Why can’t we buy more beer from local craft breweries in Georgia?

Georgia craft brewery activists have been fighting for years to loosen Georgia’s restrictions on the small businesses, but lawmakers have been resistant to this change.

But, why?

Joseph Cortes, the executive director of the Georgia Craft Brewers Guild, said the resistance to changing alcohol distribution laws in the state largely comes from the wholesaler lobby in Georgia.

The wholesaler lobby has heavily invested in the lawmakers on the regulated industries committee in the state Senate through campaign donations and Political Action Committees, he said.

“We need to continue to educate lawmakers, and some… don’t seem to want to be educated beyond being educated by one stakeholder, and that stakeholder frankly gives the most donations, and that’s a bipartisan problem,” he said. 

State Sen. Timothy Bearden, R-Carrollton, sponsored Senate Bill 456, which would make significant changes to the state’s alcohol distribution laws. However, the bill appears to have died in committee without a vote.

“What we are trying to do is simply help the small business in our state, a business that has truly helped this state by taking a chance and going into areas, a lot of rural areas, that has helped revitalize many of our local squares and downtowns across this state,” Bearden said at a committee hearing on Feb. 10.

What’s the current law?

Georgia’s law is very close to what it was immediately after prohibition. Georgia has a three-tier model of alcohol distribution, meaning that breweries sell to distributors who sell to retailers who sell to the public.

This system started to loosen in 2015 with Senate Bill 63, which allowed for breweries to sell a limited amount of to-go beer directly to the consumer. In 2017, Senate Bill 85 allowed consumers to buy beer on-tap in breweries.

“Senate Bill 85, as a leap forward as it was to allow breweries that opportunity to sell to their consumers for the first time, it still kept the ceiling relatively low on Georgia breweries,” Cortes said.

Georgians are only allowed to buy 24 12-oz cans of beer directly from their local brewer while they can purchase as much as they want at a package store. Local breweries also cannot sell directly to the restaurant down the street or the bar around the corner. They must go through a distributor. 

Despite small changes that have been made, Georgia’s alcohol distribution laws have made little progress over the past nine years.

Florida, Tennessee and North Carolina don’t have a limit on beer purchases at local breweries, and Alabama’s limit is significantly higher than Georgia’s.

What do brewers want?

“Let’s not continue to kill small businesses with things that have nothing to do with the actual real opposition, which is maintaining power and influence and protecting the status quo that really only helps one tier and has nothing to do with consumers,” Cortes said.

If passed, Senate Bill 456 would have allowed breweries to sell up to 1,000 barrels of beer annually to retailers located within the same county and got rid of the limit on sales to consumers.

“This is not an anti-distributor, anti-wholesaler bill. This is a pro-small business bill,” he said.