Craft brewery bust? Three Philly-area producers call it quits in 3 weeks

Three breweries in the Philadelphia region announced their closure in the last few weeks. There could be more to come, one owner warns.

The first to close was Liquid Art (formerly Roy Pitz) Barrel House in Spring Garden. The Chambersburg-based brewery announced the Philadelphia location’s closure on Instagram on Sept. 14.

Two more breweries piled on this past weekend: Easton/South Philadelphia’s Separatist Beer Project’s confirmed its permanent closure on Saturday, months after it temporarily closed due to licensing issues. It was followed on Sunday by Montgomery County’s Stickman Brews, which announced the end of its eight-year run in Royersford after shuttering outposts in East Passyunk and Chester Springs in 2022.

On Monday night, Liquid Art announced it’s winding down operations in Chambersburg as well. Its last day will be Sunday, Oct. 8.

After percolating through the ’90s then taking off like a bottle rocket in the late ’00s and early ’10s, the national craft beer market has started to fizzle in recent years. Philly and South Jersey have so far bucked the trend — with scores of new breweries still in the works — but at least one ex-brewery owner thinks we’re at the start of a downslope.

“This is going to be a bloodbath of breweries,” said Mike Treon of Liquid Art, which first launched in Chambersburg in 2008. As Treon and his partners have wrapped up the business, speaking with lawyers and other contacts, they’ve heard anecdotes of other craft breweries in the process of folding. Treon cited two more in Pennsylvania: Devil’s Eye Brewing Co. in York and Waynesboro%20Brewery%20This%20November,-By%20Breweries%20in&text=633%20Brewing%20will%20be%20closing,they%20do%20one%20final%20fundraiser" target="_blank">633 Brewing in Waynesboro.

The pandemic’s financial toll and increased costs all contributed to Liquid Art’s closing, but craft beer’s changing landscape plays into it as well. Besides facing competition from hard seltzer and big-name brands, the industry is teeming with more small-scale producers than ever.

“We opened Roy Pitz in 2008 and Chambersburg had not seen a microbrewery in 10 to 15 years. And now in that county I think there’s 12,” Treon said. “All else being equal, the consumer demand didn’t grow by a factor of 12.”

Market saturation has prompted breweries to change: In 2008, craft brewers were geared toward finding footholds in retail and distribution. Today’s brewery taprooms tend to have more modest ambitions.

“Local craft is really, really local, and we weren’t really sized for it — we were sized much bigger. And it’s just been an exercise in trying to realign,” Treon said.

He pointed to the brewery’s 2022 rebranding from Roy Pitz to Liquid Art as one way the company attempted to adapt. But the name change didn’t generate enough of a boost to buoy the Philadelphia location, which had a promising launch in 2017 but only hit its economic stride in early 2020. With interrupted operations, no Restaurant Revitalization Fund grant, and its presence split between Chambersburg and Spring Garden, Liquid Art never fully recovered.

“It’s hard to point at the pandemic, but that was a death sentence for us,” Treon said.

Even as craft breweries close, more are on the way — and that’s the case in South Philadelphia, where a new brewery will move into Separatist Beer Project’s former home at 1646 S. 12th St., now that Separatist’s lease is up.

This summer Separatist owner Joe Fay sold the brewery’s space in Easton, and he was lobbying for the East Passyunk spot to become a second home to Carbon Copy, the West Philly brewery that took over the space this summer. Fay had a deal worked out for Carbon Copy owners Kyle Wolak and Brendon Boudwin to “take over my PHL space, hire the entire staff back, and purchase the space turn-key.” However, another brewery privately approached the landlord and preempted the Carbon Copy-Separatist handoff.

“Some of the staff has interviewed with the new brewery, but it is undetermined for now if they will be able to come back to work in the future,” Fay said. “I hope they will, because they were the biggest reason we had the business that we did. They kept our little community going.”

Fay cited myriad reasons for exiting the brewery game after several years. “Inflation, taxes, rent escalations, all of the payments from the [COVID] rescue loans kicking in, [P]LCB looking to shut business down for things … makes for a cocktail of difficulties that are hard to surmount,” he said.

Meanwhile in Royersford, Ethan Buckman declined to comment on Stickman Brews’ closure. The announcement followed an abrupt 10-day closure earlier this summer and operations were significantly pared down when it reopened, according to the site Breweries in Pennsylvania.

Closures aren’t the only contractions for the craft beer industry: Some are on the market, as is thought to be the case for Ephrata’s St. Boniface and likely the case for South Jersey’s Flying Fish, whose planned sale to Cape May Brewing Co. fell through in May.

Flying Fish president Frank Rio could not speak to whether the brewery’s hedge-fund owners were still looking for buyers but said that the Somerdale brewery has done its best to continue operations without skipping a beat.

“This has been a harder space than ever,” said Rio, who’s been in the industry for 22 years. “The majority of the more legacy breweries is selling a portion of our beer in the trade at Wegman’s and beer stores, taverns. And now with whatever the number is — quadruple million — the amount of breweries, it’s an extremely crowded space.”

Add to that the High Noons, the Truly Hards, and the Modelo Especials — the newly best-selling beer in the country — and it’s not hard to see what craft breweries are up against.

“It’s almost death by a thousand cuts,” Rio said.