Just wanted to point out one fallout from the government shutdown that hits close to home to brew lovers.
When a brewer wants to bring a new offering to market there is a process he/she must go through. The product/label must be approved. It is a federal department naturally that does this.
Typically it took them about 75 days to go through this approval process.
The federal agency in charge of this is running at bare bones capacity due to the shutdown. They are handling any requests that were already in house and going thru the process. But any new requests from brewers will sit and wait until the shutdown is over. And as you can imagine there will at that point be quite a backlog and that 75 day wait will be seen as the good old days.
As you can imagine this impacts your small craft breweries more than the big boys. There are small brewers who could be waiting months now for approval of products they were planning to offer for the holidays or the spring. Brewery launches are on hold costing the breweries thousands of dollars a month in some cases. And again for the small craft brewers that is real money.
Okay, I think I kept this rant non-partisan. But for those who love craft beers and the adventurous brewers who bring them to us this is especially galling.
Contact your representatives, time to get the government back up and running.