Weekend Report: strong beer edition
If you missed this Sunday's paper (how could you!), you missed this story, which follows up on the state raising the limit on the percentage of alcohol allowed in beer.
Commonly known as the "Pop the Cap" campaign, beer activists were successful in changing state law to allow malt beverages (beers and other alcoholic drinks that are brewed rather than fermented or distilled) to have 15 percent alcohol. The prior limit was 6 percent, which beer enthusiasts said excluded lots of styles of beers.
For extra fun:
- Check out this website hosted by the NC Alcoholic Beverage Control Commission, which lets you search for whether a certain brand or wine or beer has label approval in North Carolina. For more information on related topics, click here.
- To do my story, I needed to get at more data than was available on the web. The nice folks at the commission sent me this Microsoft Excel workbook that contains data on all the brews with more than 6 percent alcohol approved for sale in North Carolina since Aug. 4, when the cap was popped. Data includes name of the beverage, the brewery that makes it and alcohol by volume.
More to come on beer and state laws next weekend.