New law is a treat for the taste buds

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© St. Petersburg Times,
published October 3, 2001

As far as business goes, Savino Sterlacci is a happy man. "Before I opened at 9 on Monday morning, a dozen people were lined up outside," he told me. By Monday afternoon he had sold out and taken a second delivery. Customers who had heard of his selection came from out of town. Tuesday went the same way.

Sterlacci owns the World of Beer on Gulf-To-Bay Boulevard in Clearwater. Until Monday, however, that was just a name. Until Monday, which was Oct. 1, he couldn't really sell the "world" of beer in Florida. He could only sell beer in certain sizes dictated by the state law -- to be exact, in containers of 8, 12, 16 or 32 ounces. That kept out hundreds of other foreign beers in metric sizes.

This was because of a law passed by the Legislature in 1965, at the behest of powerful beer interests trying to choke competition. Even as the decades passed and the market for imported beer grew, the industry used its power in Tallahassee to stifle change.

The arguments on the other side were silly. Beer distributors claimed if we had more sizes, customers would get "confused." We might accidentally drink more (the beer industry, advocate of temperance). Trucks and shelves would have to be rearranged. Chaos would result. And so forth.

It was nonsense, of course. Finally, a state senator named Tom Lee, a Republican from Brandon, made it his cause to repeal the law. This was not necessarily because Lee wanted people to drink beer, but because he actually believes in the "less government" rhetoric that politicians use in their campaigns.

So this is how a conservative Republican state senator becomes a hero in a beer store. His name was praised so warmly I was surprised they did not have his picture on the wall, like Francis Albert in many an Italian restaurant. "Tom Lee gets all the credit in the world," Sterlacci beamed.

We looked over some of the new beers on the shelf, and new sizes of old beers. Some of the new sizes, translated from the metric, will be seven, 11.2, 16.9, 22 or 25.4 ounces.

If you are a beer buff you know that the beers of Belgium are all the rage. Of 75 new labels to be available from one of his distributors, about 60 are from Belgium, including famous beers made by Trappist monks.

The beer market will be wild for a while. There is no guarantee your neighborhood supermarket will sell more labels. Existing brands will start showing up in new sizes to compete, maybe even squeezing their rivals off the shelf in some places.

Sterlacci, 46, is a high-energy guy. He has owned his store for 12 years, not to mention starting and selling other World of Beer stores in St. Petersburg and Tampa. As a young man he worked for a large brewery, and came to Florida to work for a distributor.

If you want to buy a Budweiser or a Miller Lite at the World of Beer, you can. They're in the 12th and final glass case, so you have to walk past many of his 400 other labels (which will swell to 700-plus by December).

"Sooner or later," he grins, "they're going to try one. That's all you want to do -- get them to try."

To its credit, public television station WEDU-Ch. 3, is resuming its weekly public affairs show Tampa Bay Week, a panel discussion of local and state issues. The debut of the retooled show will be 9 p.m. Friday.

WEDU put the show on hiatus in July as a cost-cutting measure, and creator and longtime host Syl Farrell moved on. The new host is Rob Lorei, news and public affairs director at community radio station WMNF.

The station will rely on a steering committee to seek a diversity of panelists and viewpoints. Another new twist is that viewers can interact with the show or address individual panelists via e-mail (tbw@wedu.org).

Because I criticized station officials for taking the show off the air, it seems fair to thank them for bringing it back, and to wish them good luck.

- You can reach Howard Troxler at (727) 893-8505 or at troxler@sptimes.com.

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