For the past 30 years, ordering a cocktail in South Carolina has been similar to ordering a drink on a plane: The liquor is poured from the same 1.7-ounce minibottle.
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The bedrock conservatism that spawned the minibottle when the South Carolina state legalized liquor-by-the-drink in 1973 -- it was assumed smaller bottles better bridled a customer's alcohol intake..
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The logic is simple: As DUI laws have tightened, the standard shot size nationwide has shrunk to 1.25 ounces. So South Carolina bartenders now pour the nation's stiffest drinks, by nearly half an ounce.
That has prompted the South Carolina state's Baptist Convention to join a minibottle repeal coalition that includes the tourism industry, Mothers Against Drunk Drivers, a bipartisan majority in the General Assembly and many, if not most, bar and restaurant owners -- though they'll have to reconfigure their medicine cabinet-style liquor shelves to accommodate the fuller-figured booze containers.
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The minibottle law made sense to a lot of people when it was inaugurated. In the first place, the smaller-is-better theory mollified religious conservatives reluctant to support any liquor-by-the-drink legislation. Liquor supporters then pushed to enact the law as a constitutional amendment, making it harder for prohibitionists to return the state to its bring-your-own-bottle, "brown bagging" past.
Lots of bar owners like the minibottle. Inventory is a breeze -- one shot, one bottle -- and the help can't over-pour or hand out free drinks, unless they want to pay for them out of their own pockets. Everything's accounted for.
It's also tied to an easy-as-pie tax collection system, which generates about $20 million a year, funding alcohol and drug abuse programs. A single South Carolina government agent each month collects a 25-cent-per-bottle tax from the state's four wholesalers. One hundred percent compliance is virtually guaranteed, and bar owners never have to deal with it.
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This taxing method is the chief reason some legislators still oppose a minibottle repeal. They worry that with a free-pour setup, the state could too easily be duped.
It would get nothing, for instance, from an on-the-house round, or get tax from only one drink during two-for-one specials, causing revenues to sink. An economic impact study done at the University of South Carolina concluded that an added 5 percent sales tax on bar tabs would be revenue-neutral, but doubters are not convinced.
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Drink potency is one. New or out-of-state customers often are unaware of the mini-bottle's added pop; like those who crafted the original law, they assume the smaller container means a smaller shot. But two mini-bottles now equal nearly three standard drinks.
"Customers get drunker faster," said Teresa Smiley, bartender at Ironhead's Lounge in Murrell's Inlet, south of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. "You worry about sending them off driving."
The little bottles also can make for an expensive cocktail when more than one liquor is required. Each shot is a bottle, so a two-liquor drink, like a white Russian, can run $7 to $9. The same drink free-poured is about half that. Bartenders make sure to alert new customers of the situation.
"You have to tell them or they get the tab and think they're getting raked over the coals," said Frank Recker, bartender at Shamrock's, in Myrtle Beach.
Minibottles are hard on bartenders in other ways. Bartenders develop calluses along the thumb and forefinger from nights of twisting off metal caps. Some wear gloves. Smiley went to a back-pocket bottle opener after her hands turned bloody.
And for cocktail connoisseurs, there's little room for a bartender's personal touch. Some multi-liquor drinks, like a five-booze Long Island Iced Tea, come in a single pre-mixed bottle -- a concoction that John Antun, director of the National Restaurant Institute at the University of South Carolina, likens to "a frozen dinner."
"If there's an art and artifice involved in bartending, this takes all that away," Antun said. "It becomes much more formulaic."
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South Carolinians are proud of being unlike the rest of the country. This is a state where fireworks are legal and tattoo parlors are not.
