Re: CHAT: Alcohol : was [conculture] Digest Number 360

>From: Adrian Morgan <morg0072@...>
>Thomas R. Wier wrote:
>
> > But they don't make exceptions for selling the stuff.
> > Some of the blue laws here in Texas are really arcane:
> > on Sundays, in Travis County, you can only buy beverages
> > below a certain alcohol content (beer and below)
> > basically, past a particular time in the day (1 PM, I
> > think).  But it varies; there are still lots of East
> > Texas counties that're dry, so I hear.
East Texas is all a mess.  I live in Angelina County, which is a dry county,
which is surprising since although Baptist/Pentecostal culture is dominant,
Lufkin (the county seat, where I live) is a working-class town where the
Democrats are dominant, though the GOP is gaining ground among "suburban"
Lufkinites.  (What do you call a suburb of a town of 30,000?)

North of us, you have the Angelina River, and past that, Nacogdoches County
and lotsa liquor, beer and wine stores.  At least one of them is a
drive-thru (see quoted paragraph below).  Making Nacogdoches a "wet" county
was a concession, a result of the influx of young adults mostly from Houston
and Dallas when Stephen F. Austin State University became a full four-year
college (it was a small teacher's college before).  And individual towns,
even in wet counties, can ban alcohol sales at stores.

Texas, as a whole, has some confusing alcohol laws.  All I know is that
sales are illegal between midnight and 7 am, except Sunday where sales are
legal at noon.  The licensing of restaurants, clubs etc., as well as
membership requirements, are a pain in the neck, and a lot of places won't
even sell alcohol since (at least I've thought) the expense and the red tape
involved with licensing.  And you got the TABC (or the TKGB as I like to
call them).

Spirits above some proof I have no idea which cannot be sold after 9 pm any
day.

>I don't know the precise laws in Australia on that point,
>but one of the legal/cultural differences that really
>stood out to me when I was in Britain in January was to
>see alcohol available in the supermarkets. No alcohol is
>available in Australian supermarkets; not even beer.
Oh in America it's the best place to buy beer and wine; the prices are best
in supermarkets.  You outta see the lines at 11:45 pm in Nacogdoches; it's a
mad rush to get the beer sold by midnight.

>Also, I hadn't realised that the idea of a drive-in
>bottle shop was so particular to Australia. A bottle shop
>is, of course, what many countries call an off-license.
>Most Australian bottle shops are drive-in, meaning that
>you can drive your car right inside the shop to save
>lugging heavy crates around.
>
>Many of the people I discussed this with in Britain
>were shocked at the very thought!
We've had drive-thru beer places since the 80s; forgot what year we got
those at "the river" (for Lufkinites, that's the Angelina River in
Nacogdoches County, or the Neches River in Trinity County, the other
neighboring "wet county".

Angelina County doesn't look like it wants to go wet any time soon.

DaW.
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