Kyle Nabilcy
It was Sunday in the Twin Cities. Just this most recent Sunday, in fact. I punched my destination into the navigation. “Stinson Wine Beer and Spirits may be closed today,” Google Maps helpfully popped up.
Not today, friend, I thought. Today’s a whole new kind of Sunday. Today, as the movie says, we celebrate our Independence Day.
There are 50 states and 50 different sets of liquor laws. Some are reasonable even in their differences — a 10 p.m. versus a 9 p.m. end to daily liquor sales, say — while others are ridiculous holdouts, doing deference to bygone interests and social mores. Until 2005, for example, the booze in any cocktail in South Carolina had to come from mini-bottles.
Minnesota, from its statehood in 1858 until July 2, 2017, did not allow for retail sale of pre-packaged alcohol on Sundays. “Sunday sales” is the shorthand name for the debate. Justifications came and went over the decades, from “It’s the way Jesus wants it” to “Liquor retailers need a day off” to “Just because, okay?”
Both Jesus and liquor retailers seem to be getting by OK in Wisconsin, though, as well as in the other 36 states that allow Sunday sales of pre-packaged alcohol. And so it was that, after many sessions of close-but-no-cognac votes on Sunday sales, the Minnesota Legislature legalized growler fills on Sundays in July 2015. The wall was crumbling.
From there, full legalization of Sunday sales seemed like a fait accompli. It happened at the end of February, with Gov. Mark Dayton signing the bill into law in March. Despite some attention-seeking violations of the date of the law’s enactment, July 2 arrived with no fire and brimstone, no mass walk-offs, and plenty of crowds at the shops that opened for the first day of Sunday sales in state history.
“Sunday Sales bans were always a guise created under religious morality standards,” says Michael Wagner, a brewer at Steel Toe Brewing in St. Louis Park, Minnesota. He’s a friend of mine who used to be my go-to guy at a now-closed Minneapolis bottle shop called The Four Firkins; that’s two of the three tiers he has experience in.
“It wasn't necessarily a hot-button issue for me, but I am a big supporter of personal freedom and open markets, with more competition,” he says in an email conversation. “[Legalization of Sunday sales] gets government a little more ‘out of the way’ in regulating people's lives, and the business of hypocritically ‘protecting us from ourselves’.”
It just feels...OK, y’know? No big deal. Just businesses being allowed to do business how they want to.
Wisconsin is now facing the adoption of its own brand of ridiculous liquor law, with a potential 999 motion against taprooms. This motion, if attached to the budget bill and signed by Gov. Scott Walker, would essentially define taprooms as a separate retail entity from the brewery attached to it, which would put taprooms in violation of Wisconsin’s three-tier alcohol regulation system. (One entity can't own interests in multiple tiers: production, distribution, and retail.)
Nobody seems to know exactly who wrote the leaked proposal memo containing this legislative agenda, but most suspicions put the Wisconsin Tavern League near the heart of it, most likely aided by unnamed large distributors, though the Tavern League says it is not aware of a proposal.
The Tavern League, like many conservative lobbying bodies, often argues for small-government policies — opposing smoking bans and objecting to the criminalization of first-time drunk driving offenses — right up until the point when increased regulation suits their interests. Then it’s all regulate me, daddy.
In Wisconsin, this taproom motion would crush a lot of breweries, wineries, and distillers in the interest of the commercial viability of bars and distributors. Hasn't Wisconsin been a gem of a state in the brewing industry for years, on both the macro and craft sides of the business? In what right mind is it a good idea to hobble those industries?
Walking into Stinson Liquors back in Minneapolis on that first Sunday sale day, the Rolling Stones’ “Ruby Tuesday” was playing, and I had to smile when I heard it. It was too perfect.
“Don't question why she needs to be so free,” it goes. “She'll tell you it's the only way to be.”
