A bill that would allow customers to take home more beer from Georgia’s craft breweries won final passage late Thursday from the Senate.
Senate Bill 63 had a rough journey this year at the Capitol. Originally proposed as a way for craft brewers to sell directly to consumers, the bill's final version represented a watered-down effort that left supporters flat.
The House also rewrote it to include the state’s distilleries — so, effectively, they added more booze to the mix.
As now written, SB 63 would allow 36 ounces of beer to be consumed “on-premise” of a brewery and up to 72 ounces of beer — the equivalent of a six-pack — to be taken home. Patrons would also be able to take home up to 750 milliliters of liquor from a distillery.
The bill, however, would continue to ban direct sales. Instead, SB 63 would allow breweries to charge for a tour and, depending on how much someone pays, the tour could include the beer as a free souvenir — up to the limits.
Brew pubs would continue to be banned from sending beer home with customers, since an early provision allowing them to do so was stripped from the bill.
The bill's sponsor, state Sen. Hunter Hill, R-Smyrna, has said the state's nearly 40 craft breweries — nearly double the number of just a few years ago — deserved a chance to make a little extra money to reinvest in their business and the local economy. All of Georgia's bordering states — Alabama, Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee — allow craft brewers to make limited direct sales to consumers. Nationally, Georgia is one of four states that doesn't. The others are Hawaii, Mississippi and West Virginia.
But changing Georgia’s Prohibition Era ban on in-house sales by local breweries has proved to be a tough sell, and the effort was fought wholeheartedly by the state’s wholesalers who otherwise play a role in beer sales across the state.
SB 63 wasn’t the only booze-related bill to struggle this year.
House Bill 535, sponsored by Rep. Brett Harrell, R-Snellville, would have allowed local governments where Sunday sales of alcohol are already legal to permit restaurants to sell alcohol two hours earlier on Sundays. It passed the House overwhelmingly but stalled in the Senate Rules Committee.
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