Alberta's tax on beer geeks

I've written a lot about the ridiculous Ontario liquor laws and wrote my last post on Molson and Labatt trying to raise the Quebec price floor on beer for their own profit. These aren't the only provinces where regular people are inconvenienced by the government and big business.

The Alberta government announced a ban on high alcohol beers (greater than 11.9% alcohol by volume) in early December. The whole logic of this ban was absurd. The general idea was to stop kids from buying the really high alcohol beer to get drunk off of. Even if you agreed with this logic, every single beer over 11.9% alcohol was considerably more expensive per unit of alcohol than pretty much everything on the market other than expensive wine and high end spirits. Taken from a thread on BeerAdvocate.com, here is the list of beers above 11.9% abv available in Alberta:

De Struise Black Albert
Dogfish Head Palo Santo Marron
He'Brew Jewbelation 13
Malheur Brut Noire
Mikkeller Big Worst
Mikkeller Black (Islay Edition)
Mikkeller Black Hole
Samichlaus

My guess is if you aren't a beer geek (like me), you wouldn't have a clue what any of those beers were. However, I would guess the average price in Alberta would be over $10/bottle for these beers. This works out to much more expensive than alternatives to get drunk. Plus, none of these beers are the flavourless lagers that teenagers would be used to drinking. (As an aside, Samichlaus got banned by the Ontario government for the label being appealing to children because the picture looks too much like Santa Claus)

The ban was originally started because of the Scottish brewery BrewDog was trying to get some of their "extreme" beers approved for sale. BrewDog is famous for pushing the boundaries and the buttons of regulators world round (for me to list the ways would be its own post), but all they did in Alberta is try to get beers approved with 41%, 32% and 18% alcohol. The stronger of these bottles would were estimated to sell for at least $85 in Alberta liquor stores. That's a standard 12 ounce bottle. For the same price, you can buy several 26 ounce bottles of whiskey or vodka, which are approximately the same alcohol. I've tried all 3 of these BrewDog beers (were not cheap to get into Ontario!), and I can safely say myself at 16 would not have been able to take more than a sip of any of them.

So after consultation and realizing this ban was pointless to actually protecting a single child from anything, the Alberta government unbanned these beers. However, they put huge new taxes on high alcohol beer.

Beers with alcohol content of 11.9 per cent to 16 per cent will see a $4.05-per-litre mark-up. Beers up to 22 per cent alcohol will see a $9.90-per-litre mark-up and beers up to 60 per cent alcohol will see a $13.30-per-litre mark-up.

So this is literally just a tax on beer geeks. The government doesn't want to admit they made a mistake in the first place by banning the products, so they saved face by adding a tax on them. As these things always go, once you have a commission to study it, of course they will have a solution involving more government. Ironically, given how high these taxes are, I don't even know if the government will get more revenue since it will just move demand beer geek demand to the beers slightly below the arbitrary line of 11.9% alcohol instead of just above the line (which most of these beers are).