Me and a buddy of mine are thinking about picking up a towable food cart and maybe using it to make some side money. I'm curious, as I have a recipe for nuggets/onion ring beer batter. My question is, does anyone know if it would be legal for le to use homebrew for this batter if we were to do this as a small business making food?
using homebrew to cook in a commercial setting?
- Thread starter Pugnax88
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When I ran a restaurant briefly, the local liqour board told me that cooking with alchoholic beverages wasn't considered the same as serving them.
In other words, I could cook with rum or vodka, etc. regardless of whether I had a liqour license. I think you should be ok, but I urge you to run this by the authorities. The tripping point might be that you could need to prepare the beer in a licensed, inspected kitchen. Maybe not, if it's just considered an ingredient.
Ask, you don't want to run afoul of those guys. You might be surprised at how reasonable and helpful they can be.
In other words, I could cook with rum or vodka, etc. regardless of whether I had a liqour license. I think you should be ok, but I urge you to run this by the authorities. The tripping point might be that you could need to prepare the beer in a licensed, inspected kitchen. Maybe not, if it's just considered an ingredient.
Ask, you don't want to run afoul of those guys. You might be surprised at how reasonable and helpful they can be.
But that might just trip you out for having to be a licence brewery to produce the beer that you are using in the food cart. I don't know what the law is like in the US but I wouldn't expect it to be clear cut.
Example from NZ - to just produce beer you need to comply with food manufacturing regulations (similar to if you were a bakery, etc.), but to actually sell beer you need to comply with a totally different set of regulations on the supply of alcohol, and then a third set for the taxes!
I would expect that if you are producing an ingredient that is used in a food that will be sold to the public that there are at least some hoops to jump through to produce it, hopefuly as you are not preparing the beer for sale as beer those hoops would be no more stringent that operating a comercial kitchen. Good luck!
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