Why do breweries close?

I can't see how some breweries (Appalachian Brewing Company) stay IN business.
Their beer sux, except for their seasonal Mai Bock, which still isn't great, the Director of operations is a total tool, the food is one step up from Alpo dog food and the service is absolutely horrible.
Yet, they have something like 3 locations. Their beer is never on tap at any local restaurants, and they have almost no footprint at the beer distributor.
Tröegs blows them out of the water, and I am not the biggest Tröegs fan either. Too many damn IPA's and such. Not enough variety of styles for me, and the ones they do make are usually overly hopped.
There used to be 4 owners, with the DOO owning a small share. I know one owner died, I believe two bailed out, I'm not sure if Shawn is still an owner or not?
How da F do they stay afloat?
The main Harrisburg location is NEVER busy anymore, at least the times I've stopped in.
I don't get it?

 

Appalaician had 2 locations in Gettysburg and 1 closed down a couple years ago (the one by the outlets/movie theater. The downtown location is still there. They pull in good business. FWIW, I’ve been 3-4 times over last decade and always had good food and found the beers respectable. It is a 1990’s microbrew pub model like Gordon Biersh, BJs etc that seems to be falling away over the last 5 years or so.

 

I saw his youtube videos a while back. Loved his enthusiasm and dedication to making quality beers. Sad to hear he closed. Haven't watched the video yet but will so.

 

Unfortunately, it seems he set himself up to fail:
1. Started a business with very limited capital.
2. Believed in the "build it and they will come" marketing concept. You have to market your business, especially in such a competitive, low margin space.
3. As an earlier poster pointed out - Location, Location, Location. Small town and lived too far a commute to the business.

I give him a lot of credit for giving it a go. He severely handicapped himself from the get-go in three majorly important areas: location, investment and marketing.

 

He still has to solve those three major issues I mentioned previously in order to have a chance to be successful.

 

Doubt it. You need to turn inventory fast in a low margin business. Lager does not seem like a great place to start.

 

Why nor? It's by far (like several orders of magnitude) the higher volume category of that particular beer dichotomy

 

Craft lagers don't move as fast. It takes longer to produce them too. He should probably start with beers that are quicker to make & sell quicker. Then he could branch out to lagers. I'm certainly no expert, just speculating here.

 

As a famous poet used to say, when I have no inspiration, I write prose. If beer is bad, brew "notbeer". Today, by the way, there was a publication by a "well-known" expert from the USA about how beermakers are massively switching to winemaking ("Wine Maker" magazine, anyone interested should read it). So there are plenty of options...

 

That's news to me. This may be happening at a few breweries (or maybe they are just adding wines to the beverage menu), but the number of switch-overs to making wine is certainly not "massive." Who is the "well-known expert"?

 

He's likely referring to this article (no pub. date, tho' and he says "Today") which appears to be a home winemaker publication, rather than one aimed at the commercial industry:
https://winemakermag.com/article/craft-beer-influenced-winemaking
Which says:

I'm not sure "Some...brewers" equals "Massively".

 

That is an interesting article. But, yeah, 'some' is a big difference from 'massive' as far as the numbers go.

 

A while ago I read an article about all the winemakers that are just hanging on financially in a saturated market.

What does a guy from the Russian Federation know?

 

It seems to me that you can be plenty successful moving higher quality lagers in large volumes as long as you're set up to do that from the start. You might require a bit more startup capital up front (which, as you mentioned, this fella was lacking) but otherwise we've got lots of examples of craft lagers that move at a scale that many ipa brewers can only dream of.

It seems to me that the big change from the boom days to these more mature market times for a start up brewer is that you need to go in to the operation clear on what your goal is, scale wise, and also assured that you have the proper capital to fire up at that scale. It seems less possible to start on shoestring and grow into a regional distributing brand than it might have been 15, 20, or 30 years ago

 

Lagers were the basis of several successful craft brewers. Brooklyn lager, sam Adams, Blue point Toasted. Yuengling lager. All are ambers, reminiscent of pre prohibition beers. It's hard to make a dent in the market now wherever you start.

 

I inadvertently id'ed Yuengling as craft. Still a successful amber lager. But Sam and Brooklyn were both initially brewed at main line brewers. And bottled Blue Point too.