Houston Beer by Ronnie Crocker

Author:Ronnie Crocker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2012-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

It’s hard to imagine Bud Light going the way of Grand Prize or Southern Select, and the multimillion-dollar upgrades suggest a secure future for the Houston brewery—good news for local labor. But not all Texans are happy with the company’s corporate behavior these days. During the summer of 2011, a vocal minority grew downright hostile, particularly on social media, after lobbying by Anheuser-Busch sank a bill designed to help the state’s small craft breweries by letting people take home a small amount of their beer after brewery tours. This lobbying effort came twenty-one years after the company had secured special treatment for itself from the legislature in a deal derided as the “sea mammal exclusion,” which excepted it from the same prohibition on manufacturers’ selling directly to the public after its purchase of the Sea World amusement parks.

The company sought that exemption because its purchase included the Sea World park in San Antonio, and state law technically forbade it from putting its own beer on tap there. In the manner of the way these things are handled in Texas, the carefully crafted law change allowed brewers who keep sea mammals in a marine park on 250 acres, give or take 5 acres, in a county whose population exceeded 950,000 to go ahead and sell beer there. The wording meant the exemption applied to just one place: Sea World, in San Antonio, the county seat of Bexar County.

But in 2011, the company fought a bill with similarly constrained wording that would allow brewers that manufactured fewer than 75,000 barrels annually not to sell beer directly to customers but to let them take home one or two souvenir six-packs following brewery tours. The amount of beer these tourists could walk out with varied, depending on how much they’d paid for the tour.

Supporters of the bill said it would help new and smaller breweries with marketing. Anheuser-Busch, which hasn’t hosted public tours of its Houston plant for years, argued that it was unfair to not include the bigger breweries. Two years earlier, when the bill was introduced without that exception, it was quietly killed in a committee.

Spurred by the setback, a couple of restaurants announced boycotts of Anheuser-Busch products, and a group of frustrated beer aficionados formed a consumer lobby called Open the Taps to advocate for changes to the state’s alcohol laws that would encourage competition from within and from outside Texas.

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