Thursday, 20 Jun 2002

OLYMPIA, Wash.

School is out for the summer and I have just arrived at the brewery after having dropped off my nine-year-old son, Gaius, at day camp. He is definitely going to have more fun today than I will. The usual amount of interruptions — both planned and otherwise — are bound to delay my one overriding priority for the day, which is label approval.

The logos are label-ready.

Under the best of circumstances, the process of acquiring approval for package labels in the beer business is extremely convoluted and time-consuming. In Washington State, all labels which appear on kegs and bottles must be approved by the Washington State Liquor Control Board. If you sell beer in more than one state, it is necessary to comply with the labeling laws of each different state — and in some cases, those laws are contradictory. For example, some states allow or require you to list the alcohol quantity on the label. Some require the alcohol to be listed by volume, while others require it to be listed by weight. I think you get the picture.

The WSLCB has any number of arcane requirements concerning what can and cannot appear on a beer label. Fortunately, however, there is really only one overriding requirement for label approval in Washington State, which is that the label in question first must receive approval from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, in Washington, D.C. The BATC may sound like an intimidating agency to have to deal with on a daily basis, but the fact is, they almost never actually show up to threaten brewers. Once licensed as a brewery, all we need to do is pay them annually for our license and file and pay our excise taxes twice monthly. Basically, if we send them money, they don’t send guys with guns to collect. They must be concentrating on all those other vices — cigarettes, guns, explosives.

Unfortunately, when it comes to labeling, our situation is slightly more complicated than the normal brewery, because we also have to maintain our organic certification. This is further complicated by the fact that this coming October will witness the advent of a new national organic standard to be used across the land.

My label approval process is now as follows. First, I must study all the requirements that are expected to come into play. This is not easy, since the BATF and the U.S. Department of Agriculture have not quite come to full agreement on what “organic” means for beer, or exactly what wording will apply after Oct. 21. Nonetheless, I believe I understand what is required and allowable, and I have conveyed that information to my graphic designer, who has printed up mock-up label designs for me to submit. The first approval must come from the Washington State Department of Agriculture, which is the current certifier of our beers and through which we will later receive our USDA approval.

Once the WSDA has renewed my certification for 2002 and granted preliminary approval on the new label design, then I can proceed with the big boys in D.C.

Today, I am filling out the label approval application forms for the BATF. These must be submitted as duplicate originals. The applications include full color mock-ups of the new labels. Color is required because the new USDA symbol which appears on the labels must follow specific color requirements. I am told the B.A.T.F. will be running the new lables by the USDA; if they are in full compliance I should see federal approval on my desk in about four weeks. If they do not comply, I will have to make changes and resubmit until they are correct.

Once I have USDA and BATF approval, I will then submit the labels to each state in which we intend to sell our beer. In some cases, such as in Washington State, once I have received state label approval I must then post prices for the new products, even though the products are not really new; the labels have just been changed to reflect the new federal standard.

All of the time involved in approval and price-posting assumes that we will be able to order new labels from our printer in time to meet the deadline in October when the new standard takes effect. Naturally, I cannot order new labels until I have all the necessary approvals. If I send the job off to the printer before receiving final approval, I may just end up wasting a lot of money and paper on labels that do not comply. So in the meantime, we face the challenge of ordering enough bottle labels, six-pack carriers, and mother cartons with the old design to last up to the point when the new standard kicks in. That is the trick: how to achieve full compliance on the new standard, order all the new packaging we need, and then run out of the old packaging just in time to begin using the new stuff.

I am hoping that sometime in November, when we are still using the old packaging because we did not correctly judge the amount we needed, and because an environmentally friendly brewery such as ours does not want to waste old packaging, the WSLCB, WSDA, USDA, and BATF do not all get irate at once. Could get kind of crowded on our doorstep.