We greatly appreciate our readers over the past year and are pleased to share that we were once again recognized for our food and beverage thought leadership in the 2020 JD Supra Readers’ Choice Awards, which acknowledge top authors and firms for their thought leadership in key topics during all of last year. Through our various blogs and thought leadership pieces, we are dedicated to maintaining our position as a leading firm for alcohol and…

To meet the growing need for hand sanitizing products, various federal agencies including the Alcohol Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB), Federal Drug Administration (FDA), Health and Human Services (HHS) and Congress have been rapidly updating and providing guidance for alcohol manufacturers interested in producing or supplying alcohol for the production of these important products. The below neatly summarizes the key issues surrounding the production of alcohol for use in or production of hand sanitizers…

Importing and exporting beer or other alcohol beverages involves multiple levels of government regulation and taxation. Some regulations, taxes, and reporting requirements mirror your existing compliance obligations as a brewery. Other obligations are unique and include government agencies that are not involved in regulating domestic producers, such as US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and the Commerce Department.…

With the increasing pace of the spread of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) and the related emergent need to increase the available supply for hand sanitizer products across the United States, the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB), followed by the Federal Drug Administration (FDA), have relaxed requirements for certain alcohol producers to produce these products without first amending their existing permits or obtaining prior formula approval.…

In an important ruling dismissing a proposed class action, the US District Court for the Southern District of Florida ruled that the US Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA’s) generally recognized as safe (GRAS) regulation preempts a Florida statute that criminalized adding grains of paradise to liquor. More specifically, the Court in Marrache v. Bacardi USA, Inc., 2020 US Dist. LEXIS 13668 (January 28, 2020), ruled that the Florida statute was preempted because it conflicts with…

Last week, the Supreme Court of Mississippi handed down an opinion in Fitch v. Wine Express Inc., No. 2018-SA-01259-SCT. A state court decision on the rather dry subject of personal jurisdiction often merits little comment, but the Fitch opinion features an emphatic rejection of the legal theory relied upon by many direct-to-consumer retail alcohol sellers today. As a “control” state for wine sales, Mississippi law generally prohibits the importation, transportation and sale of alcoholic…