Two members of Congress, coming from different directions, just reached for the same answer on hemp beverages, and it looks an awful lot like the U.S. alcohol model. Manufacturer sells to distributor, distributor sells to retailer, retailer sells to the customer, nobody skips a step. They can't even agree on how to tax it. One bill reads like a jingle: 5 milligrams a serving, a nickel a milligram, 5% off the top. The other keeps the 5mg serving and trades the rest for a single flat rate. But both reach for the same three-tier bones, and when two independent bills do that within weeks of each other, it isn't coincidence, it's direction. A discussion draft is not a law, but the founders who read the direction early will build differently than the ones who don't. The sell-it-from-your-own-site, ship-it-straight-to-the-shelf model most brands run has a clock on it now. That's a hard question even for wider operators, Cannabev included, whose relationships already reach across all three tiers. It also quietly rewrites who owns the customer: when a brand can't sell direct, that relationship migrates to whoever owns the shelf, and more and more, that shelf is a digital one. So sit with this: if the wall between making, moving, and selling becomes law, which side of it is your brand built to live on?