USA, SC: The Blue Ridge Brewing Co. closing its doors in downtown Greenville

The Blue Ridge Brewing Co. will be closing its doors on North Main by the end of this year - 20 years after the brewpub staked out the first territory for craft beer in downtown Greenville, Greenville Online reported on December 15.

Blue Ridge had been poised to shut down its operations over the winter as it prepares to open a full-scale brewery in downtown Greer, owner Bob Hiller told The Greenville News on December 15.

The decision to close the longtime North Main Street location came sooner than later, Hiller said, when he couldn’t reach a lease agreement with the landlord. The disagreement was over the length of the lease, he said, not the cost of rent.

However, the departure won’t mean the end of Blue Ridge’s presence downtown, as Hiller said he is actively pursuing spaces in Greenville’s central business district to open a restaurant with the Blue Ridge name ─ though without the in-house brewing system that has been its hallmark.

“Yes, we are closing the doors in this building, but we’ll be opening a new set of doors downtown as soon as possible,” he said. “I’m pretty much aware of all the properties that might be available to us, and negotiations are in the works. I’ve actually found several places I would be proud to be in.”

The beer will be supplied from its new brewery in Greer, scheduled to open in April, which will combine the larger scale of a production brewery on one side with the restaurant business on the other side.

The Greer project will reap the benefits of the so-called “Stone Law” - on the largest scale seen in the Upstate since the beverage law’s passage two summers ago.

Blue Ridge Brewing was a pioneer in Greenville’s beer culture, opening as a brewpub in 1995 when local craft beer was more of a novelty than the movement it is today.

From the beginning, Hiller knew he wanted to sell his beer beyond the confines of his downtown restaurant, but he found that, because of South Carolina beverage laws, he couldn’t even sell his brews at beer events being held right outside his door.

With more-favorable laws in North Carolina, Hiller took $1.6 million to Winston-Salem and invested in Foothills Brewing, which allowed him to make the same beer he was making at Blue Ridge and sell it back to South Carolina.

Foothills became well-known, and he sold his interest in it four years ago.

Unlike most of the Upstate’s other breweries, Blue Ridge has always wanted to be both a restaurant and a brewery.

In the 1990s, Hiller and others helped get state laws enacted to allow brewpubs, legislation that at the same time limited them to a production limit far lower than that of breweries.

Breweries had the benefit of producing more and distributing but couldn’t sell their product on site.

That began to change in 2010, when lobbying efforts resulted in breweries being allowed to offer limited samples at their production sites.

Three years later, further lobbying efforts under the banner of the “Pint Law” allowed breweries to sell up to three pints to a customer in a day for consumption on site, prompting the establishment of “tasting rooms” that helped provide added income.

Then, two summers ago, state legislators changed beer regulations under the “Stone Law,” an effort to attract the $31 million expansion of California’s Stone Brewing Co., which ultimately decided to build an East Coast location in Richmond, Virginia.

The catch: Breweries had to serve prepared food on site, essentially getting into the restaurant business.

For the past two years, local breweries have been finding creative ways to follow the law on a small scale, said Brook Bristow, a beverage law attorney and executive director of the South Carolina Brewers Guild.

The Blue Ridge model would be the first to use the law on a larger scale, similar to the concept that Stone envisioned for a production brewery and restaurant.

“This is like on the other end of the spectrum,” Bristow said.

The restaurant side of a brewing business can be a challenge and not necessarily one that brewers are ready for.

Two years into the “Stone Law,” Quest Brewing Co. in Greenville has yet to initiate any food production, which keeps its limit at three pints, co-owner Andrew Watts said.

Quest had the state Department of Health and Environmental Control do an assessment of what changes would be needed to the brewery’s facility near the Greenville Downtown Airport to meet the food aspect of the law.

The changes necessary would have altered the rustic character of the brewery’s tasting room and affected its production capability, Watts said.

“It didn’t fit the mold of what want to do,” he said. “It would have changed the atmosphere of our place so dramatically that it would have negatively affected our place more than positively.”

The Stone Law created more opportunities, but both Watts and Hiller said the changes didn’t extend far enough to make the artificial limits on the craft beer market more fair.

The problem, they said, lies in not allowing smaller brewers to distribute their products themselves, instead of having to employ the state’s three-tier distribution system – a legacy system governing the flow of alcohol from producer to distributor to retailer.

After two years in business, Quest has grown to the point that it needs to have a distributor and can afford the added costs.

However, Watts said, “the smaller guys having a middle man and having only 20 accounts hurts them greatly. The only way they’re able to do that is self-distribution, which you can’t do in South Carolina."

This is the case for the Swamp Rabbit Brewery & Taproom in Travelers Rest, where owner Ben Pierson said that he would like to distribute on a small scale but can't because state laws force him to operate as a brewpub to fit his business model, which doesn’t include food service but relies on being able to serve more than three pints.

“I believe brewpubs should be able to do that,” Pierson said. “It’s pretty ridiculous stuff.”

The idea of being classified as a brewery isn’t something Pierson said he is considering for the small space in downtown Travelers Rest, but he said is considering his options as he looks to open a second location.

“We’re looking to expand into downtown Greenville,” he said. “We managed to pull it off one time in TR. I think we’re going to get it done. We’re taking our time with it.”

Brewing representatives “took a breath this year,” declining to push for more changes in state beverage laws, but they did lobby federal lawmakers for tax cuts on beer production, Bristow said.

The concept of brewpubs being able to distribute isn’t out of the realm of possibility, he said.

“I think it would just have to be structured the right way," Bristow said. “Maybe in the future there are some tweaks that can be made."

While downtown Greenville is losing a stalwart of brewing ─ at least in terms of the beer actually being produced downtown ─ others are coming to fill the gap.

The Upstate Craft Beer Co. has plans to open next week in the renovated space of the historic Claussen's Bakery in the West End.

Likewise, Loose Reed Brewing Company has selected its location a few blocks away on Augusta Street in the former home of the Greenville Growler Station, next to Smiley's Acoustic Cafe.

The roll out for the Greer Blue Ridge Brewing location will come in April as Hiller said he didn't want to open in the dead of winter — but he said he's known ever since he sold his share in Foothills that he'd have to move production from downtown.

"I'm ready to get back to brewing full-scale," he said, "and that's never been an option in this location."

16 December, 2015