The parent company of Oyster City Brewing Company has signed a purchase agreement to acquire the assets of Catawba Valley Brewing Company.
Made by the Water, a portfolio company of family office Wiregrass Equity Partners, which owns Oyster City, will acquire the assets of Catawba Valley, including Catawba Brewing in North Carolina, Palmetto Brewing in South Carolina, the Twisp Southern Hard Seltzer brand that launched in 2019. The deal also includes the company’s taprooms and production facilities in Asheville, Charlotte, Wilmington and Morganton, North Carolina; and Charleston, South Carolina, CEO Alexi Sekmakas told Brewbound.
The transaction is expected to close on November 1 after a process that began about seven months ago.
Catawba co-founder and CEO Billy Pyatt described the reason for the sale in a press release: “We love the craft brewing industry and our 130 Catawba-family coworkers. But one day you wake up and you’re 60 years old. You realize it’s time we knock some things off our bucket list. Jetta, Scott, and I are extremely fortunate to have met the Wiregrass folks.
“Their business model, a great mix of tasting room retail and wholesale sales, almost exactly mirrors ours,” he continued. “They value our people, markets, customers, and most of all, our culture.”
Pyatt, his wife Jetta Pyatt and his brother Scott Pyatt founded Catawba in 1999 and grew the company to include six taprooms and five breweries with distribution in five states. In November 2017, Catawba acquired Palmetto Brewing. Combined, the two beer brands produced 30,050 barrels of beer in 2020, an -18% decline.
Catawba chief operating officer Scott Pyatt will remain with the company following the acquisition, but Billy and Jetta Pyatt will retire.
“I’m really happy that he chose to do so,” Sekmakas said of Scott.
Speaking to Brewbound, Sekmakas said each of the brand’s will be maintained separately, however, the soon-to-be sister brands will eventually be sold in one another’s taprooms. He added that the acquisition of Catawba Valley gives Made By The Water three brands that personify their specific regions of the Southeast, with Oyster City on the Gulf Coast, Catawba in the mountain regions of North Carolina, and Palmetto in Charleston.
Made By The Water acquired Oyster City about three years ago. In 2020, Oyster City’s production volume increased 89%, to 8,416 barrels of beer, and 2021 trends are continuing at a “very similar pace,” Sekmakas said. Oyster City distributes its offerings in its home state of Florida and Alabama, while Catawba offerings are distributed in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee.
Sekmakas described the transaction for Oyster City in similar terms to the deal with the Pyatt family with an attraction to the brand as much as the culture and the people who built it. All Catawba and Palmetto employees will be retained, he added.
“We are a people first company,” he said, adding that Catawba’s “people and their culture” first attracted Made By The Water to the company after a mutual friend introduced them to the Pyatts.
This isn’t Oyster City’s first acquisition of 2021. In June, the company announced it would take over the former Serda Brewing location in Mobile, Alabama.
Sekmakas described Made By The Water as a “very ambitious group” that “loves opening taprooms.” So the company is open to the possibility of future deals within the craft beer space.