Defeat River Brewing in Reedsport to close next month. https://brewpublic.com/beer-news/de...yPICl1DBia3DIRej9xY7X4nYH8JeB2ytVK2Eollg7nZlw iI visited when i was down camping at Florence last 2 summers. Cool place.
So are we finally seeing that bursting bubble people have been speculating about for the last five years or so?
I think the answer is yes, but not because of what happened here. Based on the article it sounds like these guys attempted the romanticized idea of opening a brewpub in a small town and found out that the reason you don't see them as often is that they're really hard to make financially viable.
Fair. Honestly I didn't read the article specifically cited here, and my question was posed more in the face of an accumulation of notifications such as this as opposed to being in response to this particular closing. But, yeah, I've often pondered just how some of these small town spots manage to stay viable. Making it work in a food (or tangential) industry is hard enough, especially so when there's not a huge pool of potential customers to begin with.
Businesses come and go especially in the food and drink industry. It has nothing to do with craft beer being a fad. It's not. Craft beer is popular because it's better and people are willing to pay for quality. One factor of many may be rent hikes. My town has a town center as many do. Several businesses are closing up shop and leaving because - their reason given anyway - was their rent was raised. So sites remain empty. Seems like a bad business decision by the property owners but what do I know?
I agree that it seems crazy for landlords to continue to raising rents on seemingly successful businesses. We're seeing a lot of large properties empty out in Portland over the last few years, and they're hard to fill. Chains don't survive here, and almost no one else wants a massive Rock Bottom-sized space. Reading Portland's restaurant closings on Eater makes it look like the city is dying, but it's because you're only looking at one statistic. The openings far outpaced the closings. This article lists plenty of new breweries opening in Oregon, and I'm pretty sure Away Days opened this year too so there's even more than are on the list. We're seeing more closings, but we're still seeing openings. I do think we're going to see a lot more production-focused breweries close. The distribution market is too saturated, there's almost no way to stand out. Most of those breweries are sitting on a lot of debt from the investment to get that big, and they're not going to be able to pay it off.
I guess that is part of the reason. I of course only visited in the summer season. Another reason for this is also a big city problem. Leases going up. Ironically Defeat River were one of the original businesses that gentrified this once bleak and forlorn part of Reedsport.. Now i expect leases are going up.
