Derek Larmett, owner of Tony's Drive In Package Store in Harwinton, said he also has to explain to people who live outside of Connecticut and the rest of New England exactly what a "package store" is.

"Especially when you go down into Florida or out west, they have no idea, like, 'Wow, what's a package store?'" he said, adding that growing up in Connecticut, he always knew a package store was a place where you bought liquor. "That's what I've always known it to be."

When asked where he believes the term "package store" comes from, Larmett said he thought it's because "everything when it leaves the store, it's in a bag, a brown paper bag."

"We put everything in a package, hence the 'package store' name. But that goes back to the prohibition era," he said. "That's what I was always told."

Jean Cronin, executive director of the Connecticut Package Store Association, shared a similar story, though she admitted to needing to do more "research" on the question.

"I think it goes back to years ago, when prohibition first went away and they were starting up the stores and maybe it was the way that they were packaged or something," she said. "We've got to do more research ourselves into that. But, yes, Connecticut, historically has called them 'package stores' and refers to them in statute as 'package stores,' not 'liquor stores.'"

Even Will Siss, an author who has written about the history of alcohol in Connecticut — including the book "Connecticut Beer: A History of Nutmeg State Brewing" — had to look it up.

"I grew up in New Jersey, and we called it a 'liquor store.' We never called it a 'package store,'" he said. "When I moved here about 20 years ago, that was new to my lexicon and, oddly enough, I've been writing about beer for 18 years and I never thought to ask."

Businesses that sell liquor are referred to as "package stores" in Connecticut state law and on official forms. "I find it interesting that when you file an application, when you're looking to open a store, a package store, it it says it on the paperwork," Gomez said.

State law defines which types of businesses require "package store licenses" as those that "allow the retail sale of alcoholic liquor in sealed bottles or containers not to be consumed on the permit premises," though Siss noted that statutes differentiate between beer and wine, which can be sold outside of package stores, and liquor.

"It's always kind of been that way," he said. "If you look back at the history of breweries in the state, you're going to see that they were trying to separate themselves from from liquor, especially when prohibition was about to go down."

In fact, the term "package store" is not a uniquely Connecticut thing but, being the land of steady habits, the state has kept alive an antiquated term dating back nearly 200 years, with its roots in a series of federal court rulings.

Package stores did begin with a temperance movement, but not the prohibition of the 1920s. In the early 1800s, several states attempted to ban alcohol with statewide prohibitions. One such law, in Maryland, required businesses that imported and sold alcohol and other goods "by bale or package" to get a license from the state.

In 1827, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that law unconstitutional. Chief Justice John Marshall said it violated the Commerce Clause of the United States Constitution. He wrote in Brown v. Maryland that if a business imported wholesale goods between states, they had the right to sell them in their "original packaging."

Then, in 1890, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Leisy v. Hardin, confirming Marshall's opinion, that no state could restrict the importation of alcohol sold "in the original packages or kegs, unbroken and unopened, of such liquors manufactured in and brought from another state, unconstitutional and void as repugnant to the clause of the Constitution granting to Congress the power to regulate commerce."

Richard Hamm, in his book "Shaping the Eighteenth Amendment," wrote that "The U.S. Supreme Court's interpretation of the federal interstate commerce power shaped the course of the prohibition movement."

"Brewers," Hamm wrote, "turned to the federal commerce power to curtail the effects of state prohibition."

In every prohibition state, "original package stores" and "supreme court saloons" began to open. In both cases, alcohol was sold in its original packaging, following the letter of the court's ruling. "The Supreme Court's interstate commerce decisions created an 'original package business' that threatened all liquor controls and created a crisis in alcohol policy," Hamm wrote.

A letter to the New York Times in June 1890, explained that, "A bottle of rum, when corked, sealed and labeled, may be an original package for the time being, but when put into a case with other bottles and packed for transportation it is only a fractional part of an original package, which by the law may be imported into any state and sold."

Later that year, Congress passed the "Wilson Act," also known as the "Original Packages Act," which rendered all those original package stores illegal. The high court upheld the law, and original package stores began to close en masse.

Thirty years later, only two states did not agree to ratifying the 18th amendment to the Constitution, which created Prohibition: Connecticut and Rhode Island.

The term "package store" somehow survived Prohibition in Connecticut, other parts of New England and the Carolinas, but Siss said that may be for a different reason.

"After Prohibition, the concept of selling liquor in the original package was put into law to prevent retailers from getting full spirits and then repackaging or watering them down," Siss said. "It has nothing to do with brown paper bags, which I thought in my mind was why we call them 'package stores.'"

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.