The TTB Brewer's Notice

Before a single barrel of commercial beer leaves a facility in the United States, a document called a Brewer's Notice has to exist, on file, approved, in the records of a federal bureau most drinkers have never heard of. The bureau is the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, known as TTB, and the Brewer's Notice is the foundational permission slip that turns a building full of tanks into a legally operating brewery. It is, on close inspection, a slightly strange artifact — part tax registration, part facility blueprint, part biographical disclosure about everyone with a meaningful stake in the business.

What the Brewer's Notice actually is

The Brewer's Notice is the federal authorization required under 27 CFR Part 25, the regulatory home of beer in the United States, before any person may produce beer for commercial purposes. The framework sits inside Title 27 of the Code of Federal Regulations, which the eCFR publishes in full at the TTB Beer regulations page, and it descends from authority granted in the Internal Revenue Code — specifically 26 USC § 5051, which imposes the federal excise tax on beer. The Notice is the mechanism by which TTB knows who is brewing, where, and on what equipment, so that the tax under § 5051 can be assessed and collected.

A useful way to think about the document: it is not a license in the traditional sense, the way a driver's license is a license. It is a registration combined with a bond commitment combined with a sworn description of premises and personnel. Once approved, the brewery is said to be "qualified," and the operation may begin. Until approved, beer produced for sale would be, in the dry phrasing of the regulations, beer produced without authorization — which is to say, a serious problem.

The TTB itself describes the program at the top of its regulatory tree for beer, and the Cornell Legal Information Institute mirror of 27 CFR Part 25 provides the parallel regulatory text for anyone who finds the eCFR interface unfriendly.

Who has to file one

The short answer is: anyone who intends to produce beer for sale, regardless of size. The Brewers Association distinguishes craft brewers from larger producers using its Craft Brewer Definition, but TTB does not care about that distinction at the qualification stage. A nanobrewery making three barrels a week and a regional producer making three hundred thousand barrels a year file the same form, on the same regulatory basis, at the same federal agency.

There are a few edge cases worth naming directly. Homebrewers producing beer for personal or family use, not for sale, are exempt from the Brewer's Notice requirement under longstanding federal allowances — the homebrew exemption is one of the cleaner carve-outs in alcohol law. Brewpubs, contract brewers, and alternating proprietorships all fall within the Notice framework, but with variations in how the premises and personnel sections get described. A contract brewer producing beer at a host brewery, for example, files a Notice that describes the contractual relationship and the schedule of premises use; the host brewery has its own separate Notice. The arrangement is bureaucratically tidy if filed correctly and bureaucratically miserable if not.

What the Notice contains

The Brewer's Notice is filed through TTB's online Permits Online system, and the substance of it is essentially a portrait of the proposed brewery in regulatory form. The portrait includes:

Premises description. A diagram and written description of the building, including the brewing area, fermentation and conditioning space, packaging, and any tasting room or retail area. TTB needs to understand where taxable beer is produced, where it is stored before tax determination, and where the bonded space ends. The bonded premises is a real thing with real edges, and those edges need to appear on the diagram.

Equipment list. Brew kettles, fermenters, brite tanks, packaging lines, and measuring equipment. The point is not aesthetic; the point is that TTB needs to know the production capacity it is authorizing.

Ownership and personnel disclosure. Every individual with a meaningful ownership interest, every officer, every director — name, date of birth, Social Security number, address, employment history. The agency runs background checks. People with certain criminal histories can be disqualified from holding an interest in a brewery, and the Notice is where that gets surfaced.

Bond information. Historically, every brewery posted a Brewer's Bond, a financial instrument guaranteeing payment of the federal excise tax. The Protecting Americans from Tax Hikes (PATH) Act of 2015 amended the bond requirements, and many small brewers — those reasonably expected to owe under a specified annual excise tax threshold — became eligible for bond exemption. The current bond rules sit inside 27 CFR Part 25, and the specifics of who must post a bond and in what amount can shift; see the TTB Beer page for current details.

Source of funds and trade name registration. Where the money came from, what trade names will be used, what the labels will say in broad terms. (Specific label approvals are a separate process under 27 CFR Part 7, the labeling and advertising regulations for malt beverages, and under 27 CFR Part 16, which governs the alcoholic beverage health warning statement.)

The relationship to other federal and state authorizations

A Brewer's Notice is necessary but not sufficient. Three other authorization layers tend to operate in parallel:

The Federal Alcohol Administration Act, defined at 27 USC § 211, establishes a separate Basic Permit regime for producers, importers, and wholesalers of alcoholic beverages. For brewers, the Basic Permit and the Brewer's Notice are administered together; the Notice itself functions as the qualifying document for federal beer operations, while wholesale and importing activities trigger additional Basic Permit considerations.

State alcohol beverage control agencies issue their own manufacturing licenses, and these are entirely separate from federal qualification. A Brewer's Notice approved by TTB does not authorize a single sale within any state. Each state has its own application, its own bond or surety arrangement, its own posting requirements, and its own waiting periods. The Brewers Association maintains state-by-state craft beer statistics that hint at the diversity of state frameworks, though the legal specifics live in state codes.

Local zoning, building, and health authorizations form a third layer, and they often turn out to be the slowest. TTB approval does not override a city's determination that a building is not zoned for manufacturing.

Timeline, in the unhurried sense

TTB does not publish a guaranteed processing time, and Brewers Association best-practices guidance has historically suggested that applicants budget several months from filing to approval. The actual time depends on completeness of the application, complexity of the ownership structure, responsiveness to TTB requests for clarification, and the agency's workload. Applications with unclear funding sources, foreign ownership components, or unusual contractual arrangements tend to take longer. Straightforward filings tend to take less. There is no expedited pathway in the conventional sense.

A small observation, made without judgment: the time required to qualify a brewery federally is one of the reasons brewery business plans tend to look optimistic in their first draft and chastened in their third.

Amendments — the document that keeps living

The Brewer's Notice is not filed once and forgotten. Almost any material change to the brewery requires an amendment: adding a fermenter, expanding the bonded premises, changing ownership percentages, adding an officer, changing the trade name, adding a contract brewing arrangement, moving the loading dock. Amendments are filed through Permits Online and approved on roughly the same regulatory basis as the original Notice.

The practical consequence is that an established brewery accumulates a small archive of Notice amendments over its lifetime, each one a snapshot of a moment when something changed. A brewery that has not filed any amendments in five years has either been remarkably static or is, in regulatory terms, somewhat behind.

The international comparison, briefly

The American framework is one of several. Germany's brewing regulation operates under the Reinheitsgebot tradition with oversight from the Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture (BMEL), and the Deutscher Brauer-Bund represents the industry side. The Brewers of Europe coordinates continental policy across EU member states, where excise and qualification regimes vary by country. The United Kingdom's framework runs through HMRC's small brewer's relief and producer registration scheme, with industry coordination through the British Beer and Pub Association. Belgium has the additional layer of HORAL for traditional lambic producers and the International Trappist Association for the Authentic Trappist Product designation. None of these foreign frameworks involves anything quite like the TTB Brewer's Notice as a single combined registration-and-bond document; the American instrument is, in that sense, distinctive.

For producers operating across categories, parallel regulatory homes exist for distilled spirits at 27 CFR Part 5 and for wine at 27 CFR Part 4, each with its own qualification process. A brewery adding a distillery does not amend its Brewer's Notice; it qualifies the distilled spirits operation separately under the spirits regime that TTB administers at its distilled spirits regulatory home.

What the Notice does not do

A Brewer's Notice does not approve recipes, does not approve labels, does not approve advertising, does not authorize specific sales, and does not constitute a tax return. Label approvals run separately through TTB's Certificate of Label Approval (COLA) process under 27 CFR Part 7. Advertising compliance — including the health warning statement under 27 CFR Part 16 and the voluntary advertising standards published by the Beer Institute under its Responsibility program — runs separately again. Tax returns and operations reports are filed on their own schedules, monthly or quarterly depending on the brewery's tax liability.

The Notice is, in the end, the threshold document. Crossing it puts a producer inside the federal beer regulatory system. Everything else — labels, taxes, reports, amendments, eventual surrender of the Notice if the brewery closes — happens within that system, on top of the foundation the Notice provides.

A note on getting the details right

Anyone using this page as a starting point should treat it as a map, not a manual. The regulatory text at 27 CFR Part 25 is the operative authority, and TTB's own beer page is the operative source for current forms, current bond thresholds, and current procedural guidance. The Brewers Association best-practices library and Brewers Publications catalog include practitioner-oriented material that translates the regulations into operating reality. Where a specific number or rule matters, the federal source governs.

Further reading

• Electronic Code of Federal Regulations, 27 CFR Part 25 — Beer — https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-27/chapter-I/subchapter-B/part-25
• Cornell Legal Information Institute, 26 USC § 5051 — Imposition and rate of tax on beer — https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/5051
• Cornell Legal Information Institute, 27 USC § 211 — FAA Act Definitions — https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/27/211
• Brewers Association, Best Practices Library — https://www.brewersassociation.org/best-practices/
• Beer Institute, Brewers Almanac and policy briefs — https://www.beerinstitute.org/