For now in North Carolina, your best bet (and freshest bet) to fill a growler is to continue visiting your local craft brewery.
We reported in mid-June that North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory had signed House Bill 829 into law, making the selling and filling of growlers legal in restaurants, bars and bottle shops (among other places). We also advised those establishments that before rushing out, ordering a shipment of growlers and sending them out the door, the ABC Commission would have to first adopt a set of rules for dealing with growler sanitation. The deadline for those rules is still Jan. 1, 2014, but one Ashville growler shop was a little hasty in trying to open up his growler business.
According to Asheville Scene, the new Asheville Growler shop has pulled back the opening of its fill and sell take-home growler beer bottle business. Owner Sean McNeal made the decision to pull back after speaking with Robert A. Hamilton, the ABC’s deputy administrator.
“He told me in no uncertain terms that he would have me shut down if I open Monday,” McNeal said. He was also told that opening Asheville Growler now could also mean trouble for his separate laundromat and pub the Bar of Soap.
The ABC Commission was pretty specific back in June about waiting for sanitation laws to be approved. Agnes Stevens, the public affairs director for the N.C. ABC Commission, said a month ago that the commission would now start working on establishing both temporary and permanent rules for the sanitation of growlers, noting the creation of a permanent rule is a process that takes between six to eight months. So for now, North Carolina growler sales outside of breweries would have to be shelved till then.
