Bill would increase tax on beer for breweries over 125,000 bbls/year.
A bill is making its way through the Oregon state House that would increase the tax on a 12 oz. beer from less than a penny to around 10 cents for most major breweries.
The proposed bill would raise a projected $60 million in state revenues that would be used for prevention, treatment and enforcement of drug and alcohol abuse. The tax would raise the tax on all companies that sell over 125,000 barrels of beer annually.
Currently the tax on beer in Oregon is one of the lowest in the nation, having not seen an increase since the 1970s. “It’d be a hefty increase, but there hasn’t been one for 30 years,” said Don Bishoff, the legislative assistant to Bill Morrisette, the bill’s other chief sponsor.
Hey Folks,
Just curious. We call it a “Privilege Tax” here in Oregon. What does your brewery pay to the state per barrel, per month? We currently pay $2.60 on what we sell during a certain month. This is reported the next month and the total due (bbl’s sold x $2.60) on or before the 20th.
I’m particularly interested in Colorado, and Missouri! Thanks
Drink more beer,
Ken Johnson
Kentucky has a discounted rate of $1.25/bbl. if you produce 15,000 bbl. or less. Rate doubles at 15,001 bbl.
There is also a 9% Wholesale Sales Tax paid by the distributor.
We pay 18.5 cents per gallon which works out to 5.735 bucks per barrel. I don’t know if there is an increase at a certain barrelage mark.
So, for now consider yourself lucky, but good luck keeping that tax down. It sounds like a huge increase.
Matt
In Tennessee, we pay the state $4.29 per barrel. There is also a 17% wholesale tax. I think that puts us at #4 on the highest taxes per state.
125,000 bbls is a big number… how many breweries would actually be affected? (I suppose I could just wait until I get home and look it up in the New Brewer…)
In California, land of taxes, we pay $0.20 per gallon (why they use gallons is beyond me) or that works out to $6.20/BBL.
Missouri charges us $1.86 per bbl, but we only brew about 2000 bbls a year. I would assume AB, Schlafly and Boulevard pay more, but i do not have those figures.
Jeff
Beer tax here in Japan is pretty ridiculous…
We pay 230 yen per liter, which is right about $2.00 per liter.
So, to put things in perspective…
A 12 oz beer is roughly 330 ml, so the tax on every beer we bottle is about .70 cents a bottle.
On a bbl basis, it’s roughly 27000 yen, or about $225!!
The real bear here is that the tax has to be paid by the producer, and usually in advance, on a quarterly basis. Our brewhouse is 15 bbls, so one batch is roughly $3375 dollars! We have to make projections on production pretty far out.
Now for the really amazing part, we’re taxed on the total volume of our fermenter, not what we bottle or keg off of it. This means we’re taxed even on yeast left in the cone for the next batch, as well as for spillage we’ll never sell! Say we want to dump a batch, a rep from the tax agency has to some and watch us destroy/dump it. My boss tells me when we first opened, one tax rep poured salt into a fermenter before we dumped a test batch we weren’t going to sell before giving us the tax credit back!
Consumer prices are of course raised to compensate, an average priced pint goes for 900 yen, or around $8.00 in Tokyo. We sell them for 600 yen at our restaurant.
In the UK small brewers (I can’t recall the cutoff point) are charged a function of a flat rate by volume by alcohol percent:
(6.63 * hl * %abv)
So a 10 hl batch of 4.2% abv would be about 278 GBP.
or
8.52 US barrels = 537 USD
or
63 USD / US barrel
Bigger brewers are double that and they are lobbying hard to take the tax break :rolleyes: away from the little guys…
Cheers,