By JOHN KOZIOL

Staff Writer

LACONIA — The state Liquor Commission on Wednesday approved three Bike Week beer tents in The Weirs.

And now, on a separate track, commission officials are waiting to see whether two businesses, the Naswa Resort on Weirs Boulevard and Manchester’s Uptown Tavern, will file applications for beer festival licenses for the June 7-15 rally.

The commission approved the extension-of-service requests of the Weirs Beach Lobster Pound, 70 Endicott St. North; Broken Spoke Saloon, 1072 Watson Road; and the Paradise Beach Club/Coral Reef Restaurant, 322 Lakeside Ave., said Aidan Moore, chief of the Liquor Commission’s Enforcement Bureau.

For the record, it had been previously reported in The Citizen that the NHSLC earlier this month had approved the Broken Spoke’s extension-of-service license for Bike Week when, in fact, the commission approved only an extension of beverage service to the upstairs portion of the saloon.

Both the Lobster Pound and Broken Spoke agreed to have no more than 1,000 patrons in their tents at one time, Moore added, and, according to the commission agenda for its Wednesday meeting, the Paradise has been issued a permit of assembly by the Laconia Fire Department for no more than 319 patrons in the outdoor patio area where beverage service will be extended.

As of Wednesday afternoon, Moore said the commission had not yet received an application from the Uptown Tavern to operate a beer festival tent at the Weirs Beach Drive-In during Bike Week. But he noted that he did anticipate receiving the Naswa’s application by the end of business Wednesday. The Naswa wants to have a beer festival tent on a parking lot it owns on the east side of Weirs Boulevard.

The commission on May 7 rejected the Naswa’s request for an extension of its liquor license to a beer tent on the parking lot because the area was not contiguous to the main inn which is on the west side of the road.

Moore said if the Uptown Tavern does submit an application for a beer tent festival license, that request will probably undergo a great deal of scrutiny by the commission since it will be breaking some new ground.

The chief explained that the beer festival license provisions in the Liquor Commission’s rules were intended to help promote specialty brews and were enacted during the height of the "micro-brewery" craze of the late 1990s to give state and regional brewers an opportunity to offer their products to a public that was frequently unaware of them.

What the Uptown Tavern was proposing, however, based on what its representatives told the NHSLC two weeks ago, said Moore, seemed to go counter to what the commission set as a goal in creating the beer festival license.

Representatives from the Uptown Tavern were not available for comment on Wednesday.

For starters, Moore said, the beer tent festival license was meant to be issued for one, three-day period, while the Uptown was seeking three consecutive, three-day licenses.

Depending on what kind of application the Uptown Tavern submits, he said, other issues the commission might have to tackle are the appropriateness of "a retailer in Manchester seeking a beer festival license in Laconia," and of allowing service at multiple locations.

Moore said the Uptown indicated that it was interested in serving beer both at the drive-in and across the street at the Weirs Beach Water Slide.

The two businesses are owned by the Baldi family, which did receive permission from the Laconia Motorcycle Technical Review Committee (MTRC) for a beer tent at the drive-in but did not seek approval for one at the water slide.

City Planner Dawn Emerson, who chairs the MTRC, said it was her understanding that the Liquor Commission could approve a beer festival tent only at a site that had been previously approved for a beer tent by the MTRC.

She added that the MTRC wrapped up its business for Bike Week 2003 on May 1 and that no new site plan requests would be considered.