New Jersey lawmakers are poised to vote Monday to lift restrictions on Garden State breweries — like bans on selling food, and limits on the number of TVs they can have — just days before a moratorium on enforcing the rules would expire.
If the bill successfully passes both chambers of the legislature on Monday, it would then be sent to Gov. Phil Murphy’s desk in hopes that he signs it into law one day before the end of the current “lame duck” session of the Legislature.
“It seems that the stars are aligning in our favor for the first time in a long time,” Eric Orlando, director of the Brewers Guild of New Jersey said. He called the bill “a great start to the year” and said he’s very confident that it will make it to Murphy’s desk before the session ends.
Lawmakers unanimously passed a similar piece of legislation last summer, but the governor sent it back to them, saying he wouldn’t sign it unless they also incorporate liquor license reforms he’s been championing. For the past year, Murphy has been pushing to phase out New Jersey’s Prohibition-era caps on how many liquor licenses a town can award.
But Murphy stopped short of demanding a complete overhaul of New Jersey’s liquor license rules when he rejected the previous brewery bill with a conditional veto. Instead, he asked for more modest reforms, like a provision that gets inactive licenses back on the market.
State Sen. Vin Gopal, the prime sponsor of the bill, said the latest version of the bill addresses the issues Murphy raised with his conditional veto, and he’s cautiously optimistic that the governor will sign it if it passes.
The bill would do away with a limit on the number of special events breweries can hold on site, lifting a ban on selling food or partnering with vendors like food trucks at their facilities, remove limits on how many televisions a brewery can have and eliminate rules against showing certain major sporting and entertainment events.
“Just a lot of simple…
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