Well, as you might have heard on the news, many functions of the United States government have been shut down since 1 October 2025. The TTB’s label review functions are included in this shutdown, so there are no new label approvals for me to sort through for October.
What does this mean for brands? Well, if they didn’t submit a label approval request and receive approval before 1 October, they’re on hold until the government reopens. This is a nightmare for brands (especially for beer brands, where their product has a shorter shelf life than distilled spirits). If you already have a new product ready to go, you can’t put it out on the market until the TTB is open again and can approve the label. But what can you do in the meantime? Do you go ahead and buy a run of labels and hope that the TTB approves them once they’re open again? You’re taking a chance that they might not approve your label and then you might have to re-label everything.
For the record, there were actually a couple of rum TTB filings for October, but they were all approval expiration notices that were automatically generated. None of them were for brands that I’d include in the report.
Let’s hope that the December report is more interesting!
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