“On the surface, it seemed like a bad idea,” said David Ayers, owner of Glacier Brewing in Polson, which operates a taproom to serve the small-batch beers brewed on site.
“Those are the rules we agreed to play by. No one likes it when you change the rules once you've started playing the game.”
The change was scheduled to be the subject of a hearing here Thursday, but members of the Montana State Brewers Association met Wednesday with Revenue Director Dan Bucks, who agreed to pull the item from the hearing agenda.
Instead, the department is going to begin having meetings with brewers and other members of the public to better define when taprooms should close. Those meetings are expected to begin this fall.
Taprooms are public areas where microbreweries sell the beer made on-site.
They are not required to have a liquor license like a bar and are governed under different laws. They are allowed to sell only three pints of beer per person per day, to be consumed in the taproom, and must stop serving at 8 p.m. However, they can stay open until 2 a.m., like a bar, so long as they sell only beer for consumption off-site, like growlers or kegs.
Few Montana taprooms stay open past 8 p.m.
Travis Zeilstra, head brewer of the Billings Brewing Co., which makes beer for the adjoining Montana Brewing Co., a brew pub and restaurant, is secretary of the Montana State Brewers Association. Zeilstra participated in Wednesday's meeting by telephone.
He said the proposed rule change would cause many problems for breweries with taprooms and didn't seem to be necessary, given that no taproom has ever had a written complaint about their operation.
Microbrews often contain more alcohol than mass-produced beers, up to
7.5 percent by volume by Montana law, he said. Closing the doors at 8 p.m. would encourage people to guzzle such beers, which could lead to drunkenness and create more problems for the public.
Plus, he said, the new rules seemed unreasonable given that breweries can legally stay open until 2 a.m., provided they only sell kegs and growlers.
Brian Smith, a brewer and owner at the Blackfoot River Brewing Co. in Helena, said allowing patrons to sip their microbrews encourages responsible drinking. People who like microbrews drink them because they like the taste, he said, not because they're trying to get drunk.
“I suppose there's time for drinking a beer very rapidly,” he said, “but generally speaking it's something one should savor.”
Smith said the rules would also seriously affect how taprooms do business and could put some out of business altogether. Most taproom traffic doesn't pick up until 5:30 or so, he said. If breweries are required to close their doors at 8 p.m., they'd have to stop serving at around 7:30 p.m. It's very hard to make a living, he said, when you're only selling your product for two hours a day.
Many brewers described the proposed rules as a solution in search of a problem.
In prepared remarks for Thursday's hearing, Bucks said the proposed rules were merely to clarify the regulations on taprooms and make them easier to enforce. He said one brewery in particular has caused problems, although Bucks did not identify the brewery in his remarks.
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