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Here’s the latest newsletter from Free the Hops:

Let’s go ahead an quash one rumor right away – we are not done. Free the Hops has always, always been about more than the ABV bill. We never wanted to give the impression that we were about the ABV issue and nothing else.

The ABV bill was simply our first issue. Since we built the organization from start to now on that initial issue, many people don’t realize that there are plenty of other beer-related laws that need changing in Alabama. When first conceived, FTH identified two legislative issues that it wanted to address – the ABV issue and the container size restriction.

Since we’ve grown and become more familiar with the legal restrictions in Alabama, several other very important possibilities have emerged for our next push – mainly restrictions on breweries and brewpubs in Alabama.

Over the next few months, we will be gathering input from our members and industry to decide what legislation we will introduce in 2010.

We will be discussing this and other topics at our next quarterly statewide membership meeting on Saturday, July 18. The statewide meeting will be held in Huntsville and is open to members only. It will be held at Olde Towne Brewing Company, 3200 Leeman Ferry Road, Huntsville, AL 35801. The meeting starts at 4:00pm.

If you’re not a member, we will be having our traditional tasting after business. Everyone is welcome to the tasting.

There are some final things to tidy up this newsletter.

The brewfests both went well. For its first year, the Rocket City Brewfest exceeded expectations. Although there is room for improvement, most of the headaches were due to very last-second changes to the venue and layout due to bad weather a few days before the festival. Despite these setbacks, we did better than we anticipated in terms of the number of patrons and customer satisfaction.

The Magic City Brewfest sold out of advanced ticket sales for the first time this year. This was also the first festival featuring newly legal beer and the first place to find high gravity beer legally brewed in Alabama by Birmingham’s Good People Brewing Company.

Finally, I want to make sure everyone’s aware of the forums. We created a section in the forums called “Where’s the Beer” so that beer lovers around Alabama can find and share information about where to buy all the new beers available in Alabama. If you’ve found a gem that has a great selection of the new beers, let everyone know about it.

I hope to see everyone in Huntsville on the 18th.

Related posts:

1. The hops have been freed!
2. Free the Hops update
3. act now
4. redux
5. all hail Ninsaki*