TTB COLA: Certificate of Label Approval

A label on a bottle of beer looks, to the casual drinker, like a piece of design. To the federal government, it is a regulated document, and before it can appear on a bottle that crosses a state line it must, in most cases, be approved in advance by an agency in Washington that almost no one outside the trade has ever heard of. The certificate that comes back is called a COLA, and the rules behind it are older, stranger, and more particular than anyone might reasonably expect.

What a COLA actually is

COLA stands for Certificate of Label Approval. It is issued by the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, known as TTB, which sits inside the Department of the Treasury and is the descendant, by way of several reorganizations, of the bureau that once enforced Prohibition. The certificate is the federal government's formal sign-off that a particular label, on a particular product, in a particular container, complies with federal labeling law before that product enters interstate commerce.

The legal foundation is the Federal Alcohol Administration Act, the post-Prohibition statute that, among other things, gave the federal government authority over the labeling and advertising of malt beverages, wine, and distilled spirits sold across state lines. The relevant definitions live in 27 USC § 211, where "malt beverage" is defined in a way that sweeps in beer, ale, porter, stout, and most things a brewer would call beer, provided they meet the statutory composition rules.

The labeling rules themselves are spread across three different parts of Title 27 of the Code of Federal Regulations, depending on the commodity. Beer and other malt beverages fall under 27 CFR Part 7. Wine falls under 27 CFR Part 4. Distilled spirits fall under 27 CFR Part 5. A separate part, 27 CFR Part 16, governs the alcoholic beverage health warning statement, which appears on every container of every regulated beverage at or above the statutory alcohol threshold and which is, technically, a separate body of law from the labeling regs even though the warning sits on the label.

A COLA is therefore not one approval but a bundle of compliance findings stitched together: the brand name does not mislead, the class and type designation is accurate, the alcohol content is stated in the form the regulation requires, the net contents are in the right units, the producer's name and address match a permitted premises, and the health warning is present in the correct typeface size for the container.

When a COLA is required, and the slightly absurd edge cases

The general rule, drawn from 27 CFR Part 7, is that a malt beverage label must have an approved COLA before the product is removed from the brewery or customs custody for sale in interstate or foreign commerce. The phrase "interstate commerce" is doing a great deal of work in that sentence.

A brewery that bottles a Saison and sells every bottle inside the state where it was brewed is, on a strict reading of the FAA Act, not engaged in interstate commerce and is therefore regulated primarily by the state alcohol authority rather than by federal labeling rules. Most states, however, have either adopted the federal labeling standards by reference or required a COLA anyway as a condition of state licensure, which means the practical answer for most American brewers is that a COLA is needed even for beer that never leaves home. The fully intrastate exemption exists, but it is narrower than it looks.

There is a separate question, which trips up new producers regularly, of whether the beverage is a "malt beverage" under federal law at all. The statutory definition in 27 USC § 211 requires fermentation from malted barley with hops, which means certain sorghum-based beers, certain gluten-removed products, and certain hard seltzers fermented from sugar rather than malt are regulated by TTB but under different rules, sometimes as wines, sometimes as beers for excise purposes but not for labeling, and occasionally as both depending on which provision is being applied. Brewers encountering this for the first time tend to find it bewildering, which is a fair response.

The federal excise framework, set out in 26 USC § 5051, is a separate matter from labeling, but it overlaps in awkward places, because a product's classification for tax purposes does not always match its classification for labeling purposes. A producer can owe beer excise tax on something that, for labeling, is treated as a wine. The agencies are aware of this and have worked through most of the practical questions in rulings, but the underlying statute was not designed with hard seltzer in mind.

What the label has to contain

The mandatory elements for a malt beverage label, condensed from 27 CFR Part 7, are the brand name, the class and type designation (the regulatory category, such as "ale" or "lager" or "malt beverage with natural flavors added"), the name and address of the bottler or importer, the net contents, and, when applicable, the alcohol content. Country of origin is required for imports. The Part 16 health warning is required on every container.

The class and type rules are the part that brewers find most intricate. A label that calls something a "porter" is making a regulatory claim that the product fits within the class of porter as understood by TTB, which in practice is interpreted with reference to commercial norms rather than to a single fixed recipe. Style guidelines published by the Brewers Association and the Beer Judge Certification Program inform the trade understanding of what porter or stout or India Pale Ale means, but those are private documents with no regulatory force. The TTB makes its own determinations.

Geographic and source-of-origin claims are more tightly controlled. Calling a beer a "Munich-style Helles" is generally fine because "style" disclaims literal origin. Calling it a "Munich Helles" without that softening word may invite a request for evidence that the beer was, in fact, brewed in Munich, or at least that the term has become generic enough not to mislead. The line between geographic descriptor and geographic indication is, on close inspection, a slightly absurd pile of definitions invented by humans, and TTB has spent decades drawing it case by case.

How the approval process works in practice

Applications are submitted through TTB's electronic system, COLAs Online. A complete submission includes a digital image of the label as it will appear on the container, the formula approval number where one is required, and the various administrative details about the producer's permit and the product's class and type.

Formula approval is a separate step that applies to beers containing ingredients beyond the traditional malt-hops-water-yeast set, or beers produced by processes the agency has not previously evaluated. A straightforward pale ale typically does not need a formula. A pale ale brewed with mango puree, vanilla beans, and lactose typically does, because each of those ingredients triggers a specific TTB review. The formula process and the COLA process are sequential: formula first, then label.

Processing times for COLAs vary, and TTB publishes current averages on its website. The published averages are, like all government processing-time averages, accurate on the day they were calculated and somewhat aspirational thereafter. Brewers planning a release calendar generally build in a buffer.

A COLA, once issued, is tied to the specific label image submitted. Minor changes — a new vintage date on a barrel-aged beer, a small artwork tweak — may fall within the agency's allowable revisions list, which permits certain modifications without a new application. Substantive changes to brand name, class and type, alcohol content, or net contents require a new COLA. The allowable revisions list is published by TTB and updated periodically, and the question of what counts as "minor" is, in the trade, a perennial source of polite disagreement with the agency.

How beer labeling differs from wine and spirits

The three commodity-specific parts — Part 4 for wine, Part 5 for distilled spirits, Part 7 for malt beverages — share an architecture but diverge in detail. Wine labels carry appellation rules and varietal-content thresholds that beer labels do not. Spirits labels carry standards-of-identity rules with extraordinarily granular definitions of what may be called bourbon, rye, gin, or vodka, definitions that the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States and the Scotch Whisky Association pay close attention to in their respective spheres. Beer labels are, by comparison, regulated more on the basis of avoiding consumer deception than on the basis of category orthodoxy, although the class and type framework is doing similar work.

International comparisons illustrate how unusual the American approach is. The Reinheitsgebot tradition overseen by the German Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture and championed by the Deutscher Brauer-Bund constrains what can be brewed, not merely what can be claimed on the label. The Authentic Trappist Product designation administered by the International Trappist Association is a private certification rather than a state regulation. HORAL, the High Council for Artisanal Lambic Beers, governs use of the Oude Geuze and Oude Kriek protected designations under EU law. The TTB COLA system, by contrast, is concerned with truthfulness and disclosure rather than with prescribing recipes, which is in keeping with the broader American regulatory preference for disclosure over composition.

The advertising piece

Part 7 also governs advertising of malt beverages, which is a separate body of law from labeling but lives in the same regulatory neighborhood and is enforced by the same agency. The Beer Institute publishes an Advertising and Marketing Code that members agree to follow voluntarily, addressing matters such as not depicting consumption by people who appear to be under the legal drinking age. The voluntary code and the federal regulation overlap but are not identical, and a marketing campaign can comply with one and run afoul of the other.

What a COLA does not do

A COLA is a federal labeling approval. It is not a federal endorsement of the product's safety, efficacy, or quality. It does not confer trademark rights, which are obtained separately through the United States Patent and Trademark Office. It does not preempt state labeling requirements, which can be more stringent than federal rules and frequently are. It does not certify that the beer is, in any meaningful sense, good.

It is, in the end, a piece of paper that says the label tells the truth about the beer in the way the federal government has decided beer labels should tell the truth. Given the alternative of letting every state define its own rules from scratch, that is probably more useful than it sounds.

Further reading

• TTB, Beer (regulatory home page), https://www.ttb.gov/regulated-commodities/beverage-alcohol/beer
• Electronic Code of Federal Regulations, 27 CFR Part 7 — Labeling and Advertising of Malt Beverages, https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-27/chapter-I/subchapter-A/part-7
• Electronic Code of Federal Regulations, 27 CFR Part 16 — Alcoholic Beverage Health Warning Statement, https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-27/chapter-I/subchapter-A/part-16
• 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, Advertising and Marketing Responsibility, https://www.beerinstitute.org/responsibility/