Our travels took us to many breweries. It's always fun to see how other states regulate breweries and how the innovative brewery owners work within the law to make extremely good beer as well as extremely good businesses. As a small example of how different the laws can be state to state:
- Montana is only allowed to serve 48 oz of beer per customer between the hours of 10 am and 8pm. They are allowed to sell growlers on site but customers must take them home to drink them. Montana breweries can self-distribute, meaning it's cheaper and easier to distribute while the brewery is still new and small.
- Wyoming doesn't seem to have a limit on how much each customer can drink in one day. Wyoming law doesn't seem to allow breweries to sell growlers, but I did find that they can sell bottles and cans to customers from their premises. Wyoming breweries are not allowed to self-distribute but can use current licensed distributors.
- Colorado law is harder to understand. From what we saw the breweries that also served food didn't distribute their beer anywhere else. This would indicate that the law doesn't allow it? We didn't see growlers in Colorado either but they were allowed to sell bottles and cans on site, we purchased some from both Steamworks and Ska. We also found out they can self-distribute, Ska Brewery does but we never figured out why some breweries self-distribute and others don't. After a bit of research I also found out that Colorado has an interesting low-alcohol content beer law that doesn't allow beer sold in grocery stores to be over 3.2%. This law was being looked at by the legislator, not sure what happened.
*On a side note I may not have all this right, I didn't do a lot of research. I'd love to hear more if anyone has more information! Also, I'm not sure about New Mexico breweries, we haven't found one in Silver City, but I'm traveling to Santa Fe and Taos later this summer so I'll keep you posted.
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