The bill’s primary focus is to allow some alcohol license holders to offer free samples under certain circumstances, but the proposal to raise the alcohol cap was attached to the bill as an amendment in the Ohio House committee.
The Ohio Senate may go a step further. Senate Chief of Staff Jason Mauk told our Columbus bureau reporter Laura Bischoff Fiday that state senators may seek to amend the proposal to lift the ABV limit on beer when the bill is sent to their side of the Ohio General Assembly.
Ohio Senate President Keith Faber, R-Celina, has expressed some support for the idea. Mauk said Faber thinks the market should be able to determine what beer alcohol levels taste good enough to buy. There may be some effort to mark high ABV as “high alcohol content” on the label, Mauk said.
Previous legislative proposals in recent years — one of them reintroduced in the current Ohio General Assembly — would raise the alcohol cap on beer to 21 percent. Those bills attracted attention and some bipartisan support, but never made it into law.
Joe Waizmann, co-founder and president of Warped Wing Brewing Company in downtown Dayton, favors eliminating the alcohol restriction on beer altogether, even though beers that are brewed with 12 percent or more alcohol "are extremely difficult to produce and represent a small fraction of total annual production" of the nation's breweries.
“Any move to provide a broader range of beers to Ohioans would be a positive step,” Waizmann said.
Yellow Springs Brewery co-founder Nate Cornett said he too hopes legislation to lift the alcohol cap passes.
“We are one of the few states with a law like this,” Cornett said. “The state’s breweries are losing business because we can’t compete on the same playing field.”
The alcohol limit may have been one reason California-based Stone Brewing skipped over Ohio in favor of Virginia in 2014 when it was searching for a suitable location for a production brewery in the eastern half of the U.S. Other Ohio brewery owners have said the cap handcuffs them in developing new specialty products.
• Staff writer Laura Bischoff contributed to this story.
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