Senate Bill 56 is set to go into full effect on Friday, banning intoxicating hemp products and ending the emerging market for several Cincinnati breweries creating hemp-derived THC-infused drinks.
After state legislation takes effect, these breweries will be forced to destroy their Ohio-based products, ending their run in an emerging market.
“So that’s a huge problem for our business,” said Scott Hand, co-founder of Urban Artifact, a brewery in Cincinnati’s Northside neighborhood.
In 2024, Urban Artifact released Coastalo, a line of fruit-flavored hemp sodas.
In recent years, other Cincinnati craft breweries have made the business decision to pivot to making THC beverages after beer sales declined. The endeavor had been paying off.
A 2025 Gallup poll found that only 54% of U.S. adults reported drinking alcohol, one of the lowest rates in nearly a century. The San Francisco Chronicle reported 50% of adults aged 18 to 35 report drinking, down from 72% in the early 2000s.
“We certainly weren’t getting rich off of it,” Hand said of his Coastalo THC beverage. “But we thought it was a good alternative because craft beer hasn’t been exploding like it used to be.”
Prominent Tri-State-based craft brewery Fifty West released Sunflower, its take on the beverage category, in 2024. The product sold more than an estimated 30,000 cases in 2025.
Photo By Noah Jones | CityBeat
“We are on pace to sell more THC beverages than we are beer,” Fifty West Brewing Co. founder Bobby Slattery said. “That puts it into perspective.”
On Thursday at 9 p.m., Slattery is fully prepared to pull THC beverages from his locations. But he currently has a massive inventory of the product that he’s not willing to lose.
“We’re going to comply with the laws that are set forth in the state of Ohio,” said Slattery. “For right now we have to consolidate all of our product and ship it into other states where it is legal.”
How did we get here?
On December 31, 2025, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine signed SB 56 into law, which bans these types of drinks from being sold, among other things. At midnight on March 20, the 90-day grace period will end, banning all intoxicating hemp products within the state of Ohio.
Dan Tierney, deputy director of media relations at the office of Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, said the governor believes intoxicating hemp drinks arose from loopholes in state and federal hemp laws that voters never approved. Eliminating them is necessary to honor Issue 2’s tightly regulated dispensary system while addressing safety concerns about high‑dose THC products being sold like alcohol, he added.
“In 2019 science and technology did not allow for hemp to create any intoxicating product,” Tierney said. “A little bit after Issue 2 passed [in November 2023, allowing for recreational cannabis consumption in Ohio], science allowed for taking large amounts of hemp and synthesizing it into what they call Delta-9 or other THC products that could intoxicate you.”
Still, not everyone is convinced the state has clearly defined the problem it’s trying to solve, including Rhinegeist Brewery CEO Adam Bankovich.
“I would honestly love to first hear very clearly stated what the specific issue they have with these drinks is because I feel like that has not been clear and has changed significantly over the course of time,” Bankovich said. “I don’t believe there’s enough clarity there at all.”
Rhinegeist created its hemp-infused Fuzzy Bones, a beverage that took two years of taste-testing, experimentation and hard work. The company was planning on launching the product on Oct. 8, 2025, the same day DeWine signed his executive order initially banning the beverage category.
“It was a gut punch,” Bankovich said. “We had really high hopes for what Fuzzy Bones would do, not just for sales within Ohio.”
Rhinegeist sells beer in a total of nine states. In 2026, the company had planned to break into new markets, using Fuzzy Bones as the lead product in addition to its craft beer.
When DeWine banned all intoxicating-hemp products, Bankovich said he felt it was unexpected, but understood and agreed with his concern about the lack of regulation. Eventually, he and Slattery worked together to help create regulatory rules.
“It should be age-gated,” Bankovich said. “We need to treat this industry responsibly. And from my perspective, I didn’t see anyone disagreeing with that. It should be regulated safely.”
He added that craft brewers are uniquely positioned to meet the consumer demand in the intoxicating hemp industry.
“We have a stable of industry experts that are capable of producing this new category of beverage in a very safe, responsible way, and conforming and operating within any regulation that is written state by state, which is how alcohol works,” Bankovich said. “And so that’s where SB 56 came into play. Bobby and I and many others worked with the General Assembly of Ohio, who wrote SB 56 in a way that I thought was very smart, very responsive, and a lot of the concerns that pre-existed. Unfortunately, all of those provisions were line-item vetoed.”
This line item would’ve allowed a low-potency substance with a 5-milligram cap on beverages and would’ve required them to be sold at places with an appropriate license, with age-gating (21 and up) and eventual taxation to generate tax revenue for the state, according to Bankovich.
Dewine line-item vetoed more than 50 items, including the one Ohio brewers had helped write, Tierney added.
There is still hope for the product
Doug Moormann, a lobbyist for Rhinegeist advocating for the removal of the THC-beverage ban for Fuzzy Bones, said there were three ways Ohioans have been trying to hold onto these beverages.
The first is a ballot referendum. To make the ballot, 250,000 signatures must be collected across 44 counties.
Moormann said he was not involved with this attempt to regulate a hemp marketplace. But he does expect signatures to be turned in to the secretary of state by Thursday. Then, a 10-day cure period could be set for the secretary’s office to verify signatures. If the signatures are accepted, the referendum will be placed on the ballot, and Ohioans will be able to decide the product’s future.
Another option is getting buy-in from the Ohio General Assembly.
But Moormann said this has not gone as well as he’d hoped.
“There has been some discussion about the legislature overriding the governor’s veto,” he said. “But we’ve not been able to detect a great support in the general assembly for overriding the governor’s veto, so we’ve really not seen any progress on that front.”
The final option is a lawsuit, submitted by Ashbrook Byrne Kresge Flowers LLC, a Cincinnati firm representing Fifty West, Urban Artifact, Cycling Frog and Sarene Craft Beer Distributors. The lawsuit challenges DeWine’s veto. The Ohio Supreme Court could hand down a decision later this week. This could impact the upcoming March 20 deadline.
“I’m not expecting anything to change,” said Hand. “I don’t have super high hopes on either of them (the lawsuit and the referendum) at the moment, but the more likely candidate is the lawsuit.”
Hand that he has not yet entertained the idea of creating a new hemp soda manufacturing site in another state for Urban Artifact.
“It’s not an impossibility, but it’s not a business move that we’re investigating,” Hand said. “We’ve got the facility here … so it doesn’t make sense to duplicate all of those efforts for another product line that is still going to be in legal jeopardy for the foreseeable future.”
Hand is referencing U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell’s November 2025 move, where he added a provision to the spending bill that ended the government shutdown, effectively prohibiting most intoxicating hemp-derived THC products nationally beginning in November 2026.
Regardless of what happens on the state and federal levels. The whole debacle is causing long-lasting financial issues for breweries like Urban Artifact.
“I don’t want to go into the details on that, but I will say that we’ve had to make difficult decisions running up to this week,” Hand said. “That has not been fun.”
As the brewers begin dealing with the idea that this emerging market has come to a close, the bottom line is that they need a new way to bring in non-alcoholic drinkers to their tap houses.
“Even though we see a decline in alcohol consumption currently, it doesn’t mean that it’s gone away entirely,” Bankovich said. “So what we’re having to do is just pivot to figure out what other white space exists where we can focus our attention, but the reality is, there’s certainly no immediate plug for that hole in our plan because there’s no other emerging category — the size and growth rate appetite by the consumer. It’s truly unique, the level of interest and how fervent the consumer is for these products. It really does solve a unique occasion that I don’t believe anything else on the market solves.”
Alcohol was prohibited in the 1920s in the United States, driven by religious, moral and health concerns. It aimed to improve societal moral purity, reduce poverty and crime and protect families. The prohibition lasted about 13 years.
Bankovich said he sees some parallels with what is happening right now with THC beverages.
“It feels like some elected officials are trying to make us go through prohibition again for these beverages,” Bankovich said. “We’re not learning from the failures of the past … we have this opportunity to embrace an emerging category for a consumer that clearly has a demand for this type of product, and we should be able to just work together and put smart laws in place.”