Kentucky's distillers are lobbying state lawmakers to open up the market for pre-made cocktails.

It was a plea they made before a legislative panel in Frankfort today.

Our June Leffler has more in tonight's legislative update.

Kentucky's alcohol producers want to get more of their products in more stores.

That includes ready to drink or RTD products.

Think of a cocktail in a can.

You know, the canned old fashioned in a in things like a jack and Coke and things like that are very popular and stuff that our members want to produce and believe that they ought to be.

There ought to be parity so that it can be sold alongside the same level of alcohol by volume as a malt based RTD is.

Grocery stores and gas stations can sell beer, but not spirit based drinks.

Even though the alcohol content may be the same, a retail lobbyist says stores want to sell these mixed drinks and wine.

Who is excluded exclusively here?

That's your grocery and your convenience stores.

Grocery and convenience stores have been able to sell unlimited ABV of malt since Prohibition.

Lawmakers could change those rules.

You know, any time we get in the middle of these things.

There's their definitive winners and losers.

Mom and pop liquor stores that sell every kind of alcohol don't want to change.

I'll get into Kentucky's retail package system.

It works.

What we've been doing, it may be different, but it's working in.

We are meeting consumer demand.

Regulating alcohol impacts.

How much money all sorts of businesses and state government bring in.

Aside from the numbers, lawmakers are asking themselves what makes common sense and what's right for the consumer.

To say that somehow it's okay to have it in in pharmacies, we get medicine, but not okay to have it where you buy eggs and milk and bread.

It just never made a lot of sense to me.

So so, you know, I'm all in favor of eliminating that delineation.

In cities and everything.

I don't buy it up here.

Do you have to climb through tunnels or ladders like it's Donkey Kong to get it to get into a stores or some sort of.

Is there some sort of difficulty where where we need to address this ability to access the front door of a liquor store?

An outgoing state senator.

Questions of his colleagues will take up this issue in the next session.

You know, of the 36 or so reasons, I'm not coming back here in January.

One of them is another alcohol fight because and pardon the pun, but that's what's brewing.

I'm not going to be here.

I'll probably be in someplace a lot warmer than it will be here in January.

But I just want to warn you that I'm not sure this committee or this General Assembly is ready for another big alcohol fight.

Last session, the General Assembly outlawed stores and individuals from buying and reselling some of the state's rarest Bourbons.

For Kentucky Edition, I'm June Leffler.

Thank you, June.

The Kentucky Distillers Association spent more than $43,000 lobbying in the last legislative session.

The Kentucky Retail Federation, which represents grocers, gas stations and other businesses, spent $64,000.

That's according to reporting fr