NEW BREWERIES TO LOOK FOR IN 2014
Creature Comforts, Athens, creaturecomfortsbeer.com.
Eventide, Atlanta, eventidebrewing.com.
Orpheus, Atlanta, orpheusbrewing.com.
Reformation, Woodstock, reformationbrewery.com.
Second Self, Atlanta, secondselfbeer.com.
Wild Heaven, Avondale Estates, wildheavencraftbeers.com.
On Tuesday evening, it was standing room only and loud as people fought to get in the door and pushed in around the bar at Six Feet Under Pub & Fish House on Memorial Drive. The festive occasion was the debut of the first two beers — a German-style kölsch and an American-style pale ale — from newly opened Eventide Brewing, located in nearby Grant Park.
Cheers went up when pint glasses with the Eventide logo were passed through the crowd. The brewery partners — early 30s husband and wife Nathan and Haley Cowan, brewer Geoffrey Williams and marketing guru Mathew Sweezey — greeted friends, neighbors and curious beer geeks with hugs and handshakes.
“We had over 500 people RSVP,” Sweezey said, appearing proud and nervous at the same time. “I’m not sure where we’re going to put them all.”
It’s a ritual that’s become much more common since the nationwide craft beer boom that’s been building for more than a decade started hitting Atlanta in a big way over the past several years. Where there were once only Red Brick, Sweetwater and Terrapin, the likes of Jailhouse, Red Hare, Burnt Hickory, Strawn and Blue Tarp have come on the scene since 2009.
Three new breweries, Monday Night, Jekyll and Three Taverns, opened in 2013. And Eventide is the first of as many as six more new breweries set to open in 2014.
Asked if he was worried about all the competition and talk of a “craft beer bubble” that might be getting close to bursting, Sweezey answered in two ways.
“Opening any kind of business is tough, but the beer business is even tougher because it’s highly regulated and it takes a large amount of capital to build a brewery,” he said. “But in Georgia, we don’t have that many craft breweries, especially compared to many other states this size.”
Bart Watson, staff economist for the Colorado-based craft beer industry Brewers Association, would agree. In fact, in September, Watson penned a piece titled “The Craft Beer (Non) Bubble.” Watson sees “little to no evidence that craft is in a bubble” or “that brewers and investors are betting more than they should on a future that won’t exist.”
He was even more specific about Georgia during a recent phone call. “By my estimates, in 2012, Georgia craft breweries produced about a third of the beer that craft beer consumers were demanding in the state,” Watson said, “so clearly there is a demand for more local offerings.
“I don’t necessarily think that’s true everywhere. But in the Southeast, there’s a lot of pent-up demand. And as more people discover craft beer, that demand is only going to grow. I think there are plenty of opportunities in places like Atlanta for more craft breweries to open to supply that demand.”
Of course, the more basic question might be, what’s driving the craft beer boom?
“When you look at surveys of why beer lovers drink craft beer, No. 1 is flavor,” Watson said. “But very closely behind that is local. This is particularly true among the millennial generation, which is going to be the largest consumer group in the country very shortly.”
Millennial generation brewer Jason Pellett is getting ready to open Orpheus Brewing, located in a building overlooking Piedmont Park and the Beltline, and hopes to have beer in the Atlanta market by late April. Pellett is a big fan of flavorful Belgian-style beer, and his flagship brew, Lyric Ale, is a saison hopped like an American IPA.
"There's a big difference between what people drink here and what's produced here," Pellett said. "If you go on ratebeer.com, we have three of the top 10 beer bars in the country but no beers anywhere near the top of the list. So I think the difference between what people want to drink and what's actually being made here is pretty big."
As for idea of the beer bubble, Pellett has a slightly different take.
“We haven’t seen a lot of brewery failures in the last few years because the growth has been explosive enough to prop just about everybody up,” Pellett said. “That will start to change, and the subpar breweries will not necessarily make it.
Numbers from the Brewers Association show that the business can be tough. There were 409 brewery openings in 2012 (310 microbreweries and 99 brewpubs) and 43 brewery closings (18 microbreweries and 25 brewpubs).
“I think the biggest thing that will change will be growth patterns,” Pellett said. “Many breweries in the last 10 years have done a lot of expansion by spreading out into a lot of different markets. At some point soon, there won’t be much reason for a Georgia consumer to buy a generic-tasting pale ale from another state when there are lots of choices from closer to home.”
