Raising the Bar (Bill)
The U.S. economy may be sputtering, but the current trend on the club scene features markups worthy of the dot-com boom.
By Sarah Preston
(page 3 of 3)
Drinking Duties
A big bite of the price of alcohol is excise taxes, or "sin taxes," as they're sometimes called when they apply to liquor. When retailers sell alcohol, part of the price is local, county, state, and federal taxes. Below we've listed the first three within the city, which are cumulative. (The federal liquor tax system is too byzantine to fit here.)
 | Tax per gallon of beer | |
| Chicago | $0.29 | |
| Cook County | $0.06 | |
| Illinois | $0.185 | |
 | Tax per gallon of liquor with less than 14% alcohol | |
| Chicago | $0.36 | |
| Cook County | $0.16 | |
| Illinois | $0.73 | |
 | Tax per gallon of liquor with 14% to 20% alcohol | |
| Chicago | $0.89 | |
| Cook County | $0.30 | |
| Illinois | $0.73 | |
 | Tax per gallon of liquor with more than 20% alcohol | |
| Chicago | $2.68 | |
| Cook County | $2.00 | |
| Illinois | $4.50 | |
Photography: (beer) Inhaus Creative/istockphoto.com, (wine) Plainview/istockphoto.com, (irish cream) Ivan & Monika/istockphoto.com, (whiskey) Floortje/istockphoto.com
This article appears in the January 2008 issue of Chicago Magazine.
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Reader Comments:
Isn't it a violation of Illinois liquor laws to serve (let patrons serve themselves) entire bottles of hard liquor?
Yeah, I think it's a violation of the Happy Hour law or something like that.
It is but people still do it... Go to any club and you'll see patrons pouring it themselves. It's impossible to monitor that. I'd bet every club that has bottle service is violating the law...