The state legislature is looking to
encourage the brewing craft beer industry in the Mountain State
In a September interim session,
lawmakers heard a presentation from the West Virginia Craft Brewers Guild
–representing the interests of the 12 licensed craft breweries in the state/
The Joint Commission on Economic
Development took the guild’s recommendations on how they could make the state
more friendly to the industry and asked legal counsel to create a bill.
While the first draft presented
during the committee’s meeting Tuesday couldn’t incorporate every
recommendation, it was able to include one of the major complaints craft
brewers had in the licensing.
Currently, there are two types of
licenses to those who brew in the state, one for resident brewers and one for
foreign corporation brewers.
In the proposed draft, the fee would
change based on production, requiring breweries to provide an estimate of how
much beer they will produce when applying for the license. For those producing
over 20,000 barrels –at 31 gallons per barrel– per year, the fee would remain
$1,500. For those producing between 6,000 and 20,000 barrels per year, the fee
would be $1,000. For the small operations producing less than 6,000 barrels per
year, the fee would be $600. If the company produced more than estimated and
reclassified, they would have to pay the difference on the next license.
The license for breweries wishing
to sell their beer on site, known as brewpubs, the fee would now be $400,
thereby making the total cost for a microbrewery producing less than 6,000
barrels per year and selling the product on site $1,000 dollars in licensing.
