20,000 barrels to sell growlers directly to consumers. The new bill would allow these sales, regardless of brewery size. We need to work with the Guild and our local legislators toward this end, hoping to give craft beer drinkers this option.”
“Put plainly: We want to sell Darkness bottles for you to take home from the Destination Brewery. Once we can, Darkness Day will return to Minnesota at our Destination Brewery.”
“A bill to increase the growler cap to breweries producing 40,000 barrels annually was just introduced this week,” according to The Growler.
And on March 3 the Minnesota Craft Brewers Guild is holding a rally at the Minnesota State Capitol to advocate for a “wider array of packaged products available to purchase directly from a taproom, more opportunities for growler sales in restaurants/bars/liquor and the ability for breweries to truly collaborate with each other and sell each other’s products if made collaboratively.”
