An Update from Cellador Ales (from their email): Our North Hills taproom closed about a week ago, so we're on to our next set-up. Here's what you can expect. Currently: We're fulfilling orders out of our Van Nuys warehouse on Tuesdays. We're sending out shipments on Tuesdays for Wednesday delivery. You can order shipping boxes and set up shipments in our online store, but additional beer will be temporarily unavailable. Very Soon: Beer and merchandise will be back up in the online store. We'll be announcing the details of the 2023 Syndicate Membership! Sign up for the waitlist below. Just a Little Further Down the Road: We'll be announcing our new taproom location! We'll be announcing the first events of 2023! TL;DR--THEY WILL BE AROUND IN 2023!!!
Alex sent this out today: Just before our announcement that our North Hills location would be closing at the end of 2022, Kevin made the difficult decision to transition out of ownership. Kevin and Sara offered me the opportunity to steward Cellador Ales forward as the new owner and, after four or so years with the company and the Cellador community, I knew it would be the right decision for me to accept. I am enormously excited about what the future holds and I can't wait to get some new beers into your hands. We'll be continuing to produce many old favorites, and it'll be great to finally get some new projects and experiments fermenting away in barrels again. There's already a lot of fun stuff in the works. I want to take a moment to acknowledge all of the work that both Kevin and Sara put into making Cellador Ales into what it is today. They both poured their hearts and souls into building Cellador Ales from the ground up and I'm incredibly grateful to be taking the reins of the company they created. They have both been not only thoughtful and and creative in the way they ran their company, but deeply generous with me and everyone else who's worked to make Cellador what it is, and I can't thank them enough. Kevin will also continue to be involved to support us for some time, as we get situated in our new space, and will help to ensure Cellador is set up for a very bright future. Similarly, Cellador Ales wouldn't be what it is without our past and current staff. Kevin Jaffe, Julio Aguilar and Tim Ireland have all previously played important parts in running Cellador, and likewise, I'm lucky to have Erik Santos and Rob Ward staying on with me. I also want to thank you, our most dedicated fans and customers. If you're reading this email, that means you're a past club member or have decided to stay up to date with what we're doing. Without your past support, we never would have made it this far. I hope you'll continue to support us in this new chapter, and I really hope to see you all soon. Our New Home Having to leave our space in North Hills was less than ideal, but some of the doors that it’s opened for us are fantastic. We're excited to announce that the new home of Cellador Ales’ brewing operation is at Smog City Brewing Co! The folks at Smog City have welcomed us in to share their dedicated sour beer production space. While our team will continue to handle every step of our own production process, working at Smog City will give us access to a dramatically better workspace as well as tools, equipment and climate control that’ll let us fine tune our process the ways we’ve always wanted to. Through our new relationship, our brewery and our team are about to be better equipped than ever to put some truly exciting beers out into the world. Smog City Brewing Co., under Porter and Laurie’s leadership, has been turning out some of the most dialed-in beers in the city for over a decade. Their dedication to their craft and exacting approach to brewing makes them invaluable partners for us to lean on as we make the jump to Cellador Ales’ bigger, brighter future. Stay Connected We will be brewing, fermenting and blending our beers at Smog City, but we won’t have a taproom on their property. All I can say on that subject for now is that we’re working to get a taproom back open as quickly as possible. If all goes according to plan, our future taproom will also be a restaurant where in addition to Cellador beers we’ll be pouring a diverse tap list of beers from other breweries and wine too! In the meantime we hope you’ll continue to support us by buying beer online, supporting retailers that carry our beers and especially by joining the Syndicate membership! Now more than ever, your support is helping us to build a strong foundation for the future of Cellador Ales. At a time with breweries closing down left and right, we consider ourselves lucky to be able to find a new home and to continue into the future. Your continued support is a profoundly important part our future success.
So in summary… Was this the brewery that announced they were going out of business, but now they’re not going out of business? Not trying to be sarcastic. Honestly can’t keep up.
Not gonna lie, I like MacLeod as a brewery but that situation was a little bizarre. They went from the sky is falling and we're closed in a week, to let's see how things go for a few weeks, to now they have both locations back open and were buying all sorts of new pizza equipment at the Van Nuys spot. I'd like to think that it was maybe just the owners being inexperienced and not understanding the situation they really were in, but to go from doors shutting quickly to buying (presumably) expensive new equipment in 2 months doesn't really line up for me.
Wishing Cellador the best, although I have to admit I dont but their beer anymore (too acidic for me!). Hopefully with access to better fermentation equipment and controls, they can dial that acid level down.
They announced they were losing their space. I don't think they ever formerly said they were going to close.
To be fair they said that they had purchased the new equipment 18 months ago. I don't know how brewery equipment purchases work, but maybe they had a large final payment to make on it at the time of delivery? Add the delays to the York location opening and general slowdown in business and maybe it put them in a bind. It was a little weird, though.
