USA, VT: Collaborative Brewing to close down on February 22

Brett Seymour walked into a meeting late last month with his partners at Collaborative Brewing and was floored immediately by what they had to tell them: They needed to close the brewery, the Burlington Free Press reported on February 19.

“This just isn’t really working,” Seymour, the brewer for the Waitsfield beermaker, said he was told by one of the partners, accountant Craig Isvak. They held a vote and, according to Seymour, Isvak and the third partner, Steve Parker, voted to shut the brewery down.

“I didn’t even bother casting a vote,” Seymour said on Monday, 14 afternoon at Collaborative Brewing’s taproom, which will close Feb. 22. “I was pretty shocked. I hadn’t digested it yet.”

Brewery openings have been extremely common in the past decade as Vermont’s reputation as a beer-intensive state has grown nationally and internationally. A state with just over 20 breweries in 2011 has seen that tally skyrocket past 60.

A brewery closing, however, is exceedingly rare in Vermont. Then again, so is a pandemic like COVID-19, which hit about a year after Collaborative Brewing started making beer and four months after the brewery opened its taproom in the Mad River Green plaza off Vermont 100.

It takes a good five years for a brewery to start to turn a profit, Seymour said. The pandemic took those good years away.

“I would have kept it going if I could have,” Seymour said. “I just felt like the last three years we’ve been open it’s been a constant struggle.”

Collaborative began as exactly that — a collaboration between childhood friends Seymour and Parker as well as Parker’s sister, Jen Fleckenstein, and Isvak, their tax preparer.

“Brewing is just a collaboration of ingredients and minds,” Seymour told the Burlington Free Press soon after Collaborative started brewing three years ago at Clear Water Filtration, the Waitsfield business run by Parker and Fleckenstein.

They opened the taproom in December 2019 as ski season resumed in the Mad River Valley. Kyle Fisher of Fayston soon became a regular customer at the taproom. He has known Seymour for a while and the two share an interest in pinball machines, so Fisher would stop by the taproom to play pinball and sample Seymour’s brews.

Seymour and his crew put their personality into the place, according to Fisher. “I think that’s really the ultimate draw, that they kept kind of changing and upgrading,” he said.

Business was great at the start. “We’ll just steamroll through the summer,” Seymour remembers thinking at the time.

Well before the summer of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic struck, shutting down bars and restaurants for weeks. Seymour said Fleckenstein left the partnership soon after the pandemic began.

Collaborative Brewing distributed some of its beer in cans across the state but relied on the taproom for about two-thirds of its income, according to Seymour. With its 30-seat taproom off limits for weeks and takeout or a dozen or so seats on the narrow porch out front the only options for customers, business dropped off sharply.

“There never really was an end to it,” Seymour said. Business ebbed and flowed — mostly ebbed — through periods of relatively low COVID infection followed by sharp increases in case numbers caused by variants of the virus. Then the omicron variant hit Vermont in December as the winter snow season that businesses in the Mad River Valley rely upon so heavily got off to a slow start.

Seymour said he’s been nervous about the brewery’s economic viability for the past couple of years, especially after the departure of Fleckenstein, who handled bookkeeping.

“All the government assistance saved us” at the start of the pandemic, according to Seymour. “There’s no more government assistance.”

Collaborative had company in a rough 2020 for brewers. According to data on the national Brewers Association website, overall beer sales dropped nearly 3% that year, but craft-beer sales — which generally rely heavily on visits to taprooms, bars and restaurants that were temporarily shut down by the pandemic — plummeted more than 9%.

According to a January article by the association's chief economist, Bart Watson, draft beer sales dropped deeply early in the pandemic, and "packaged sales didn’t fully make up the lost beer volume during the hardest hit months." The data suggest, according to Watson's report, that "that the boom in to-go sales that breweries saw during the pandemic hasn’t systematically stuck around."

Seymour said he remains friends with his partners in Collaborative Brewing.

“(Parker and Isvak) were just looking at the books and not sure when the end would be,” he said. “It’s hard to fault them for worrying about their money.” Seymour said Collaborative Brewing will be able to pay off loans for the taproom and other rental space and sell its brewing equipment. (Parker and Isvak did not respond to repeated requests for comment by email and phone.)

Collaborative Brewing leaned toward the malty side of beer — the taproom’s offerings this month included a stout and an Irish red ale — rather than the hoppy, New England style of India pale ales so popular at many Vermont breweries. Seymour did brew hop-forward beers including a session IPA and a hoppy pale ale, but avoided the hazy IPAs and double IPAs found elsewhere in Vermont.

“I fought my partners on that the whole time,” Seymour said. “That’s why I wanted to open a brewery — I was tired of going to bars and they only had IPAs.” That might have hurt Collaborative, Seymour said, as IPAs tend to get the buzz in online beer forums, but he found more recently that customers at the taproom were looking for the different styles Collaborative was offering.

“Honestly, I think (other) people do a better job with them, anyway,” Seymour said of IPAs. He mentioned the award-winning brewery up the road in Waitsfield, Lawson’s Finest Liquids, as one of the best-known for that variety. He said Lawson’s complemented Collaborative’s offerings instead of overshadowing them.

Fisher doesn’t think the closure of Collaborative has to do with IPAs or competition from Lawson’s.

“Had they been more established pre-pandemic I don’t know if we would be having this conversation right now,” said Fisher, who cited the brewery’s Buzzed Logger coffee lager as one of his favorites. “It’s sad because in my opinion they did everything right.”

Collaborative’s beers will be available beyond the closure of the taproom. Seymour said he had just canned the Salute your Schwarz Schwarzbier before the closure was announced, and recently kegged “a ton” of Dorta the Exporta lager. A red ale and German pilsner were still in fermenters as of early February.

Seymour — who worked at the taproom bar five days a week and brewed on the other two — said that since Collaborative Brewing announced its closure in late January, new customers have been coming in and saying they wished they sampled his beers sooner.

“Everyone loves a funeral,” Seymour said. “I get it.”

His initial thoughts when he realized the brewery would be closing, he acknowledged, were “not great ones. I was just pretty depressed about the whole thing.” He almost immediately received job offers after the closure was announced and started to think of his options for the future.

“I’m much more optimistic about it now,” he said.

The winner of the inaugural “Make the Cut” homebrewing contest in St. Albans in 2015plans to take it easy once Collaborative shuts down. He might do some landscaping this spring and summer, and plans to get back into homebrewing.

“I don’t think I’m done brewing” professionally, Seymour said. “I just need to step away from it a little bit.” Seymour, who once worked for Otter Creek Brewing, said he doesn’t want to work for another brewer, but might take the business acumen he’s acquired from Collaborative and apply it to his own brewery one day.

“I’ve always been a dreamer,” Seymour said.

Fisher said if Seymour opened another brewery he’d support it just as he supported Collaborative.

“I think the whole community would, too,” Fisher said.

19 February, 2022