Brewers look beyond rim

As head brewer at the Desert Edge Brewery, he would like to see Latter-day Stout or Happy Valley Hefeweizen on tap throughout the city, or at the very least, available at the brewery's sister restaurants.

Because of current Salt Lake City zoning laws, however, the beers that Chris Haas brews for The Pub at Trolley Square cannot leave the restaurant in anything larger than a half-gallon jug. For years, representatives of the brewery have urged the city to allow them to at least fill 15-gallon kegs at the microbrewery.

"We have a small facility, so we aren't looking to distribute all over the state," Haas said. "But we would like to sell it at our other restaurants," Cafe Martine and Red Butte Cafe.

To help boost the profitability for small Salt Lake brew pubs like Haas', the Salt Lake City Council on Tuesday will consider amendments to the zoning laws that would allow the microbreweries to package their beer for off-premise sale, either in bottles for grocery stores or kegs for restaurants and bars.

Other cities, such as Ogden, allow their downtown brew pubs to package the beer in kegs for off-premise sale. Nobody could be reached at the Salt Lake City Council office Monday to explain why the city currently prohibits it.

Among the four downtown brew pubs, Desert Edge and Marmot Mesa do not have any off-premise sales, while Red Rock does have some beer brewed by Uinta Brewing, and Squatters operates a brewery jointly with Park City-based Wasatch Beer. Haas said that even if all four breweries began filling kegs at their downtown brew pubs, he doubted that there would be much impact on either beer sales or delivery traffic.

"If someone really wanted to distribute on a larger scale, there's no small brewery that could do it," he said.

Not all of the City Council members are convinced that allowing expanded operations at the brew pubs would not have any impacts. Among the concerns are delivery trucks and the light industrial nature of the breweries.

"It would be like bringing a Coca-Cola plant downtown," Councilman Van Turner said. "It would be just too big."

Councilman Tom Rogan, who is sponsoring the amendment, said that the changes would help the breweries compete with other Utah-based breweries with very little negative impacts. The changes would not increase consumption, because the locally brewed beer would only replace specialty beers for elsewhere in the state or country, he said.