Trafalgar Ales & Meads recently redid their entire lineup as braggots, which is how I think they're getting around it.
Selling mead/wine in Ontario
- Thread starter Chevette Girl
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You hit the nail on the head. First thing anyone wanting to open up a brewery or winery or distillery needs to do is get a lawyer to navigate the reams of paperwork it generates. Not to mention the labyrinth of laws and regulations. Doing it on your own would probably take the wind right out of your sales.
Sent from my TARDIS at the restaurant at the end of the universe while eating Phil.
I'm pretty sure to the LCBO, anything without hops is wine, thus a braggot with a hop leaf in it, is "beer" to them. Which may be a more desirable selling category than wine, as I am unsure of their regulations.
All I know is that microbreweries are on street corners and in malls and all kinds of convenient little places, wineries HAVE to be on farmland where the fruit is grown and meaderies HAVE to be in the building where your 100 hives' worth of honey is processed and in the case of wine or mead, it must be sold onsite, can't be made back at the farm and sold someplace else (except LCBO).
The breweries are having a lot of "fun" when they try to add fruit to a beer though, because like the definition of beer, once you put hops and grain in it, it's a beer, once you put fruit in it, it's a wine, so they've had some interesting hoops to jump through when they want to add fruit to a beer recipe. And I think there's still a regulation on the books that you can't make beer and wine in the same building unless they're walled off from each other.
I need to win the lottery and get some dang laws changed...
The breweries are having a lot of "fun" when they try to add fruit to a beer though, because like the definition of beer, once you put hops and grain in it, it's a beer, once you put fruit in it, it's a wine, so they've had some interesting hoops to jump through when they want to add fruit to a beer recipe. And I think there's still a regulation on the books that you can't make beer and wine in the same building unless they're walled off from each other.
I need to win the lottery and get some dang laws changed...
The province is making some noise about doing "something" with the wine regs so they can be comfortable selling it in grocery stores like the announcement they made for beer. I'm going to keep an eye out to see if they're looking for public feedback in that process...
Please let me know if you hear anything, I generally live under a rock when it comes to what's going on out there...
