California public health officials have released updated reopening guidelines, allowing breweries, wineries and distilleries to operate without serving meals.
The new rules apply regardless of a county’s pandemic-safety tier.
Breweries, wineries and distilleries have been allowed to operate under restaurant guidance since last year, provided that they provide meals with alcoholic beverages. Alcohol vendors that did not provide meals, either from their own kitchens or a partnered vendor such as a food truck, had to remain closed in the purple and red tiers.
Starting Saturday, that will change.
According to the California Department of Public Health (CDPH), breweries, wineries and distilleries in red and purple tier counties will be allowed to serve alcohol to customers outdoors, provided that those customers have reservations and do not stay for more than 90 minutes. On-site consumption without a meal must also end by 8pm.
In the orange tier, the affected businesses may also resume indoor operations at 25 percent capacity or 100 people, whichever is fewer. Yellow tier restrictions increase those caps to 50 percent and 200 people, according to the CDPH.
Drinking establishments that do not serve meals in purple and red tier counties must remain closed while bars in orange tier counties will be allowed to operate outdoors with modifications and those in yellow tier counties will be allowed to operate indoors at 25 percent capacity or 100 people, whichever is fewer.
State officials also announced that, beginning June 1, overnight sleepaway camps can resume with restrictions in red, orange and yellow tier counties.
Click here for more information on the state tiers and guidelines.
Reservations? For Jack’s Bar? Can only stay 90 minutes, despite being outside? These COVID decrees are pure authoritarian nonsense.
The risk of catching COVID outdoors is negligible, and it has nothing to do with whether you are eating while drinking, while watching a sporting event that typically goes on longer than 90 minutes.
And masks don’t work, because if they did the governor would not be belatedly suggesting you need two (and he would actually be wearing one while at the French Laundry).
When are we going to see journalists asking common sense questions instead of simply parroting the BS diktats from banana republic despots?
There is ZERO science to support a distinction between selling food with beer or wine or not when it comes to the likelihood of transmitting Covid1984. In fact, the vast majority of the ever-changing rules do not have any basis in science. I can imagine all these bureaucrats sitting in their cubicles every day laughing at how they make business owners and everyday folks dance to their tune like so many marionettes. Give bureaucrats a little power in the name of a pandemic and BOOM, they become little tin pot despots.
Great questions.