Here & Now

Will Glass on Wisconsin's Confusing Alcohol Laws

Zac Schultz:

Also at the Capitol this week, a Republican bill is moving forward that would make numerous changes to how Wisconsin regulates the sale and distribution of alcohol. The current law was designed in an age where giant brewers dominated the industry, well before the boom in microbreweries and wineries across the state. Marisa Wojcik spoke with a craft brewery owner and president of the Wisconsin Brewer’s Gild, Will Glass, whose life was upended by the state’s convoluted statues.

Will Glass:

We started the Brewing Projekt because there was a void in the market. Kind of thought, hey if it’s not there, maybe we should start making it.

Marisa Wojcik:

While working through the complicated permitting process to start his brewery, Will Glass faced a significant barrier.

Will Glass:

Because my wife’s business had a municipal liquor license, I was not allowed to have a brewery. One of the things that they actually told us was that if we got divorced, we could then have this problem would be solved. When it came to be a real conversation, because at that point we were over a half million dollars in investing into this business, we also then found out that because we had children in common and there would be a fiduciary responsibility between spouses, that money would have to go between us, that that would also constitute a bridging of the tiers and made us ineligible to get a brewer’s permit.

Marisa Wojcik:

The tiers he’s referring to are the three tiers that largely regulate Wisconsin’s multi billion-dollar alcohol industry.

Will Glass:

Depending on if you want to be a producer, a wholesaler or a retailer, you kind of have to act as one and not the others. There are a lot of exceptions to that. I started looking at the statutes a little closer and I was having a conversation with my father. I was driving to the grocery store, getting some milk, I was talking to him on the phone, and he said, “Well, what if I owned the brewery?” and I said, Well, that could work.” So we basically made a deal where I transferred all of my assets into his name. So all of the debt that I had taken on, all of the money that I had saved for years.

Marisa Wojcik:

When he thought they had dotted all the “Is” and crossed all the “Ts”, another complication suddenly arose.

Will Glass:

They told us “no” again because one of the management employees that we had, his wife was a bartender at a bar in town. It’s all this crazy stuff, and it really is the unintended consequence of people not paying attention to the changes that happened in 2011 to our industry. We lost the ability to hold multiple permits at the same time. It just turned into this kind of rat’s nest of complications and exceptions to this rule and exceptions to that rule. It is very difficult to know what you can and can’t do. We host weddings up here. It helps for us to become more competitive.

Marisa Wojcik:

Glass has spent years poring over the statutes out of necessity. He couldn’t afford a lawyer to interpret them, and even then, he doesn’t think that would have mattered.

Will Glass:

Without a doubt the, the statutes have not kept up with the market. Right now, hard seltzers in the state of Wisconsin are considered wine. That’s as of about two months ago when the Department of Revenue decided to reinterpret what a hard seltzer would be as opposed to being a fermented malt beverage, now they consider it a wine. So if you don’t have a winery permit and you’re making hard seltzer, now suddenly you’re illegal. The problem with a pure 3-tier system is that it takes away a lot of opportunities from entrepreneurs. It holds up the ability for the market to change and for us to be able to respond to that.

Marisa Wojcik:

The current bill speeding through the legislature is the culmination of years of advocacy from different parts of the industry.

Will Glass:

This proposal that’s being floated right now, we’re major proponents of. It would clean up the vast majority of issues that I have run into in the past. The majority of issues that our members run into. It’s long overdue because the other members of our industry have spent so much time in it, change is difficult. Change is hard. The 3-tier system isn’t going away, but what this bill does is it creates allowances within. It gives somebody the ability to open a brewery when their wife owns a bar. It gives somebody the ability to have small levels of investment in other parts of the industry, in other tiers, that’s been forbidden for a very long time. It just kind of opens the market up in a way that makes sense today.

Marisa Wojcik:

Reporting from Eau Claire, I’m Marisa Wojcik for “Here & Now.”