Crafting change

Photo by Brad Nettles

Jaime Tenny wasn't your usual lobbyist. She was a bio-diesel laboratory technician with two children. All she and her husband wanted to do was craft beers.

But there were two problems. Hoppy craft beers are "high gravity." They have a concentration of ingredients that often produces a beer with a higher alcohol content than the law allowed, a selection that includes one-third of the beer types brewed in the world. And a microbrewery couldn't sell directly to customers and couldn't bring in customers to taste samples. Tenny and her husband couldn't, in other words, have a retail business.

Tenny, 33, compares it to a pizzeria being limited in toppings and forced to distribute through a wholesaler. She and her brewer husband, David Merritt, were struggling to find enough money to open Coast Brewing Co.; the laws were two large hurdles in the way of making a go of it. She decided to lobby the state Legislature to get the laws changed.

"How hard can it be? I remember thinking that, how hard can it be?" she says with a rueful grin.

That was 2005. She took over a dormant Pop the Cap state campaign website created by a North Carolina group that had succeeded in changing the laws in that state. She began calling on movers and shakers. A year later, she watched a bill to allow higher alcohol brews die without action in the S.C. Legislature. And the slender biology major with hipster glasses had gotten an eyeful of the legislative process.

"I got a lot of, 'Oh, baby, honey,' " she said. "It was so bizarre."

She was amazed to find herself repeatedly driving to Columbia to lobby not with legislators, but with lobbyists, at meetings that occasionally were canceled when she got there. The S.C. Beer Wholesalers Association initially didn't support the changes; some wholesalers worried about potentially losing sales. Its official position was a concern that, unless restricted, the changes weren't socially responsible.

The association represented $1.6 billion annually in economic activity. If those businesses didn't support the bill, legislators weren't going to move it. When the bill died, an exhausted Tenny hit the wall.

"I thought, 'OK, well. This is not going to end well.' I was thinking we were at least five years away from anything being any different," she said.

Her husband talked about moving to North Carolina, where dozens of microbreweries were flourishing. But she didn't give up.

"She doesn't take no for an answer," Merritt said. "She's pretty good at arguing her case."

Tenny just smiles and says he tells her she's bossy. She went back for Round Two, using for leverage the tourism, economic and tax revenue advantages North Carolina was gaining with its emerging microbrewery industry.

"I understand alcohol is different. But we're not all unorderly. Some of us are responsible. People don't go out and down six-packs of craft beer," she said.

She and Merritt opened the brewery in March 2007 on a dare. Without the higher alcohol content law, they would be reduced to brewing only one or two beers -- a tough way to establish a niche market.

Pop the Cap became the S.C. Brewers Association. With the website and other association brewers, Tenny galvanized a massive campaign that had an estimated 4,000 people calling and e-mailing legislators, a huge number for a grass-roots group with no money, she said.

In May 2007, the high-gravity law passed. Tenny worked with the wholesaler's association to put "social responsibility" restrictions in place, and last June, the Legislature passed H3693, a microbrewery law allowing tasting tours and sales.

"She learned a lot, and she taught people a lot," said Julie Cox, the wholesaler's association executive director. "She spearheaded the efforts of the brewer's association. She did a super job on the grass-roots effort with local legislators to get the laws passed."

As little as it is, the change is groundbreaking, Tenny said. "With the buy-local movement, people want to see where their stuff comes from, see who made it."

The firsthand feedback from customers at the brewery's tastings is invaluable to the couple. And occasionally, she gets to hand a sample of a flavorful craft brew to a person who professes not to like beer and "see the light bulb go off," she said.

"We no longer have to blindly send our little babies (craft brews) off into the world," she said.

The microbrewery law tightly regulates how much beer can be served (four 4-ounce samples) during a tasting tour and how much can be bought, among other restrictions. Coast can't set up a bar and open up the brewery to bands like North Carolina microbreweries can. But the law is a start, she said.

Asked if she would go back to do it again, Tenny takes a deep breath. She has a different answer every day.

"Nobody should have to fight that hard just to make a product and sell it. I'm proud of where we're at. I think it's pretty cool that we got in on the ground floor of something people really enjoy," she said. "I'm taking this (legislative) session off."