New Jersey’s Revamped Brewery Laws Highlight Just How Bad Things Still Were in The Garden State

Back when I was first developing a passion for craft beer in the mid-2000s, one used to hear a lot in beer media about various state’s fights for modernized laws revolving around both beer production and consumption in brewery taprooms. This was a common genre of story at the time: “____ State Fighting for Right to Pour Pints,” etc. I read a lot of those stories, and I wrote a fair number myself, and they had the intended effect–over time, states altered their broken laws, many of them rooted in irrelevant Prohibition-era rulings, and the modern brewery taproom culture was born. Even holdouts such as Tennessee or Georgia eventually amended laws that did things like limit ABVs to painfully low levels, or requirements to give wink-wink “tours” to visitors in exchange for beer sampling. Within the last decade, it began to feel as if the entire, nationwide beer scene had at least reached a level of some basic, universal logic when it came to brewery law. But as I dedicated an increasingly large amount of my time as a drinks writer to cocktails and spirits in recent years, I was missing just how bad state law remained for brewers in a few specific places. New Jersey brewery laws, just amended this week, are a testament to just how bad things can still be.

Suffice to say, I honestly didn’t believe there was anywhere in the country where the breweries were still subject to such archaic, damaging and just plain senseless regulations as what had been going on until this week in New Jersey. Certainly, if these laws did exist somewhere I would have assumed it was in some rural, religious haven of the south or Midwest, and not a densely populated urban center like New Jersey. These poor breweries were truly putting up with some egregious bullshit, a few instances of which I will summarize for you here:

— Until this week, breweries could not offer snacks or even non-alcoholic beverages (including coffee and soft drinks) if they didn’t produce those beverages themselves on site.

— Until this week, a strict event limit of 25 per year was applied to brewery taprooms, including live music, trivia, film screenings and even local charity fundraisers. Many brewery taprooms obviously rely on busy weekly event calendars to establish a core clientele.

— Until this week, New Jersey brewery laws forbid the breweries from collaborating with on-site food trucks to provide food for drinkers.

— Until this week, breweries were subject to a limitation on how many TVs (2) and how large those TVs could be in taprooms, and even limitations on what sports programming could be shown on those TVs.

— Until this week, New Jersey breweries still needed to go through the song and dance of providing a nonexistent “tour” to patrons in order to effectively sell them beer to consume on premise.

The newly instituted New Jersey brewery laws, by comparison, now allow for all of those things, as well as introducing the ability for breweries to host off-site special events and self-distribute up to 50% of their own beer. It’s a truly sweeping series of changes–even the total production allowed was increased from 10,000 to 300,000 barrels per year–but it’s only capable of being such a dramatic change because of how truly dreadful the situation was before.

The obvious question: Why were such horrendous laws for breweries still in place in New Jersey? Much of the legislation can be traced back to lobbyists working on behalf of the state’s bar and restaurant lobbies, both of which felt threatened by brewery taprooms in the same way that bar/restaurant lobbies have opposed brewery taprooms in nearly every other state at some point. In particular, proponents of the previous brewery laws described them as leveling the playing field because the actual license to make beer and operate a brewery is quite inexpensive in New Jersey, whereas the state’s limited number of liquor licenses for bars and restaurants can be cripplingly expensive to obtain. To that end, the new legislation also overhauls the existing liquor license process, attacking what it calls “the main cause for the scarcity of liquor licenses for decades,” which are licenses that are inactive or simply being held hostage by those who have purchased them but aren’t using them. Under the new law, license holders will effectively be forced to either use the licenses via a business, or sell those licenses to another business when they’ve been inactive for more than two years. According to the office of Governor Phil Murphy, “these changes will substantially boost accessibility by injecting as many as 1,356 licenses back into the market, a roughly 15% increase over the 8,905 active retail consumption licenses presently being used.” Theoretically, this would lower the cost of liquor licenses in the future.

The sweeping changes in New Jersey will obviously be celebrated as the lifting of an onerous and totally unnecessary burden by the state’s breweries, but reading about the situation has led me to wonder if any other state still has existing brewery laws that are this painful for that state’s small businesses. And honestly? I’m not seeing anything at the moment that even approaches what New Jersey was dealing with.

To be sure, there are some places with individual laws that are noticeably onerous. In Montana, for instance, they have a strange statewide 8 p.m. cutoff for beer sales at breweries, a law that is particularly painful given that in the summer in Montana the sun may not even set until around 10 p.m. In Alaska, meanwhile, recent changes in the last year have eased some previous restrictions, but the state still has a 9 p.m. beer sales cutoff at brewery taprooms, and other odd laws such as “no TVs” and “no chairs or stools at the taproom bar.” Again, one can feel the likely influence of the bar and restaurant lobby at play here.

But still: New Jersey’s crappy laws were in a class of their own. We’re glad that this era has come to an end, but it sucks for New Jersey breweries that likely had their opportunities to grow through the 2010s and 2020s restricted by brewery taproom laws that were straight out of the 1990s or earlier. Here’s hoping that the New Jersey beer landscape is now able to evolve for the better.

Jim Vorel is a Paste staff writer and resident liquor geek. You can follow him on Twitter for more drink writing.