Brewing Up Some Economic Development: Changes to Craft Brewery Laws in North Carolina

<p style="text-align: justify">North Carolina has recently enacted several provisions aimed at increasing the development of its brewing industry. The first North Carolina craft brewery opened in 1985 with Uli Bennewitz’s Weeping Radish brewpub, and the industry has grown to over sixty breweries since the opening of Weeping Radish. A driver of this growth, arguably, is a series of recent changes that have occurred in North Carolina’s brewing laws. This blog post will document recent changes in North Carolina and regional brewing laws as well as its relevant tax rates to outline how the legislative changes have acted as drivers of economic development.</p> <p style="text-align: justify"></p> Pop the cap <p style="text-align: justify">One of the most significant recent changes to the North Carolina brewing laws was enacted by the “Pop the Cap” campaign, a movement that resulted in 2005 legislation that raised the allowable amount of alcohol by volume (“ABV”) in malt beverages from six percent to fifteen percent. This provision allowed for a larger variety of beer types to be sold in stores and brewed by craft brewers in North Carolina. It also proved to be a boon to the craft brew industry in North Carolina, prompting three new breweries to open in the Triangle area alone in the five years following the legislation, and growing the number of craft breweries in the state to sixty-one as of June 2012.</p> Special tasting permits <p style="text-align: justify">Four years after raising the ABV limits, the North Carolina General Assembly, following in the footsteps of an earlier bill that [...]</p>