With around 3000 breweries now in America producing tens of thousands of beers, I bet you wonder how a bar could possibly choose what to put on their few taps. Of course, we all know some bars prefer the kind of corporate swill that their non-demanding customers can drink a lot of on the cheap. While other, more scrutinizing spots surely opt for local offerings and the absolute best craft beer they can possibly land. But what if I told you something more insidious is actually going on?

Last night while you were sleeping—or closing down a bar—Dann Paquette, co-founder and brewer for Pretty Things Beer & Ale Project out of Cambridge, Massachusetts, decided to blow the whistle on an illegal practice going on right before our very beer-soaked eyes. In a series of Tweets under the brewery's handle, Paquette revealed that Boston is a "pay to play town and we're often shut out for draft lines along with many beers you may love."

What's "pay to play"? It's when breweries bribe bars under the table to stock their beers and freeze out competition and is, according to the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau regulations, an illegal practice. Paquette even dared "name names," accusing some popular Massachusetts' joints such as Bukowski's Tavern and The Lower Depths of accepting this dirty money. Paquette further noted, "Ever heard the term 'committed lines'? This is what it means. Breweries buy draft lines so their lame beers aren't irrelevant." He didn't name any of these "lame" breweries though he hinted at one, saying "Right now one of the hottest newish brewers in MA pays for lines all over the place." (Of all his rant-y Tweets, though, this was the only one he eventually deleted, presumably to stop rampant internet beer geek speculation.)

I had long assumed this sort of stuff happened, but wasn't completely certain until this social media screed. Paquette revealed, "Since I've started as a brewer in 1992 it has been a given in Boston that beer lines were for sale." But, in fact, it's not just Massachusetts where this is a major issue. In 2010, a Crain's investigation found that a trendy Chicago hotel bar had been taking payouts and other bribes from a powerful MillerCoors distributor. Deb Carey of New Glarus Brewing went so far as to call the city of Chicago "a whores' market," noting, "Everyone has a hand out and everyone wants some cash, (free) beer or a discount."

You might not think this matters much and is just the cost of playing ball, but if you care about the quality of beer in your glass, the implications are massive. Even if they wanted to break the law or their own ethics, a brewery like Pretty Things couldn't afford to out-spend the big guys. Likewise, how can we blame a corner dive from accepting tens of thousands of dollars just to serve a particular lager that just so happens to be as "cold as the Rockies"? And, thus, your favorite bar is all of a sudden serving macro-swill as opposed to say, Pretty Thing's glorious English barleywine, Our Finest Regards.

Unfortunately, most states don't seem to want to waste the time or effort cracking down on these big beer scofflaws. So Paquette has determined it's up to him:

And now it's up to us. Demand that breweries don't participate in this practice. Demand that bars refuse to illegally line their pockets. Heck, just demand that brewers brew the best beers they possibly can and bars likewise stock the best beers they can possibly find.

Still, if the big breweries want to continue throwing money around to try and force us to drink their beer, there is one way that remains legal: they can keep buying those lame Super Bowl commercials.

Aaron Goldfarb Aaron Goldfarb lives in Brooklyn and is a novelist and the author of 'Hacking Whiskey.'

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