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I’m going to post a quick summary, and follow up later with interesting tidbits from Judge Sparks’ ruling. But in the interest of getting information out there quickly, the Judge has ruled Sec. 108.01(a)(4) of the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Code unconstitutional as a violation of the First Amendment. . Additionally, he has ruled Texas Administrative Code Title 16, Sec 45.77, 45.79(f), 45.90, & 45.110(c)(3) unconstitutional as a violation of the First Amendment.
What does this mean in layman’s terms? 3 things:
TABC cannot prohibit you from telling customers or advertising where they can buy your products
TABC cannot require you to label your products by their definition of “beer” and “ale”
TABC cannot prohibit you from advertising the strength of your products by prohibiting words like “strong”, “prewar strength”, “full strength”, etc
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Brewers’ have their 14th amendment rights violated by virtue of the states make brewers chose between being a brewpub (which can only sell its products directly to the consumer on its premise) and a production brewery (which can only sell its products to distributors for resale) while not applying the same restrictions to wineries, which are allowed to do both.
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The defense did cite the 21st amendment, which ended prohibition and gave the states to regulate alcohol in their state, as a defense, but that led to the most comical moment of the morning for me, as Judge Sparks asked: “So can the state just define wine as beer? Can they define malt liquor as orange juice? [...] These are false statements.”
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There is a hidden expense to this lawsuit for all Texas breweries. The TABC is now going to have to come up with a new way of differentiating between beers that are above and below 4% alcohol by weight [...] There are some retail licenses in the state that only allow the sale of beers below 4% ABW. In fact there are some counties and precincts that only allow beers under 4%. This part of the law is quite legal. Once the TABC comes up with its method for signifying these categories, we will have to change all of our labels. This is not an enormous expense, but will probably cost us at least a few thousand dollars.
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Stopped by the midtown specs yesterday and was reminded how much more they have there compared to every other specs in town