There’s a fight brewing down at the 2016 General Assembly, and one of Virginia’s oldest liquor laws is at stake.
There’s a fight brewing down at the 2016 General Assembly, and one of Virginia’s oldest liquor laws is at stake.
Local restaurant owners and advocates have banded together in the hopes of changing the state’s “ratio law” from 45% to 25%. What does this mean? Currently a restaurant needs to make at least 45% of their income from food sales in order to have a mixed beverage (liquor) license.
Read more about the proposed bill here!
If that ratio bumps down to 25%, it would reduce the burden on struggling bars that aim for more of a late-night crowd. IS that a good thing? That’s up to you to decide – and if you have an opinion on the issue you should head down to the House Room C today two hours after adjournment and let legislators know.
Either way, here’s a brief history of VA’s booze laws via Kevin Clay and his ‘Fix the Mix’ blog which aims to change the current ratio requirement:
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Virginia legalized liquor by the drink only in 1968, and in a state full of moralistic fears, a liquor license came with lots of bizarre strings attached. It’s not 1968 anymore, though our mixed beverage license laws might lead you to think it is.
1968: General Assembly Approves Liquor-by-the-Drink
(top image) Looks like a fun bunch, right?
It had been a long 52 years since a Virginian restaurant had last legally sold a liquor drink, in 1916. But after much squabbling, the Virginia General Assembly finally approved an act that provided for counties, cities, and towns to hold voter referendums on allowing mixed beverage sales. Within a matter of weeks, 42 localities had eagerly applied to put the question on their upcoming ballots, and the vast majority of the measures were successful. The first legal drink was served on October 17, on a Chesapeake & Ohio Railway train bound for Charlottesville as it passed through Bath County, the first locality to approve liquor-by-the-drink, and the rest was history.
The 1968 Mixed Beverage Act, though, was no simple, cut-and-dry piece of legislation. The fears of church-affiliated pressure groups, warning Virginia would be overrun with seedy houses of ill-repute were liquor to be authorized, pushed the drafters into including a vast number of compromises and conditions attached to the sale of mixed beverages.
Per this act, those that were lucky enough to get mixed beverage licenses could not:
1 – Serve from a bar. Mixed drinks could only be ordered or served to people seated at a table.
Allow “immoral, indecent, or profane language.” Licensees were not permitted to serve liquor to foul-mouths.
2 – Have fewer than 50 seats at tables. Small restaurants were considered unworthy of selling liquor.
3 – Have investors. The act specifically required that licensees not “allow any person to receive a percentage of the income of the licensed business or have any beneficial interest in such business.”
4 – Hire certain kinds of people. “No licensee … shall knowingly employ in the licensed business any person who has the general reputation as a prostitute, homosexual, panderer, gambler, habitual law violator, person of ill repute, user of or peddler of narcotics or person who drinks to excess or any “B-Girl”
Most of these silly provisions were quietly stricken over the years, but one stubbornly remained: the ratio.
“[W]hich license may be granted only to persons operating a restaurant […] whose gross receipts from the sale of full meals cooked, prepared and served on the premises […] shall exceed its gross receipts from the sale of alcoholic beverages and mixed beverages”
While not giving an exact percentage, the law said, in line with the other provisions that sought to severely restrict the number of places authorized to sell liquor, that if you made more money from alcohol than from food, then you were not qualified to sell alcohol, implying a 51% ratio. The original measure included every alcohol in this definition – beer, wine, and spirits – so if a restaurant sold $5,001 in beer plus wine plus liquor in a year but $4,999 in food, it would be in violation and face a revocation of its license.
That’s how it stood basically until …
1980: 51% becomes 45%, Beer and Wine stop being “alcohol”
