About 20 of Louisiana’s two dozen microbreweries opened in the past seven years, and another 25 breweries are in the works, according to the Brewers Association. But as The Advertiser reports, data from the nonprofit organization shows that while Louisiana’s craft beer industry is growing, it is also trailing behind the rest of the nation.
When compared to other states and the District of Columbia, Louisiana ranks 49 out of 51 for the number of breweries per capita of adults 21 and older. Only Mississippi and Oklahoma rank behind Louisiana.
Regulations in these three states have been largely unchanged since the repeal of Prohibition in 1933.
“The vast majority of states have recognized the benefits that small craft breweries are bringing,” says Bart Watson, chief economist of the Brewers Association. “I don’t think there’s a state that has a perfect regulatory structure, but the vast majority have what craft breweries are looking for generally except for the southeast.”
Louisiana craft breweries contributed more than $645 million to the state’s economy in 2014, according to the Brewers Association. That puts Louisiana not only behind larger states, such as California and Texas, but also behind states with a comparable number of residents, such as Colorado, in which the industry contributed $2.7 billion to the economy in 2014.
The alcohol industry is regulated at a state level, but nearly every state still uses some form of a three-tier system for alcohol distribution that was established in the United States following the repeal of Prohibition.
The system is meant to regulate and control the production and sale of alcohol by prohibiting ownership of a business in more than one of the three tiers. These include producers (breweries in this case), wholesale distributors and retailers (restaurants, bars and stores).
That creates problems for brewers like Karlos Knott, whose plan to pair boudin with beer through a new pub menu at his Arnaudville brewery might seem like a no-brainer. But because Knott, president of Bayou Teche Brewing, has only been able to get verbal approval from the Louisiana Office of Alcohol and Tobacco Control that a brewery can sell food, the renovation to ready his business for food service might be a risky investment.
In Knott’s plan to sell food at Bayou Teche Brewing, the potential problem is that he could be seen as operating both a brewery and a restaurant.
“There are no provisions in Louisiana law that prohibits a brewery from serving food on their premises if the local law permits this practice,” ATC lawyer Ernest Legier wriets in an email on behalf of the commissioner. “Food service is not regulated by the ATC. As long as the brewery is not functioning as a retailer ( i.e., bar or restaurant), it is not a violation of the three-tier system.”
“The commissioner told me, ‘As far as I know, you can have a restaurant, but I won’t put it in writing,'” Knott says. ATC Commissioner Juana Marine-Lombard and her staff declined multiple interview requests for comment from The Advertiser, which has the full story.
