Sell Whiskey On the Internet and Spend Six Months in County
Source: http://chuckcowdery.blogspot.com/
October 6, 2017
Whisky Advocate Magazine devoted most of its Fall 2017 issue to whiskey collecting and whiskey collectors. It is hard to collect seriously if you can only obtain whiskey through retail channels. In virtually all forms of collecting, most acquisitions come from the secondary market, either directly from other collectors, or indirectly through dealers.
But there is a problem. While secondary sale of beverage alcohol is permitted in much of the world, in the United States, with a few small exceptions, it is not. Both state and federal law prohibit the sale of any alcoholic beverage to any person unless you have the appropriate license or licenses. Penalties vary by state. In California it is a misdemeanor, punishable by a $1,000 fine and/or up to six months in county jail.
The exceptions are few. One is auctions, which only a few states allow. The owner of a collection can consign it to the auction house for sale. The auction house has a license from the state that allows it to auction the bottles, paying the proceeds to the collector, less the auction house’s fee. Are those sales taxed? I’m not sure, but it’s hard to imagine they’re not.
Another is states that allow retail license holders to buy ‘vintage spirits’ from collectors for resale either by the drink or by the bottle. ‘Vintage’ is usually defined as a product that has not been available on the retail market for some span of years. The District of Columbia allows this. Kentucky recently passed a law to allow it but it won’t take effect until January 1.
That’s about it. Peer to peer sales are all illegal.
The other side of the coin is that these laws are rarely enforced against collectors. They are really aimed at bootleggers and unlicensed bars. That doesn’t mean it can’t happen. The laws are on the books.
The legality of buying from an unlicensed seller is less clear, but most people who buy also sell. It doesn’t matter if you only trade and no money changes hands. It is the same thing.
Some people will be mad at me for writing this. They always are. Do they think I wrote those laws? Or that the people who are supposed to enforce them wouldn’t know about them if I would just stop mentioning it? At the very least, if you sell alcohol without a license, you might want to ask the Google machine what the penalty is in your state.