When Phil Bannatyne opened Cambridge Brewing Company in 1989, it was the third brewpub in the state of Massachusetts. He was one of the trailblazers of what would become a $28 billion craft beer industry. Today, taprooms and breweries seem to be everywhere. There were 9,863 operating across the country last year.
But Bannatyne will close the doors to Cambridge Brewing for the last time in December, leaving a void in Kendall Square. Over in Central Square, there’s another empty storefront occupied briefly by The Station by Artifact Cider Project. Not to mention the Lord Hobo debacle, which has seen the name stripped from its flagship bar in The Port neighborhood.
What gives? Brewing – be it beer or cider – has been having a moment, so to speak, for the past several years, but it seems the moment may be ending.
Bannatyne was living in San Francisco when Bill Owens opened the first brewpub in the country – Buffalo Bill’s Brewery in the East Bay – in early 1983. He started taking brewing courses, and one of his classmates found success opening a place off the University of California, Berkeley, campus.
“I decided to try making beer in a progressive university town too, and I wanted to come back to New England, so Cambridge was the obvious choice,” Bannatyne said.
He opened Cambridge Brewing in Kendall Square in 1989.
There were only two other brewpubs in the area – one in North Station called Commonwealth Brewing and one in Northampton called Northampton Brewing. His was the first to open in Cambridge. In the whole state, there were five breweries: the three brewpubs plus Sam Adams and Harpoon.
“And then beer took off,” Bannatyne said. “There’s been a huge acceptance of and enthusiasm for what craft beer is since those early days.”
There are close to 250 breweries in Massachusetts today, including in Cambridge and Somerville – names such as Lamplighter in The Port and North Point; Portico in Somerville’s Boynton Yards; Aeronaut near Somerville’s Union Square; and Remnant, a Somerville company that last year expanded into Cambridge to operate Satellite, picking up where Atwood’s Tavern left off when it closed after 17 years.
Challenges of Covid
Bannatyne, ready to retire, announced he was closing Cambridge Brewing on Instagram in August to an outpouring of support from longtime fans.
“It’s been a great run. We did what we set out to do, and I’m very proud of that,” Bannatyne said. “I’m proud of all the brewers we’ve trained that have gone on to create their own breweries and further the cause of craft beer.”
But, Bannatyne said, it’s also true that business has been getting harder to come by. He described the lack of business as a result of “consumer patterns changing coming out of Covid.” The brewpub used to have a robust lunch business that doesn’t exist because it just didn’t come back after the pandemic, for instance.
“I’m not going to lie, the last few years have been more challenging,” Bannatyne said. He didn’t consider selling Cambridge Brewing: “The business is really the people here, it’s my brewer Will’s recipe, it’s chef Dave’s food, it’s my kitchen staff that’s been with me for 15, 20 years. That’s who we are and that’s what this place is and that’s not for sale.”
Soham Bhatt met a similar end last year as co-founder of Artifact Cider Project, a Western Massachusetts cider brewing company that uses local apples and advanced fermentation practices. He opened The Station in Central Square in the spring of 2020.
“It was just bad timing. When the pandemic hit, the population of Cambridge significantly went down because schools were going remote and office workers were going remote,” Bhatt said. “A major part of the customer base just disappeared overnight. Things were very, very hard for two years; things started getting better, but by then, the damage had already been done.”
He also had to close his Northampton taproom.
Other factors bubble up
Andy Crouch, who publishes All About Beer from offices near Harvard Square and wrote about the end of the once popular Lord Hobo’s in June, said the proliferation of breweries made it harder for companies to differentiate themselves.
“We went from 50 places opening a year to thousands opening a year,” Crouch said. “Everything’s been growing, and so many brewers are opening, and eventually that gets hard.”
The pandemic and market saturation aren’t the only issues. Crouch pointed toward a decrease in drinking, which he believes is at least in part because of the legalization of recreational marijuana.
“Another factor is that Gen Z and even younger millennials have different consumption patterns and relationships with alcohol and sobriety and leading sober-free lifestyles,” Crouch said.
Bannatyne also noticed people are drinking less: “I think there’s less drinking in general, and Gen Z in particular does not seem to drink as much or as often as their predecessors.”
Crouch called the environment “much more competitive than it used to be.” In Crouch’s telling, Lord Hobo’s Daniel Lanigan did his business no favors with a “cocky” approach that drew allegations of assault, overpromised on expansion and spent on Lamborghinis and Louis Vuitton Nike Air Force Ones; but the amount of barrels the brand sold was also in decline starting in 2019, from a peak of 47,000 to a grim 17,000 in 2023.
Ebbs and flows toward the future
Craft beer and cider’s popularity might be waning right now, but that doesn’t mean it’s over.
Bannatyne has seen ups and downs throughout his career, and he suggested that although interest may be down now, it can surge again anytime; the industry ebbs and flows.
“We had a contraction in the industry at the end of the ’90s before the explosive growth of the mid-teens,” Bannatyne said, estimating that breweries in Massachusetts roughly doubled in number between 2012 and 2018. “I think now the general public’s interest in beer is waning a little bit from those heady days.”
Bhatt said he’s fairly optimistic about the future too.
“Things always evolve,” Bhatt said. “It’ll bounce back. It might just take a little while because we’re still really in this transition and experiencing ripple effects.”
But he would never open a taproom again, he said.
“I was just too burned by the whole process,” said Bhatt, whose Artifact Cider continues to be available in stores across New England and beyond.
This post was updated Oct. 1, 2024, to correct that Phil Bannatyne’s name was misspelled throughout.
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