All About Beer Magazine

North Carolina has its own restrictions on advertising and product placement. “No bartender or server can wear any logos from any specific brands. You’re not even allowed to see the beer through the window,” reports LeVine. He notes that the opposite is true in South Carolina. “They’d paint the building ‘Budweiser’ if they could.”

Now, we’re still in the South, where two Charleston county retail stores recently cast Belgian-brewed Satan Ale from its shelves, following customer complaints about the devilish label.

Only two years ago, wholesalers like LeVine wouldn’t have been able to sell any high-gravity specialty beers in South Carolina. It was in May of 2007 that a law was finally passed raising the alcohol percentage in beer from five percent ABV to 14 percent. That’s real progress for a state where until recently all hard liquor sold in bars and restaurants had to be poured from those little two-ounce airline-size bottles. Before that law changed in 2005, a Long Island Ice Tea would have cost you about thirty bucks.

Franchise and Conquer

North and South Carolina are also examples of what are termed ‘franchise’ states, where distributors tend to dominant the terrain. Franchise laws were originally devised to protect distributors from unprincipled brewers. Consider the scenario where a wholesaler would sign a major league brewer, invest in a large warehouse, an expensive refrigeration system and double its trucking fleet, only to have the brewer switch to a more favorable arrangement with another distributor.

These days, however, when a brewer signs up with a distributor in a franchise state, the brewer often feels shackled. South Carolina, for instance, is a successor state, meaning that if the distributor were to be bought out, the brewer’s contract is assigned to the new owner. And if the relationship sours between a brewer and distributor and the brewer wants out, the distributor has the power to either terminate the deal or hold the brewer to it. The beer could be great, but if the personal chemistry is bad, a distributor can sit on a brand and you and I won’t be able to find it.

Charlie Papazian, president of the Colorado-based Brewers Association, says that these restrictive franchise laws should not supercede the human element of conducting business.

“Sometimes people don’t get along,” he muses. “Sometimes brewers want to screw distributors and distributors want to screw over brewers. When that happens, there should be a mechanism to be able to get out without either party holding the other hostage.”

Look to the West

If the conflicting and convoluted rules of the trade have your head spinning like Linda Blair’s in “The Exorcist,” you could probably use a beer. Let’s turn to Charles Finkel, owner of Seattle’s Pike Brewing Co., renowned for its quality craft beers, for a little insight.

“Doing business with a wholesale distributor in Oregon is akin to a Catholic marriage,” he says dryly. “Once you enter into it, no matter infidelity or any other problem, you may not get out of it. The exception is if a distributor merges.”