Sierra Nevada announced last week the closure of its Berkeley, California-based Torpedo Room satellite taproom after nearly a decade in business.
“It’s tough for us to write these words,” the company wrote in an Instagram post. “But the effects of the pandemic, from staffing shortages to wayward foot traffic, ultimately made the Torpedo Room unsustainable.”
Sierra Nevada closed the Torpedo Room on June 30 for what it expected to be a temporary break due to a lack of employees.
“We closed on June 30 due to staffing shortages with hopes to reopen, but ultimately determined a permanent closure would be necessary,” a spokesperson told Brewbound.
Three weeks later, the company announced the space was shuttered for good. A “very small number of people” were affected by the closure, the spokesperson said.
The June 30 shutdown wasn’t the Torpedo Room’s first closure due to staffing shortages this year. On March 8, the company announced the taproom had to halt operations without enough people to staff it.
“We know this is disappointing and apologize for the inconvenience,” Sierra Nevada wrote. “We can’t wait to see you again soon.”
The Torpedo Room reopened on March 23 with truncated hours: 12-9 p.m. Wednesday-Sunday, 45 hours per week, compared to the 52-hour weeks reflected in the operating hours listed on its Facebook page.
Sierra Nevada opened the Torpedo Room in 2013 to establish an own-premise foothold in the Bay Area a few years before the craft brewery taproom boom began. The branded space allowed the country’s third-largest craft brewer by volume to offer tasting experiences to drinkers in the closest major metropolitan area to its homebase, about 160 miles south of its Chico headquarters.
The 45-person capacity taproom offered 16 draft lines of Sierra Nevada beers and a light food menu, as well as packaged beer to-go. No beer was brewed on-site.
Sierra Nevada’s other taprooms at its production facilities in Chico and Mills River, North Carolina, are unaffected by the move.
Last year, Sierra Nevada’s production output declined -1%, to 1,103,160 barrels, according to the May/June issue of the Brewers Association’s (BA) New Brewer. Its share of the craft segment declined by -0.42%, to 4.45% – about half of No. 2 craft brewer (Boston Beer, 7.26%) and nearly twice that of the next largest (Duvel Moortgat USA, 2.73%).
Off-premise dollar sales of Sierra Nevada, the nation’s 12th largest beer category vendor in scan data, have declined -1.4%, to $170.4 million, year-to-date through July 10, according to market research firm IRI.
However, off-premise data does not include sales of distributed on-premise draft or at-the-brewery sales, two metrics in which craft brewers such as Sierra Nevada often over-index.
According to BA chief economist Bart Watson’s mid-year reporting and analysis, craft has yet to return to pre-pandemic levels. Seasonally adjusted sales at food service and drinking places during the first half of 2022 showed improvement compared to the first half of 2021, although January ’22 sales started from a lower baseline than where July ’22 sales left off, according to U.S. Census Bureau monthly retail trade data shared by Watson. Food service and drinking place sales increased +15% for H1 2022 compared to last year (+24% before controlling for inflation).
Sierra Nevada is hardly the first craft brewer to abandon a satellite location since the COVID-19 pandemic indelibly altered standard operating procedures for the hospitality industry.
Last October, Bend, Oregon-headquartered Deschutes Brewery shuttered its taproom in Roanoke, Virginia, after deciding the impossibility of converting the space to allow for on-site production and the inability to sell packaged beer to-go made the location no longer viable. Also that month, Escondido, California-headquartered Stone Brewing closed its Napa taproom, the brewery’s only foothold in Northern California, after a legal battle over rent payments during the pandemic.
In April, BrewDog USA – the U.S.-based operating arm of the Scottish craft brewer – closed its Indianapolis taproom, the first it opened outside Ohio, its U.S. home base. BrewDog’s Indianapolis location made headlines in March 2021 after a manager terminated three women and one non-binary person. All four belonged to the LGBTQ community and were told they were being dismissed because the company “wanted a change in culture.” After an internal investigation, BrewDog USA also terminated the manager who approved the firing.
In October 2020, pandemic-driven restrictions drove Kings & Convicts to shutter Ballast Point’s Chicago taproom. The closure wasn’t the first time Ballast Point had shed an own-premise location. Its previous owner, Constellation Brands, shut down the San Diego-based brand’s Trade Street barrel-aging facility in San Diego and its Temecula-based taproom in 2019 and scrapped plans for a San Francisco taproom.
Munster, Indiana-headquartered Three Floyds indefinitely closed its taproom in May 2020 and announced the shutdown would be permanent in December 2020.
Before the pandemic, Petaluma, California-based Lagunitas Brewing closed its Portland, Oregon “community room” in October 2019, amid a rash of other Portland-based brewers shutting down in the span of several weeks.