Beer Map in Liquor Stores
Mike Laur - August 5, 2008
Okay, I like maps. I read maps like most people read books, and can spend hours pouring over an atlas or a detailed topo quad. To me, a map is the ultimate guide for armchair travel and exploration. Give me a nautical chart, and I can sail up the narrowest of channels in any wind, and with a map of Mars, I can shuffle right alongside Spirit on the rim of a big, red crater millions of miles away.
A good map is indeed a thing of beauty, too, and can talk to us whether we speak its native tongue or not. Military maps have always been the most secret of secret documents, yet where in the world would we be without Google Earth?
Woe be to the traveller, lost without a good guide, destined to blunder into the dragons and monsters that lurk out there, beyond the edges of all maps...
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When we started production on the Beer Drinker’s Guide to Colorado, it was ordained that our first print product would be a big, beautiful map. We put together a prototype and rolled it out at the Great American Beer Festival, where it was scrutinized by thousands of potential customers. Feedback was very positive. People wanted to buy our map. We were stoked. However, writing, researching, designing, producing, printing and publishing a big map turned out to be the least of our problems.
We knew that beer drinkers liked our product and wanted to buy it. One obvious potential marketplace in Colorado was the retail liquor store, where most beer drinkers go to buy beer. So, from the start, we planned to sell our maps there, right alongside Wine Spectator and All About Beer magazines, cigarette lighters, fresh limes, gift wrapping, corkscrews, ice buckets, shot glasses and ATM machines.
"Hey - I’m not putting that in my store ‘till you get it approved by Liquor Enforcement. They could shut me down because it’s not on The List”. The owner of my go-to liquor store in Colorado Springs was among the first retailers I talked with, and he thought his customers might buy a few maps. But he would not carry our map in his store without the blessing of the State of Colorado.
(Note to self: Check with State Website Enforcement before posting this story)
I didn’t know squat about Liquor Enforcement, other than you could buy Fritos in Texas liquor stores but not here in Colorado, and they will padlock your doors if you sell any malt, vinous or spirituous liquors to anyone less than 21 years of age. I was about to find out a lot more.
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Laura Harris has a tough job. She’s not “The Man”, but she works for him. As Executive Director of the State Liquor Enforcement Division, she oversees and polices the manufacture, distribution, sale, licensing, tax collection and reporting of liquor, wine and beer businesses within Colorado.
According to the Office of State Planning and Budgeting, Laura directs a staff of 19 full-time-equivalent workers, with a budget of just about $1.5 million, and last year her office helped the State collect $34 million in liquor excise taxes. (Another DOR office collects additional sales taxes on alcohol sales in stores, restaurants, pubs, grocers and other locations.) Laura’s boss is Roxanne Huber, head of the Department of Revenue (she’s not The Man, either), and they both don’t like to see tax money go uncollected.
So Laura and her department ride herd on over 1500 licensed liquor resellers, and keep every one of them honest, law-abiding and paid up. Laura’s team are all lead dogs on hunting down moonshiners and scofflaws who smuggle illegal booze in Colorado, and sniffing out and biting the butt of anyone who sells alcohol to minors. Her department, along with counties and cities that choose to get involved, manages the extremely detailed licensing and rigorous administration for dozens of types of liquor licenses and businesses across the state. Laura’s team gets to help decide whether a new brewpub opens up in a particular neighborhood, or whether a liquor license gets renewed on the basis of “good moral character”.
Remember Prohibition? It ended just 75 years ago. Many states even today maintain complete control of alcohol distribution and sales within their boundaries, running retail monopolies of dreary, poorly-stocked “ABC Stores” that almost make customers feel sleazy buying a decent case of beer, at room temperature to boot. Colorado, thankfully, is a veritable oasis where alcohol sales are conducted in the light and vitality of the free market - to a point, naturally. We’re talking booze and taxes here, right?
Not just anybody can own a liquor store business: by law, liquor license holders are held to a higher moral standard and higher standard of bookkeeping and accountability than almost all other business owners. Only last month were we finally allowed to buy alcohol on Sundays, through a bill signed into law by Gov. Bill Ritter - and, yes, he is The Man; although the bill was authored by two women, Senator Jennifer Veiga and Representative Cheri Jahn.
Laura and her crew at Liquor Enforcement have plenty to do, and now I’m going to ask her to bless our map for sale in Colorado retail liquor stores. I hope the map and I have enough good moral character between us to pass muster.
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I turn your attention now to an important set of regulations, “Colorado Beer, Liquor, Special Event Codes and Code of Regulations 1, C. C. R. 203-2, Inclusive as of June 2007”. Feel free to look it up online, or even better, you can purchase one directly from the State Forms Center for 20 bucks. It is a sure-fire cure for the most bug-eyed of insomnias.
I consulted the regulations, and near as I could tell, there was no direct prohibition against selling our proposed map in a liquor store, brewpub, restaurant or similar enterprises that otherwise answered to Liquor Enforcement. There was a “Regulation 47-416. Non-Food Items,” that listed some very specific and some not-so-specific items that were regulated for sale in in retail liquor stores only. It seemed that at brewpubs and restaurants, we were free to sell the map.
Besides, the list clearly permitted “books or magazines that are primarily about alcohol liquors or the industry” and “beverage publications”. This really should be a simple matter. We’d be ready to sell our maps in stores by Christmas...
Laura rejected our first written request, because our map was neither a “book” nor a “magazine”. She rejected our second request too, arguments aside, because she saw the same map and nothing had changed. Since we were still producing the publication, we could only provide a small, low-resolution version for her to review, and the backside of the map wasn’t nearly finished. I started to wonder: Were we of insufficient moral character? Were the colors wrong?
I went back to C.C.R. 203-2, and there was my answer, in the form of “Regulation 47-200. Declaratory Orders Concerning the Colorado Liquor, Beer or Special Event Codes.”
I could appeal to a higher power, in this case the Executive Director of Department of Revenue. So I wrote to Roxanne Huber, asking for her to review the Liquor Enforcement rulings, pursuant to Regulation 47-200.
Alas, Joseph Heller (of Catch 22 literary fame) stepped in and seemed to write the next letter I received. DOR could not answer my request for a declaratory order until LED provided me with a "Statement of Position". So back to Laura Harris I wrote, and back she wrote with the official Statement of Position, further elucidating the reasons why our Beer DrinkerÕs Guide To Colorado was not a book, not a magazine,and not a beverage publication that was primarily about alcohol beverages or the industry. Bear in mind that Laura Harris had other things on her mind besides The Beer Drinker’s Guide To Colorado, and correspondence would take weeks to materialize. Four months after our first request, and we were still locked out of retail liquor stores.
By now, though, we had some maps to sell. We were selling them online on our website, at festivals and events, and developing our retail partners along the Front Range. A few maps were even stolen. And I was not about to quit on getting the map into liquor stores. We pursued legislative options with State Senators and Representatives. We rallied letters of support from business leaders and consulted attorneys. In March, we submitted our formal Request for Declaratory Order to the Executive Director of Department of Revenue, along with a copy of the finished product, and waited for the approval that was certain to come. Surely reason would prevail, and you, Dear Reader, would soon find our map - er, our beverage publication - in your favorite liquor store any day now.
We waited. And we waited some more. If Liquor Enforcement had been busy, the Department of Revenue must have been totally slammed. After phone calls, queries and memos - 95 days of waiting, with plenty of time to question our collective moral character - we finally got our answer. Joseph Heller, again, with Catch 23 this time:
“Our staff lawyer has determined that we should remand this matter back to Laura Harris and Liquor Enforcement, since they are the subject matter experts.” Great. Three more months of bureaucratic inertness had landed us right back where we started. Ten months had passed since we started pushing the big rock uphill. Laura Harris would no doubt be happy to hear from us again.
She only took two weeks to get back with us this time. I was busy when she called. The call was short. And sweet. “Hello, Mike? This is Laura Harris. I’ve reviewed your final map, and we are approving it for sale in Colorado retail liquor stores. I’ll be sending you the approval in writing next week.” Wow. Just like that. “Uh, thanks Laura, that’s great. Can I ask you why you changed your original opinion?”
“It’s a compelling argument you made, but mostly it’s the product itself. It’s clearly a publication that fits within the existing guidelines.” Finally. I thanked her again, and it took a while to sink in: no more waiting to wait for more waiting. Now, it was time to talk to a few more liquor store managers and owners about The Beer Drinker’s Guide to Colorado.
Of course, hindsight is always 20-20. And ten months seemed like a really long time to get our map approved by Liquor Enforcement. It wasn’t our moral character in question, thank God (we weren’t really that worried). It actually was very simple: we couldn’t show Laura Harris our map until it was printed, and she couldn’t make an informed decision until she had the information. Somewhere, Joseph Heller is writing a chapter that fits in here, too.
The moral of this long story is multifold. First, don’t give up. Anything worth having is worth fighting for. Second, don’t quit. Third, support your local liquor store and brewer, and ask them to carry The Beer Drinker’s Guide to Colorado. And fourth, raise a toast to Laura Harris and the hard working folks at Colorado Department of Revenue, Liquor Enforcement Division. They're the ones who could really use a beer, and I'll throw in a good map to help them find the way.
