Test Start

Sometimes things just come together.

My career road over recent years had me working as a bartender and server at two craft beer establishments. I've been rubbing shoulders with brewers, distributors, and beer managers for establishments that carried as many as 130 craft beer on tap.

Restaurants like this have been springing up across the nation as craft beer becomse nothing short of a craze. I grew up in Kalamazoo, Michigan and during my early years as a legal drinker I hated beer; mostly because I couldn't get anything better than conventional macro-brew pilsners and my choice of an import was 'Heineken'. Today, Grand Rapids, just a short jaunt north of where I lived, is a Mecca of craft beer; the home of Founders brewery and packed with brew pubs and tap houses. What defines 'good beer' today is significantly different than it was back then.

I never intended to work serving drinks forever. I had my reasons for going that direction and my wife and I would often talk about eventually reactivating my law license and starting my own practice. I don't remember the exact occasion, but at one point, she said

"You should be a beer lawyer."

It started as a half-hearted joke related to wanting to combine bartending and law.

But over the next year or so, the joke starting sounding less and less facetious.

The March 2016 issue of Wisconsin Lawyer featured it's cover as 'Starting a Brewery; A Web of Regulations'. In 1978, the article noted, there were 89 breweries in the entire country. Today there are 120 in Wisconsin, alone. The rise of breweries, tap houses, brew pubs, and changes in how alcohol is regulated, distributed, and sold has created a whole new host of legal questions around the steadily outdated three tier separation model governing alcohol sales.

In addition, new companies and expanding interests have provided what amounts to an entirely new focus on what it is to 'get a drink'. Not just beer, but craft cocktails and custom liqueurs are in vogue as consumers demand more than just alcohol in their drink: They want an experience.

So what better niche for someone with a law degree who has been working in the craft beer industry for a few years and has watched the explosive growth continue to catch steam?

Brew Laws is certainly about the business of craft beer, helping businesses who deal with the rapidly expanding and constantly changing legal standards governing the practice, but it's also about the brewing of busines idea, the brewing of creativity in industry, and the brewing of change. This blog and its underlying legal practice will focus on managing a restaurant, brewery, distillary, tap house, or distributorship but will also focus on the more general process of navigating regulation, understanding small business risk assessment, and translating ideas into practice business realities.

Test Start Two

This is a test post just to see exactly how things will look once I get this bad boy up & running. Ideally, I want to see three columns, which you'd think would be cake but... ah who knows, I'm a novice at this.