BadWolf Closed Temporarily

BadWolf Brewing Company posted this notice on their website:

Our apologies for the terrible news. BadWolf WILL BE CLOSED temporarily until ALL of our labels are approved. It may be 30 days but hopefully not, we are trying to expedite the process. Even though we ONLY do onsite consumption, and no bottling nor distributing, we have discovered VA ABC still requires labels for EVERY SINGLE BEER BREWED even though the beer is behind the counter in kegs in our small operation. This means, we must pay for a label for every beer brewed which could mean less varieties for everyone. This out of date law does not help local small breweries in Virginia http://leg1.state.va.us/cgi-bin/legp504.exe?000+reg+3VAC5-40-50. Tell your local delegates we need to change the law to allow small breweries the ability to brew a small variety of batches without paying $30 for every new beer and waiting for up to 30 days for each label approved. BadWolf brews 5 new beers a week so we would have to approve 5 new beer labels every week? If this doesn't get fixed, we may be stuck brewing the same beers for several months and have only a few seasonal rotating beers. We do not want to deprive our happy customers! Also, on another note regarding laws, we need to lower the VA license fee for breweries from $2,150 to the same price as a winery $189 and allow us to drop off our kegs to local restaurants and retailers as wineries do. Let's change the Virginia Winery Distribution Company to the Virginia Wine and Craft Brewery Distribution Company.

BadWolf is a small batch brewery. This means they may brew many small and one-off beers. That's the beauty of nano-brewing. Virginia's archaic ABC laws make that nearly impossible. Let's hope BadWolf can get their current beers "approved" quickly. And then let's work to fix the law.

I notice that one provision of the regulation states "A brewery licensee or a wholesale beer licensee shall upon request furnish the board without compensation a reasonable quantity of each brand of beer sold by him for chemical analysis." Free samples for people who can't tell the difference between bottled water and beer? I guess we should be thankful the revenuers didn't go in with guns drawn!