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Comment by bsharitt | Hacker News Reader

Not just taxes, but being "beer" allows it to be sold in grocery stores and corner stores where a drink made from distilled spirits(even if watered down to the 5% alcohol) would have to be sold in a liquor stores in many states.

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Is there a reason no one says, "hm, that don't make a lick of sense, let's change that?"

South Carolina, in an unexpected bit of rationality, repealed their mini-bottle law a few years ago. The law originally came about because the Southern Baptists in the state felt that limiting hard liquor to being sold in small 1.7 oz (50 ml) bottles was the way to prevent the sin of drunkenness. A peculiarity in the law meant that the bottle had to be opened in front of you, and the entire contents used to make your drink (to prevent bootlegging and watered-down drinks). So if you wanted a drink that had 2 or 3 ingredients, you were getting a pretty stiff drink.

https://charleston.eater.com/2015/10/16/9553903/mini-bottles...

Someone eventually pointed out that they were the last state in the Union serving drinks this way (other than the airlines) and all those tiny glass bottles ended up in the landfill. So in 2010 the state went free-pour.

"unexpected bit of rationality" may be my favorite turn-of-phrase describing a government.

The laws are old, and likely date to a time since before it was possible to make such genre-bending alcohol drinks.

If you were making laws from scratch now, it would likely make sense to define categories strictly by ABV, not by brewing/distillation method.

I was thinking along the same lines; but there's a potential problem in that this provides an incentive to mislabel a beverage's ABV to get a lower tax rate.

That's probably solvable-ish by fining companies found to have an ABV off by more than 1% or so, but that's a lot more work to monitor, especially with the number of different products on the market.

You can't (well, shouldn't) mislabel your beverage's ABV. It's trivial to test and thus determine that you're lying, and the result would be a hugely costly recall of all product.

The accuracy requirements are very strict on this. It's already not a problem; intentionally lying about ABV on the label would be a foolish thing to do that would get you in lots of trouble.

Similar statements can be made about insider trading or constitutional violations.

Not really. Those are much harder to detect and prove, and remedies have to go through the courts.

If improperly ABV-labeled alcohol is detected, it will be immediately recalled from all shelves nationwide, no court involvement necessary.

Labeled as 5% but actually containing 40%, sure. Labeled as 35% but containing 40%? No, because those are functionally identical for most consumers.

What’s new is that brewers now have legal teams to help them figure this out.

Entrenched industries benefit from regulation and will lobby to keep the odds in their favor.

Sure, but which industry specifically? Spirits makers would benefit. Who loses? Those who are hellbent on only every using malt to produce these kinds of beverage?

In states where it is currently hard to get a license to sell spirits, the stores that currently have those licenses would lose.

There can't be too many states where the liquor lobby has a strong hold. Pretty much every liquor store I've encountered is a hole in the wall. How could they possibly stand in the way of the producer lobby?

In some states the industry of state government loses because distilled beverages are sold only through state owned stores. I live in VA and in 2018 sales at state ABC stores were $1 billion dollars. This generated $196.7 million dollars in net profit. In addition the state generated another $302 million in taxes on sales at these stores.

VA has quite a few distilleries you can visit. You can purchase bottles at these distilleries but the distillery is acting as an agent for the state. Bottles are sold at the same price state stores sell them at, the distillery deposits all sales in a state bank account each night and the distillery is later paid by the state their negotiated wholesale price.

Liquor store owners. In NJ, politicians bribed by restaurants are blocking breweries from serving food.

In NY at least small and medium liquor stores would disappear quickly if their legal mandate disappeared. There's usually one right next to every supermarket, who would love to sell wine.

So many strange laws on alcohol. No sales on Sundays in certain areas. Liqour store might have to be in it's own enclosed space (weird little room in the grocery store with a separate cashier), or it's ran by the state itself. Closing time at bars.

We are over a lifetime from the temperance movement but we are still affected by it for who knows why.

Alcohol destroys lives. These are all attempts to regulate this common but dangerous drug.

Nobody goes out and specifically votes for the pol who drops one particular liquor tax by a few %. People do go out and vote against the pol who encouraged "public degeneracy" or however their opponent frames it.

Distillation laws don't make a lick of sense and we should change them.

For any politician that will bring doubtful benefits and obvious problems.

welcome to capitalism

People have said such things. Sometimes these things change. But for the most part it achieves its original goal (which varies by jurisdiction), and hurts no one, so it continues.

I've never been so hard up for a drink that I need to buy liquor and beer in the same store. And if I was, I hope that I'd have the sense to check myself into rehab.

That is a silly justification for a silly rule. They idea that you have to go to a state run store to by booze is soviet-like. Really, that's stupid. When I'm in California one can shop around and get selection and price. In North Carolina or Virginia one is limited to a soviet style market. To make a stretch from a working free market to rehab is fallacious and simple minded.

I meant the part about "these two drinks are treated differently because of how they were produced even though it's the same % alcohol", not the liquor/grocery store separation.

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