New Legislation for Small Brewers

A new piece of federal legislation was introduced in the earlier this month in both chambers of Congress.

Senate bill, S534 is a graduated beer excise tax for America's small brewers. Specifically, S534 is geared to small breweries and brewpubs and would reduce the small brewer tax rate on the first 60,000 barrels by 50 percent (from $7.00 to $3.50/barrel) and institute a new rate of $16.00 per barrel on beer production above 60,000 barrels up to 2 million barrels. Breweries with an annual production of 6 million barrels or less would qualify for these tax rates.

I don't have to explain the math here, do I? lower taxes means less expensive beer, which leads to more sales, which translates to growth and jobs.

Small American breweries account for about five percent of all the beer enjoyed in the United States and 50 percent of brewery jobs.

Please urge your lawmaker to get behind this bill.

On a lighter note, thanks for reading! The Utah Beer Blog came in third in City Weekly's Best of Utah 2011. There's a huge amount of talented local citizen who are out there producing great stuff. It's gratifying that a narrow topic - tiny niche blog got enough votes to get noticed. Again, Thanks for reading and contributing!

Cheers!