For the first time since Prohibition, liquor bottles are being sold outside of the state’s Alcoholic Beverage Control system.

A new law, in place for a month, is allowing craft distilleries to sell visitors a single bottle of their product. It’s a small but significant shift in how liquor is distributed in North Carolina, which has long maintained a tightly controlled system of state-run ABC stores.

The distillery sales are among several newly relaxed restrictions on alcohol sales in North Carolina. Beer and wine retailers can now sell alcoholic cider and wine in glass jugs called “growlers” that have become popular in recent years to take draft beer home.

Retailers and distillers both say the changes should result in stronger revenues for their businesses. Critics worry about what’s next.

Until last month, Broadslab Distillery near Benson had to send visitors to the nearest ABC store after an on-site tour. Because of that, the tours weren’t profitable for owner Jeremy Norris.

“By the time I paid the labor to get the venue open, we didn’t make any money,” Norris said. “All the people who participated in tours expected to buy a bottle. They were real confused when you told them you couldn’t sell it to them.”

Before you can get a souvenir bottle of Broadslab’s spiced rum or “Legacy Shine,” a white corn whiskey, Norris’ staff scans driver’s licenses into an app that ensures the buyer hasn’t bought a bottle within the past year.

While the tight controls mean that only a tiny percentage of liquor sales will occur outside the ABC system, the law change wasn’t without controversy.

The Christian Action League was among several conservative groups that lobbied against the bill, which was signed by Gov. Pat McCrory in June. It went into effect Oct. 1.

The league’s director, Rev. Mark Creech, worries that distillery sales could be the first step toward a privatized liquor sales system in North Carolina.

“I have described the bill as a crack in the windshield of our ABC control system,” Creech said. “Once you start allowing the sale of liquor outside our ABC stores by anybody, you will be hard-pressed to deny that right to others.”

Other goals

But Norris says the state’s growing number of craft distilleries likely wouldn’t back a privatization plan. That’s because the state’s centralized ABC system helps small businesses get their products in stores across North Carolina.

In states with private liquor stores, Norris said, “it’s a lot more work as far as getting widespread business, and the business gets a little more cutthroat.”

The N.C. Distillers’ Association has other legislative priorities it will be lobbying for, according to Scott Maitland of Top of the Hill Distillery in Chapel Hill.

“This is a good first start, there’s plenty of things that need to happen,” he said. Distilleries face far more complicated permits than wineries and breweries when offering tastings at festivals and events. They also want the ability to make cocktails in their tasting rooms and sell more than one bottle per customer per year.

Maitland says North Carolina lags behind other states in creating a friendly environment for craft distillers. More than 40 other states have been allowing distillery bottle sales for years.

“North Carolina has a strange relationship to liquor,” he said.

Despite the restrictive laws, new distilleries have been opening at a rapid pace. The state’s first opened in 2008 in Rockingham County, and when Maitland sold his first bottles at Top of the Hill in 2012, his distillery was the state’s fifth. Now there are 27, including seven in the Triangle.

“We’re seeing the same kind of beneficial impact in our urban and rural communities (from distilleries) as we’ve seen with breweries,” Maitland said. “We’re actually off to a much faster start on the distillery side, and we seem to be more geographically diverse.”

Maitland expects the new law will encourage more distilleries, and he said Top of the Hill is already adding more tours to keep up with demand.

“Suddenly the department of tourism and a host of other state agencies are now working with the Distillers’ Association,” he said. “We’re coming up with trails and doing all the agritourism that’s common for wineries and breweries.”

While distilleries ramp up bottle sales, wine and beer stores are now selling wine and hard cider in growler containers – an option for home consumption that had been confined to beer until Oct. 1.

Wine 101, which has locations in Wake Forest and Northwest Raleigh, has added wines on tap and fills one-liter growlers, which are larger than the standard bottle size.

Owner Joe O’Keefe says that quality wines are now being distributed in kegs, and refilling a glass growler can be less expensive for customers.

“The cost per ounce is significantly less,” he said. “They’re getting more wine for less money. It’s cheaper because there’s no glass, there’s no labels.”

Customers buy the growler for $6.99, then each fill-up runs between $20 and $29, depending on the wine. Without any advertising, O’Keefe says his customers have quickly taken to the new option.

“It tastes really good off the tap, it’s really fresh,” he said. “I bought 100 growlers a week and a half ago, and we have four left.”

The growler law change was pushed by the growing number of craft cider businesses in North Carolina. While cider is often served on tap next to beers, state law puts the “fermented fruit” in the same category as wine.

Bottle shops like The Glass Jug in South Durham can now fill growlers with cider as well as beer.

Glass Jug owner Chris Creech said customers have wanted cider on draft, but until October he only sold it in bottles. And since some small local cider producers like Bull City Ciderworks don’t offer bottles, it means more of their offerings will be available for home consumption.

Coming directly from a keg, “it’s going to maintain the carbonation and the freshness,” Creech said.

Like distilleries, the number of cider producers in North Carolina has grown rapidly.

“It’s riding the coattails of craft beer,” Creech said. “We’ve seen a big jump in the varieties of ciders available and the amount being produced, and also the demand for it.”

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Information from: The News Observer, http://www.newsobserver.com

SUGAR MOUNTAIN – Sugar Mountain Resort’s Summit Express Grand Opening and ribbon cutting ceremony took place Saturday November 14. The grand opening was for a $5 million high speed, detachable, six passenger chairlift from the base to the summit.

“Sugar Mountain Resort has been an icon in our state for years, attracting families from around this region and our country,” Governor Pat McCrory said. “This investment is a great sign for our economy and the confidence that businesses like Sugar Mountain Resort have in growing here.”

The nearly one mile long ride to Sugar Mountain’s 5,300 foot peak will take just five minutes with the new chairlift. It will carry 2,518 people per hour.

Sugar Mountain Resort is one of the many businesses benefiting from North Carolina’s thriving tourism industry. North Carolina is the sixth most visited state in the nation, and 50 million people from across the U.S. visited N.C. last year. In 2014, N.C. tourism generated record visitor spending with a total of $21.3 billion.

Across the South and Mid-Atlantic, more than $40 billion is generated annually from ocean-related tourism, recreation, and fishing. The seafood industry alone supports more than 244,000 jobs in the region, according to the National Marine Fisheries Service.

Yet right now, our massive coastal economy is threatened. For the first time since 1983, the federal government is considering opening up the East Coast to offshore oil and gas drilling. By announcing a leasing plan for oil drilling from Virginia to Georgia, the U.S. Department of the Interior is putting our pristine shoreline – and our coastal economy – at grave risk.

It’s no surprise, then, that communities along the Southeastern coast are rising up to oppose drilling off our beaches. More than 80 East Coast governments – many located in some of the most conservative congressional districts in the country – are demanding that the Interior Department permanently end offshore drilling.

But it’s not just coastal mayors, townspeople and city councilmembers who are voicing their opposition. From coast-to-coast and practically everywhere in between, businesses are speaking out, too, claiming that offshore drilling is bad for our environment and bad for our economy.

This month, more than 160 members of the national nonpartisan business group Environmental Entrepreneurs (E2) signed a letter to Congress calling upon the federal government to permanently end offshore drilling in the Atlantic and Arctic. The letter cites drilling’s threat to local economies, coastal environments and our climate.

The letter’s signatories are business leaders active in every sector of our nation’s economy, from tourism to tech to manufacturing. They hail from places like the Carolinas, Ohio, and Santa Barbara, Calif., which in May endured its own coastal oil spill when a pipeline burst near a popular state beach, not far from where one of the nation’s worst oil spills occurred 46 years ago. The most recent spill, while relatively small, led to roughly $100 million in clean-up costs.

Imagine the economic and environmental devastation wreaked by a much larger oil spill off of Wilmington or the Outer Banks. When the BP Deepwater Horizon blowout occurred off Louisiana in 2010, tourism-related economic activity along the entire Gulf Coast dried up overnight.

Along with the loss of 11 lives, the estimated loss of tourism dollars was expected to top $22 billion in the first three years following the BP spill. By 2020, more than 20,000 jobs are expected to disappear from the Gulf due to the blowout. And out at sea, as many as 5,000 marine mammals like dolphins and whales likely perished from BP’s spilled oil.

Shockingly, since the BP blowout, not a single law has been changed to make drilling any safer. This remained the case this summer even as Shell actively drilled in the remote, dangerous Arctic Ocean. (Fortunately, this fall the Obama administration canceled the remaining two years of leases in Arctic, granting a much-needed reprieve for a pristine ocean wilderness the oil industry has long hoped to exploit.)

If we truly want to expand our energy sector without putting our beaches and our precious tourism industry at risk, there’s a better way forward: Clean energy.

According to a recent study by the environmental advocacy group Oceana, North Carolina alone is a veritable Saudi Arabia of wind. Wind blowing untapped just off our Carolina coastline is capable of generating almost 32 gigawatts of electricity – the equivalent of 2.5 billion barrels of oil, much more than the amount of recoverable oil and gas under the sea floor.

All this wind would mean more jobs, building a new source of energy that’s off the horizon and out of sight. In the Atlantic, even modest development of clean, renewable offshore wind could create about 91,000 more jobs than offshore drilling, according to Oceana.

The study also found that a move toward offshore wind along the East Coast in the next two decades could produce 143 gigawatts of electricity — enough to supply 115 million homes.

We have a choice. We can gamble with the massive economic costs of an oil spill on our beaches, or we can benefit from the massive economic opportunities that come with developing offshore wind and other sources of clean, renewable energy.

For business leaders and choruses of communities across the country and up and down the Eastern Seaboard, the choice is clear: Clean, beautiful beaches free of oil – and clean, renewable energy from offshore wind.

Robbins is the owner of Cape Fear River Adventures in Wilmington, N.C.