Contact your house district representatives.

[Frank]

Letter I have sent to Paul Davis. Please copy, paste, add, and subtract to your tastes. Thank you.

Dear Representative Davis:

I am writing to ask you to support House Bill 2223 as it is currently written. This bill is truly a grassroots effort started right here in Lawrence, and I am writing to ask you to reevaluate some of the opposition testimony given during the bill's introduction.

The purpose of this bill is ease restrictions currently in place on the acceptable use of “home fermented beverages”; homemade beers, wines, or hard ciders. This bill will allow home brewers to share the efforts of their hobby with friends and family outside of their home in much the same why a guest brings a bottle of wine to a dinner or six pack of beer to a Jayhawk basketball watch party. It will also allow tastings for competitions providing invaluable feed back to the home brewer from world renowned experts in the art of craft brewing. Finally it will also allow event organizers more flexibility in providing quality craft beer that is such high demand. This year the Kansas Craft Brewers Exposition, held in downtown Lawrence, sold out 700 tickets in around 20 minutes. This bill will allow events such as this to include home brewing demonstrations and tastings. This could lead to increased sales at local small businesses such as JWL Craft Brewing here in Lawrence that sells home brewing supplies.

As an avid home brewer myself I think that this is an important bill. It will benefit the community at large by allowing us to share our favorite hobby without of fear of breaking the law. The owner of Free State Brewery, the brewer at Barnyard Brewery in The Pool Room, and the assistant brewer at 23rd Street Brewery all started as home brewers that now make significant impacts to the outstanding culture of Lawrence, KS.

The Kansas Department of Revenue Alcoholic Beverage Control has protested the portion of the bill that would allow home fermented beverages and demonstrations at special events, such as the craft brewers expo, citing that the admission fee would constitute a sale of non-taxed alcohol and potential safety concerns. Under the current law special event or festival organizers are allowed to import into Kansas fermented beverages for these events. The imported beverages are non-taxed and only allowed to be given away as free samples at the event. The organizer must declare the quantity imported and this would constitute an extension of the organizer's Kansas liquor license. For example last year's expo featured Nebraska Brewing Company from Omaha which has never had a license to distribute in Kansas. The current law allowed Free State Brewery to extend their license for the special event as they are the primary organizer. So the admission fee was not declared a sale of Nebraska Brewing Company's non-taxed beer. As far as their argument on safety this is also mute per the same instructions on importing said non-taxed beer. If Nebraska Brewing Company gets people sick there is no recourse the state has against them because they are not licensed in Kansas. What they can do is level a fine against Free State's license. I feel that if a Kansas brewery is willing to put their livelihood on the line they should have the option to choose an in state home brewer that lives, works, and pays taxes in Kansas over an out of state brewery who contributes nothing (culture, taxes, tourism) to Kansas.

Thank you for your support.

Sincerely,



Frank Dillon

[Street Address Redacted]

Lawrence, KS 66044

February 11, 2013

[Ace]

Do you have an address that we can send this to?

[ParkerBrew]

Do you have an address that we can send this to?

Email seems to works for most representatives and senators. For anyone that has Paul Davis as their rep, this is his page. His email address is posted.

http://www.kslegislature.org/li/b2013_1 ... is_paul_1/

For those of us that don't live in Lawrence, here is the house roster with contact info:

http://www.kslegislature.org/li/b2013_1 ... se/roster/

The district lines were redrawn for this session. Download the Google Earth .KML file to find your district here:

http://redistricting.ks.gov/_Plans/district_court.html

[Frank]

I found it stupid hard to find my rep.

Find your district here:
http://www.arcgis.com/explorer/?open=2b ... 1.23327683

Contact your rep here:
http://kslegislature.org/li/b2013_14/ch ... se/roster/

[ParkerBrew]

I agree. Kansas makes it very hard to find your rep.