Under Texas law, a pub can brew its own beer and sell it on premises but cannot sell it to a convenience store, restaurant or another pub. Beer drinkers who like that particular beer must go to the source to get it. Needless to say, this is bad for the brewers, bad for the convenience stores, restaurants and other bars, and bad for beer drinkers.
As Lee Nichols explains, it's been that way for a long time in Texas. Texas requires strict separation between producers, distributors and retailers. You'd think an archly conservative Legislature would be eager to dispatch an anachronistic, anti-competitive, anti-small busines, anti-consumer choice law like this one. But, alas, that is not true. Lee reports that a bill to allow brewpubs to sell their brews off premises lingered and died in committee, killed by opposition from wholesalers. Wholeselling is big business that has been sheltered from competition from alternative business models for many years.
One lesson here is that Texas legislators have pedestrian tastes in beer. Another is that conservative does not equal "pro market." The third is that we should tenaciously oppose proposals to create new barriers to competition unless there are other compelling reasons to do so; they are very hard to dismantle once they have an entrenched, dependent constituency.
(Updated to explicitly cite, rather than just link, Lee Nichols' blog post.)
