Legislation Brewing to Aid Restaurateur

State Sen. Wadie Deddeh is pushing legislation that would exempt San Diego restaurateur Paul Dobson from state Alcoholic Beverage Control laws so Dobson can open a small brewery and restaurant downtown.

Dobson, who owns Dobson’s and La Gran Tapa--two popular downtown eateries--says he wants to open a so-called “brewpub” in the Gaslamp Quarter, where he would brew a Bavarian-style lager and sell it for consumption in an adjacent pub and in bottles to go.

But Dobson cannot open the brewery under current state law because it prohibits holders of retail liquor licenses from also owning a company that manufactures alcoholic beverages.

Though there have been many exceptions made to the law since it was enacted shortly after the end of Prohibition, a state official familiar with the statute said Dobson’s request goes further than other such efforts.

The other exceptions, said Ken Byers, an attorney for the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control, generally allowed people who already owned liquor licenses to also make and sell beer or wine for consumption on the brewery premises.

Under Deddeh’s bill, as it was introduced, Dobson would be the first owner of a liquor license allowed to bottle and sell his own beer--to other restaurants, for example--without going through the beer distributors who normally act as middlemen between manufacturers and retailers, Byers said. That provision would violate the principle of keeping the different tiers of the alcoholic beverage system separate, which was the idea behind the original law, Byers said.

Though the bill was introduced for Dobson, it would apply to any San Diego County owner of not more than six liquor licenses who wanted to have part-ownership of a brewery that would produce no more than 60,000 barrels of beer a year.

“It’s a fairly far-out exception, I think,” Byers said of Dobson’s request. “It’s a little bit more than the ordinary.”

Bows to Objections

But Dobson said in an interview that he has already agreed to scale back the measure to satisfy the objections of the California beer wholesalers, a powerful lobby that is annually among the top contributors to state legislators’ campaign funds.

Under pressure from the industry, Dobson said, he has agreed to send any beer he bottles through a distributor, even if he will be using it in his own restaurants. Dobson said he has also agreed to lower his ownership share in the brewery restaurant from a planned 25% to no more than 10%.

Those changes, if they are put in the bill, will make Deddeh’s measure nearly identical to one approved a year ago on behalf of Wolfgang Puck, a prominent Los Angeles area chef and restaurateur who plans to open a brewery restaurant in West Los Angeles. Puck owns Spago in West Hollywood and Chinois on Main in Santa Monica, two in-spots for the city’s famous and hoping-to-be famous.

“He had the influence and the wherewithal to push his bill through,” Dobson said of Puck. “I don’t know how he did it.”

Representatives of the beer wholesalers did not return phone calls from The Times. Deddeh, a Chula Vista Democrat, said he was unfamiliar with the details of the bill and was prepared to accept whatever compromise might be reached when the measure gets its first public hearing before the Senate Governmental Organization Committee this spring, which oversees California’s alcoholic beverage industry.

Byers, the ABC lawyer, said the law that Dobson needs to get around was enacted to stop brewers from dominating the production, distribution and sale of beer in a way that would force others out of the business or coerce restaurants and stores into selling only one brand of beer.

“Prior to Prohibition, one of the problems that was really evident was that many of the larger breweries owned small pubs, where they pushed their products and created a lot of problems by tying up the field,” he said.

But Dobson said he suspects the law remains on the books today because the beer and wine industries don’t want competition from small breweries that would make and sell their own product.

“The distributors want to make sure the alcohol is going through their network, and the brewers don’t want a big part of their market taken up by small producers,” Dobson said.

Latino Twist

Dobson said that if he obtains the exemption, he will open a “micro-brewery,” as they are sometimes called, in the old Lawyers Building at 4th and E streets, across from the eastern entrance to Horton Plaza. Neither the restaurant nor the proposed beer has been named, Dobson said, but he indicated that the brew--despite its German influence--would be marketed with a Latino twist.

He said the only thing certain at this point is that the bottle will not carry his name.

“I’m going to try to sell it to other restaurants,” he said. “My competition wouldn’t be very happy about putting my name on a product they’re trying to sell.”