Local Craft Brewers Adjust to Slowdown

YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio – Faced with a downturn in business caused by changing consumer tastes and habits, local craft brewers are finding new ways to hold on to their market share.

They are making new products – ciders, seltzers and nonalcoholic beverages – for those who don’t want beer. One brewpub will soon launch its own wine.

And almost all brewers are leaning into their role as community gathering spaces, music venues, and – in the case of Noble Creature Wild Ales & Lagers in Youngstown – restaurateurs.

At Noble Creature, owner Ira Gerhart is also getting ready to roll out his own line of house-made wine.

Gerhart concedes that while it’s not uncommon for wineries to branch into brewing, brewpubs rarely go into wine making. But he sees it as a way to give customers what they want, instead of letting them walk out the door.

All brewers are being hurt by the rise of RTDs – “ready to drink” canned cocktails such as White Claw and High Noon. That’s why Gerhart, who does not sell RTDs at his brewery, began dabbling in wine making.

“We saw the shift coming years ago,” he says. “The generation that kicked off the craft beer trend is getting older and the new generation has different palates and wants different things. What we can do is offer those other things.”

Noble Creature will still brew about 300 barrels of beer this year – its normal amount.

Like many craft brewers, it also has started to make cider and hop water for taproom sales. Hop water is a nonalcoholic beverage made by steeping fresh hops in water.

But Noble Creature also has started offering a sparkling drink that blends Riesling wine, carbonated water and other flavors. It uses wine that Gerhart has been making on the premises.

To coincide with its seventh anniversary, Noble Creature will roll out its own wine the first week of December. The wine will be sold by the glass, in mixed drinks such as spritzes, and by the bottle to go.

Gerhart started making the wine a couple of years ago as a reaction to the shift away from beer. “We already had a winemaking license. Because we needed to get one to make cider,” he says.

Cider production was also a response to demand. “Ever since we opened, we’ve had so many people asking, ‘Do you have anything else besides beer?’ ” Gerhart says.

They also kept asking for wine. “We started to make it under the radar,” he says.

Noble Creature buys juice from the California fall harvest and the Chilean spring harvest for its wines. It is already pouring from a large wooden cask of Riesling that was recently tapped.

Gerhart plans to keep his wine list short and simple.

“We made Riesling because we wanted a clean and fruity white wine to blend with other things for a spritz,” he says. “We add carbonated beverages for new-school classier cocktails with wine that are low in alcohol.”

The brewery will also offer barrel aged red blends.

“The first one is our oak aged red blend and after that we’ll have a cabernet-merlot blend that is now aging,” Gerhart says. He will follow those with a syrah and a grenache.

“It’s an experiment for us, a learning process,” he says. “It’s tasting really good and next year will be even better.”

Gerhart says winemaking is not as complicated as brewing, “as long as you’re not growing your own grapes and pressing them.”

Market Saturation

After years of rapid growth, the market for craft beer has become saturated.

In Ohio, there are currently 434 craft brewers, according to 2024 statistics from the Brewers Association – a slight increase from the 402 in 2022.

In Pennsylvania, the number is stagnant: 531 in 2022 versus 530 in 2024.

In the early days of the boom, a new brewery opened just about every year in the Valley. Now, for every one that opens, it seems like another one closes. Last month, Akronym Brewing in downtown Akron shut its doors.

The number of craft breweries nationwide inched upward from 9,339 in June of 2023 to 9,358 to June 2024, according to the Brewers Association.

However, with static sales, volume continued to decline. It’s a story that has been unchanged in at least a year.

“It feels like the new normal to me,” says Chris Crowell, editor of Craft Brewing Business, an industry website. “I can’t speak to what’s going on with any Ohio breweries in particular but the trends don’t feel like blips to me. They aren’t the death of craft beer or anything, but there are enough shifts in consumer taste and buying options and habits and all that, that this ‘slump’ feels like the norm.”

It might be an inevitable development in an industry that started with rocket-like growth.

“The number of craft breweries went from roughly 2,000 to over 9,000 in a decade, and they were staying in business,” Crowell says. “Failure and closure rates bucked any usual statistic in terms of small businesses. That’s still mostly true. The number of brewing businesses is still high. But production volumes are falling, which hits the larger regional breweries harder.”

The most notable slump is in retail distribution, he says.

“Craft beer is just losing a lot of shelf appeal to RTDs, which are high-alcohol and fruit-flavored and eye catching when walking through the beer aisle,” says Crowell. “[That is] everything that drove interest in craft beer the last decade. Younger generations are gravitating to those or just drinking less.”

Distribution companies are the gatekeepers of retail sales and contribute to the craft beer slump, Crowell says, by placing RTDs more prominently than craft beer.

“There is less interest from distributors themselves, not just the end customer,” he says. “They are ultimately in charge of positioning and displays [in stores].”

Retail sales are not a major revenue stream for most local brewpubs, with the exception of Youngstown’s Penguin City Brewing.

Aspasia Lyras Bernacki, co-owner of Penguin City, says retail sales have slipped but they were ready for it.

“We anticipated a slowdown and cut back production,” she says. “We brewed 2,100 barrels last year but will do only 1,700 this year.” There are 31 gallons in a barrel.

Penguin City is distributed in cans and sold in more than 500 stores in Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

Drinking Less

One surprising challenge to taproom sales is that people seem to be drinking less since the pandemic.

“People are just going out less,” says Craft Brewing Business editor Crowell. “Taprooms are the more profitable craft beer business model [as opposed to distribution]. So if people realize they’d rather just have a DoorDasher pick up White Claw and drop it off at their house, that’s another challenge to the business model.”

Josh Dunn, co-owner of Birdfish Brewing in Columbiana, has noticed the trend.

To fight back, Birdfish – like most successful brewpubs – is leaning into what makes it unique and using it to keep customers coming through the door.

Birdfish maintains a busy schedule of live music and hosts a lot of gatherings of local organizations and nonprofits.

But its in-house beer sales have fallen in the past couple of years. To offset the loss, the pub has started offering outside beverages.

“We upgraded our liquor license to A1A, which allows the sale of spirits, wine, cider and other stuff that we do not make,” Dunn says. “We have cocktails on tap, and we sell wine from the Vineyards at Pine Lake.”

Dunn says they’ve had to educate customers about all the new options. “We are coming up on our ninth anniversary, but for the first eight and a half years, we only offered beer,” he says.

Birdfish last year also started making hard seltzers that blend fresh fruit juice, carbonated water and vodka.

The brewery is also offsetting its taproom slump by being bullish on off-site retail sales. The move bucks the industry trend but it’s working.

“We have not cut back on beer production at all,” Dunn says. “We have been at maximum capacity for the last three years and are shifting to wholesale distribution rather than in-house.”

Birdfish produced 1,400 barrels last year and will hit that mark again in 2024, he says.

Penguin City

With retail distribution down at Penguin City, the taproom has become the king, says co-owner Lyras-Bernacki.

The brewery has always been a community gathering spot, and that helps keep the room busy.

With its massive taproom and outdoor space, the downtown brewery hosts everything from ethnic and rock festivals to boxing and mixed martial arts cards. It also books live music, artisan shows and sales, and countless social gatherings and meetings by local groups.

More than most brewpubs, Penguin City’s space has become its signature.

The brewery is located in an industrial building with exposed steel beams and factory windows. Rows of shiny brewing tanks perched on an upper level add to the industrial atmosphere.

The brewery’s distinctive marketing plays off the city’s steelmaking history but with a forward-looking hipness.

“You have to have a niche,” says Lyras-Bernacki. “What makes us unique is our space, this big warehouse, an industrial space.”

Despite the nationwide downturn in brewpub sales, she is confident Penguin City can ride out the trend and overcome any consumer shift.

“There is a lot of uncertainty, but beer isn’t going anywhere,” she says. “There are some cities that have 30 breweries and that’s not sustainable. Overall, our area is fine because there aren’t that many craft brewers.”

She expects fresh craft beer will eventually come back into favor.

“The pendulum will swing back,” Lyras-Bernacki says. “It always does. Right now, the marketplace is heavily into RTDs. But remember, everybody was drinking wine coolers in the early ’90s.”

In the meantime, Penguin City has added products to appeal to all palates. It recently started brewing root beer for kids and adults with a sweet tooth. It also makes its own nonalcoholic hop water and is considering adding flavored seltzers.

Lyras-Bernacki explains the reasoning behind the new products.

“We’ve noticed [customers] in here who are not drinking,” she says. “Some people will [now] get a beer and then have a hop water [before their next beer], so they can stay longer.”

Pictured at top: Ira Gerhart, owner of Noble Creature brewery in Youngstown, holds one of the bottles for his new wines. He is standing in front of two large puncheons of wine he made in the Noble Creature brewhouse.

Copyright 2024 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.