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If you can’t raise the dead, might as well raise a glass to them!
An Ohio funeral-home owner says he wants to be “a party planner for the dead” — by opening the state’s first bereavement center with booze.
Evergreen Funeral Cremation and Reception in Columbus hopes to soon have a liquor license to allow his patrons to mix mourning with merriment.
“My role in this position is to kind of be a party planner for the dead,” Hunter Triplett, the owner of Evergreen Funeral Cremation and Reception in Columbus, told WSYX.
“Be more of a celebration of life than more of the multi-day traditional services.”
As his family was applying for the liquor license, Triplett said inspectors told them Evergreen would be the first funeral home in the state allowed to serve alcohol.
“We will only be serving alcohol when people are on this premises and remain on the premises until the continuation of the services just for the safety of the people in the community around,” said Triplett, whose family bought the property in 2015.
A funeral home bar would not only allow mourners to send off their loved ones in a spirit of festivity, Triplett thinks, but would help them save possibly thousands by rolling the whole funeral experience — wake, service, burial, reception — into one package.
Located in an old chocolate factory building since 2015, Evergreen has sprawling facilities and is located directly across the street from a cemetery.
“It’s kind of like a one-stop shop for funeral service. The package being around $5,000-$6,000, contrary to the national average, which can be upwards of $10,000.”
If approved for a D3 license, Evergreen would be permitted to sell beer, wine and hard liquor for consumption on-site.
Though some states ban the service of food or drinks at funeral homes — including New Jersey, North Dakota, Massachusetts, and Connecticut — alcohol at funeral homes has been on the rise in recent years.
“People used the phrase over and over again that the funeral homes were like a ‘dark lifeless tomb’ with a certain smell to them and certain look to them,” said Scott Mueller of Mueller Memorial in White Bear Lake, Minnesota.
“People said, ‘When we go, we want to have a party atmosphere. More of a celebration.’ So we decided to put a bar in,” he told NBC News in 2017. “People used to say, ‘I can’t believe you used to keep the hearses in here,’ or say, ‘I think I can smell something.”
And at Monahan Funeral Home in Providence, Rhode Island, the owners’ converted their old attached garage into a fully functioning pub — which mourners often pour into once they finish the funeral service.
New York state revised its laws in 2016 to allow food and beverages to be served at funeral homes.
Evergreen hopes to have its license and begin serving in early 2025.
