Something far more mundane (or important depending on your personal views): The passage of free pour liquor laws!
Apparently, the Palmetto State is in the process of amending their Constitution to allow the free pouring of alcohol at bars and restaurants. A blurb in the Miami Hearld can be found here.
From my limited knowledge of their liquor laws:[ul][li]South Carolina is the last State in the Union to require business to serve alcohol in those mini bottles you see on airplanes and hotel service bars. Utah was the 49th State to have such a regulation, but they overturned their law back in 1990.[]The law was initially passed to put an end to old B.Y.O.B. policies that previously allowed patrons to bring their own booze into an establishment and leave the place shit-faced.[]Mini bottles have about 1.80 ounces of alcohol per serving – free pours are usually about 1.25 ounces.[]If you order a Kamikaze (or God forbid, a Long Island Ice Tea) in South Carolina, the bartender is required to use all the alcohol from each bottle that’s called for in the drink’s recipe. My guess is you all get served some insanely large drinks that are probably made in goblet sized glasses.[]The reason debate has begun to overturn their existing laws has to do with the fact people are leaving the bars and restaurants more drunk if they had the same number of drinks in a different State. [/li](I find it kind of ironic when one nanny-state law conflicts with another {i.e. the new 0.80bpa regulation} – but that just my opinion)[/ul]
Speaking of opinions, Any South Carolinians care to share theirs?
(At least one) Inquiring mind(s) from a slightly less restrictive part of the Country would like to know.
Yes, yes we do. I ordered a mudslide one night…cost me fourteen bucks. It was good and strong, though!
I don’t know - I guess I don’t really care one way or the other. We get really strong drinks here - no chance of someone being a little skimpy on the pour - but we pay for it. I think if you want to walk out of the bar less drunk, you should probably just drink less.
I asked for some opinions on min-bottles a while back. I still don’t get it, though. Not being a drunk, it doesn’t matter to me how they serve them. I know that bartenders have to keep track of how many bottles they have when they come on and get off. While it seems like a pain to keep track of a bunch of itty-bitty bottles, it also seems like a pain to try to measure how much is left in a bottle to determine “pour counts.”
I did hear a restaurant manager chatting with a customer a few weeks ago, and he said that it costs him about 10-20% more for alcohol to serve it in mini-bottles than free-pour. So while the “per drink” cost is more with a mini-bottle, it seems like the cost for alcohol content would end up being about the same. It also seems to me that if you’re a serious alkie, you’d want to be sure you’re getting a decently stiff drink, if that’s your inclination, and not leave it up to some potentially light-handed barkeep.
I was going to say, insanely expensive more than insanely large!
I didn’t know about the liquor laws when we moved there, and we were at House of Blues for a show and I watched the guy in front of me get a relatively small drink that cost him $11. I decided that I didn’t need to drink, and asked someone about it later and they told us about the airplane bottles. I always thought it was odd. One of the things I liked about going out in other places was the ability to tip the bartender and have them make you better drinks as a result.
Geez, I live ten minutes from the South Carolina border for six years and I never heard about this. Granted that I avoided the place as much as possible, and that I don’t drink much, but you’d think one of my college friends would have mentioned it.
Though I have to think Georgia’s no-alcohol-on-Sunday law is far stupider. The real alkies stock up Saturday. Or they pick up a bunch of real vanilla extract or something on Sunday if they don’t get the chance to stock up. That law isn’t stopping anybody who really wants to drink on a Sunday…
The NPR evening news had an interview tonight with some South Carolina legislator who may be the principal sponsor of the proposed state constitution amendment. Can you imagine a consumer protection item on booze enshrined in the state constitution–something as silly as mandating those preposterous little airlines bottles and requiring, as a matter of constitutional law, that the whole damned 1.8 oz go into a single drink. Now that might work for a Bourbon and branch but it makes for an outlandish Brandy Alexander. Apparently it makes for a very expensive one, too. The guy did admit that part of the original motive was to tax the bejesus out of the mini-bottles since the state wasn’t getting much money out of the brown bag system.
At any rate I listened to the story on the way home tonight and the guy, the SC legislator, kept talking about a “three-four” law and about “three-four” states. It made no sense at all, at all. I’m so happy to have read this post. Now I know it was all about a “free pour” law.