Governor Lee,

Thank you for your leadership during this unprecedented time. As you know well and kindly mentioned during your Thursday briefing last week, Tennessee distillers have pivoted their business models to serve our state by making sanitizer. We are currently working through the state’s COVID-19 Unified Command group to ensure our sanitizer goes to the priority front lines. Small distilleries like Gate 11 Distillery in Chattanooga and large operations like Jack Daniels are actively making bulk sanitizer to service this great state in its time of peril. Over 20 distilleries are proudly meeting this demand. In order to continue this newly adopted business model, we need your help in this transition:

• We request no sales and use taxes be assessed on the sanitizer produced by a Tennessee distillery during the time Tennessee is under a state of emergency.
• We request clarity in our legal ability to deliver, ship, sell and donate sanitizer to those in need.
• For stabilizing our revenue, we request the ability to deliver bottles and jars of beverage alcohol from our distillery retail shop- a privilege granted to restaurants in your Executive Order 17. This is especially important for the smaller distilleries and will make a difference in their ability to survive.

These three requests are being made on behalf of the Tennessee Distillers Guild. For context, the Tennessee Distillers Guild consists of 32 Tennessee distilleries who enjoyed 6.6 million visitors last year. 54% of distilled spirits exported out of the U.S. were from Tennessee.

We are grateful for your leadership and are honored to serve our state’s needs during this pandemic. We stand ready to continue our efforts and would appreciate your help with these requests during such uncertain times.