I am in the design/concept phase of a growler filling station. I am pretty sure there is some legislation pending regarding beer distribution in MA of this form. Can anyone shed any light on this?? I would just love to be able to go to one shop and fill a couple different growlers up of local beer. Any help or guidance is greatly appreciated.
I'm not aware of any pending legislation. I hit this place last week, http://growler-station.com/nyc and was like a kid in the candy store. MA needs to allow growler fills at retail stores.
As a craft beer fan I'd rather see other laws taken on prior to growler sales. First of all the anti-happy hour law. A blatant barrier to free-market competition. Then MA needs to get rid of the book price nonsense which only serves to guarantee profits for distros & sales reps, but handcuffs retailers & results in some of the highest beer prices in the country for consumers in MA. Take care of that....then I'll worry about friggin growlers.
Here in Washington, especially Seattle, many breweries embrace the growler. Fremont, Georgetown and others use machines to seal the growlers to control the quality. Many breweries do an exchange program where you bring the empty and they clean/sanitize it to control the quality of the vessel.
The problem MA brewers have is that allowing growler fills at retail will take the quality control out of their hands. They have no way of knowing how clean the growlers are, or how clean the unit filling the growlers is. At least at their breweries, they can control these issues. You won't see growler fills at retail in MA anytime soon. The Mass Brewers Guild will make sure of that.
I've looked into this. The problem is the law. It states that product must be sold in the original form that it comes. It is kind of foolish for growlers but of course essential for all other products. Until that law is voted against to change we will see no Growler fills in MA. As far as the quality control issue. It would be easy to set up a place that does nothing but growler fills and does it the right way, but yeah Brewers would hate it if they had their beer sold in a nasty growler. Not to mention brewers make much less off kegs as they do bottles so its not in their best interest. So if you want fresh IPAs for now go to a bar in VT.
And yet they happily sell kegs to bars with dirty tap lines, frozen or soapy glasses, and improper CO2 pressure. And they happily sell bottle to retailers to languish on shelves well past their cryptically-coded best-by date and be unceremoniously consumed directly from the bottle. SunDevilBeer is right though, that MA's growler laws about pretty low on the list of priorities that would benefit consumers. Oh, and OP is right--there was a proposal to liberalize the growler laws in MA to allow bars and retailers to fill growlers. But of course that discussion got lost in the great BA site crash.
