Want to go out for a beer? If so, you’ll have to order a meal with your drink, thanks to a state order issued last month. The rule is intended to slow the spread of the coronavirus by encouraging brewpub patrons to sit and dine rather than mingle. By encouraging the consumption of solid food with drinks, it also ostensibly helps soften the effects of inebriation, which may lead people to relax and let down their guard at a time when vigilant social distancing is considered critical.
“I’ve been at a couple of parties where I saw it happen — people started drinking a little and their social distancing practices just fell away,” says Mike Altman, owner of Fairfax’s Iron Springs Pub and Brewery. “People start getting closer, and they want to hug each other.”
Altman appreciates what the rule is trying to achieve, but he thinks it’s too riddled with loopholes and inconsistencies to work effectively. For one thing, it isn’t clear in all cases what constitutes a full meal, proof of which is supposed to appear on each transaction receipt.
Another weakness in the rule is the way it requires just one full meal on a receipt without regard to how many individuals in the party ordered drinks.
“It makes the rule ineffective, since four people could be sitting at a table, so that one food item isn’t doing what it’s supposed to do, which is keep down the effects of the alcohol,” Altman says.
For some breweries without kitchens, the rule is taking a toll on business.
“We have premade snacks, but they don’t count as having meals, so we can’t serve people at our bar,” says Jonathan MacDonald, owner and brewer at Adobe Creek Brewing, in Novato.
He didn’t elaborate on the financial stress that his business is enduring but noted that for small breweries like his, “the taproom is the lifeblood.”
At Pond Farm Brewing, the owners — Stephanie and Trevor Martens — said in a written statement that they “recognize everyone is just trying to do the right thing, including our state and local regulatory bodies.”
But the rule has caused some turbulence. Some customers, they explained in an emailed statement, have declined to buy a beer at all upon learning that doing so would require buying a meal, too.
To meet the requirements of the new rule, Pond Farm has had to upgrade operations. As of early July, the Fourth Street brewery been partnering with local food purveyors to provide a menu of full meals. This week, for instance, Pond Farm is featuring tacos, nachos, burrito bowls and quesadillas from PopupMarin; and on Sunday, Japanese comfort food from Haraneco.
In the era of COVID-19, the rule might seem like a reasonable measure — except that it offers a conspicuous loophole: Wine-tasting venues are exempt. That is, people may still visit a winery and taste through a selection of wines without ordering food — an allowance that has many in the beer industry objecting.
“This disparity between wineries and breweries makes no sense to our members, to the public and to the media and only adds to the sense of confusion,” says Tom McCormick, executive director of the California Craft Brewers Association. “When state and county health departments make decisions that do not align or that do not make common sense, they lose the confidence and trust of the public.”
He noted that the new rule, by cutting off already waning cash flows, “has put hundreds of breweries in jeopardy of permanently closing.”
So, why the disparity in the rule between places that make and serve beer and those that make and serve wine? The wine industry itself may have influenced the writing of the rule. A July 22 story in the Press Democrat reported that reps with the Wine Institute, a trade group, argued months ago to state officials that a wine tasting is a fundamentally different thing than drinking beer at a bar, more like a dining experience than “bellying up to your local tavern,” as a Wine Institute director put it.
Lofty pretensions guide this logic, for inebriation happens in wineries just as readily it does elsewhere. What, after all, is different about someone drinking alcohol without food in the form of wine than in the form of beer? (I’m giving wineries the benefit of the doubt here, since their product typically contains twice the alcohol that brewers’ products do.)
It’s also true that people can drink — dare I say taste — beer at taprooms without getting drunk.
“We’re never allowed to overserve guests to the point of inebriation — meal requirement or no,” the Martens wrote.At Adobe Creek, MacDonald believes wine-tasting rooms have more in common than not with small breweries’ tasting rooms, suggesting they shouldn’t be regulated so differently.
“Our bar seats six or seven people, and wine-tasting rooms are pretty similar,” he says.
All sources interviewed said they agree with the intentions of the rule — to help maintain social distancing vigilance and ultimately protect the public from COVID-19 — but the preferential treatment granted to wineries will surely make some brewers bitter.
Alastair Bland’s Through the Hopvine runs every week in Zest. Contact him at allybland79@gmail.com.
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