For a long time, I thought that Louisiana wasn’t too innovative. We put all of our eggs in the oil revenue basket (we’ve certainly been on the skids since the oil price per barrel has gone down). State universities have suffered severe blows with budget cuts.

But yours truly has been wrong before.

Yesterday I heard about what I consider to be a fantastic and truly innovative idea for raising revenues for a university. The University of Louisiana at Lafayette (UL Lafayette) has a licensing agreement with Bayou Teche Brewing that provides them with ongoing revenue from the sales of Ragin’ Cajuns Louisiana Ale.

All the legal requirements have been met, and the Collegiate Licensing Co., which is the official licensing organization for most colleges and universities, approved the deal for UL Lafayette. This means that this is the very first officially licensed college beer.

Uh, why can’t this be done by a brewery to help support the University of New Orleans? Everyone makes money: the brewery, the distributor and the university. I can’t think of anything better than a win-win-win.

UNO people, what are you waiting for (better hurry before the other beat you to it)? Local breweries?