Two weeks ago, the results of the new alcopops tax came in. The attempts at revenue raising fell miserably short of the estimated 38 million dollar windfall. The Government raised a mere $9000.

This was of course, the state government of California and not in Australia. From Evan Halper in the LA Times:

Beverage makers admit they aren't paying the new taxes. They say they don't have to because they have reformulated the drinks -- more than 6,000 varieties -- to transform them into simple beers by limiting the amount of distilled spirits they contain.

They won't explain how. The formulas, they say, are trade secrets. And beverage-industry officials and federal regulators say there are no tests to determine how much distilled spirits the drinks contain.

Australia is not the first state to attempt to selectively tax a drink because it targets people with an indiscriminate preference for downing pints of alcoholic corn syrup, and nor is it the first state to fail at doing so. I'm still not sure whether there is any comfort in that or not. Binge drinking progresses unaffected.

The uninviting option for governments is to redefine what counts as beer so that industrial breweries can no longer seek out ways to apply brewing creativity to excise law. It is difficult to define what exactly makes up an alcopop.

Defining alcopops by the process used to make them does not to work because they can share the process with any other alcoholic beverage: wine, beer or hard liquor. To make your average alcopop, all which is required is alcohol, sugar and flavouring; and each of these elements can be sourced from anywhere and mixed by any means available. Once you ban the use of distilled spirits in mixers, manufacturers switch to wine or beer, heavily processed to remove their flavour, as happened in the US.

This leaves the option of accounting for taste. The obvious target would be defining alcopops by their cloying sweetness which would have the unfortunate effect of capturing sweet dessert wines, unfairly punishing botrytis aficionados as well as a selection of well-meaning but regrettable niche beers. Probably the most delightfully perverse way to define an alcopop would be by their lurid colour and packaging but perversity alone does not provide a strong argument for taxation. I can foresee a strange future where alcopops mimic the yellow through dark brown spectrum of beer but taste like bubblegum mixed with fairy floss.

Alternately, defining alcopops as within a certain alcohol range and not containing anything bitter also captures the bulk of bland, mass market lagers. The other end of the bitter spectrum has already been caught in a beer-induced moral panic. Last week the Independent in the UK took umbrage at heavily-hopped ales (which they label "extreme beer") for their blend of bitterness and relatively high alcohol content attracting young drinkers.

Is it possible to legislate on flavour?