On rare occasions, the beer industry produces a perfect metaphor. In 2022, for example, a high-profile California craft brewery called Modern Times Beer soared up the volume charts, overextended itself, and tumbled into insolvency as the segment plateaued and bank notes came due, wiping out the retail investors from its equity crowdfunding campaign. Modern times, indeed.
Three years later and across the Oregon state line, the forces of irony have conspired to imbue another craft brewery’s demise with figurative flourish. In late November, after abruptly idling its distillery and shutting down its taprooms, Rogue Ales & Spirits, a first-wave pioneer out of one of the industry’s fastest-cooling hotbeds, filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, citing nearly $17 million in debts against around $5 million in assets. The maker of Dead Guy Ale going belly up itself? C’mon.
The story of Rogue’s undoing after 37 years in business is still incomplete. Its president, Steven Garrett, did not respond to multiple requests for comment and its bankruptcy filing is a vexing read. Take the $594,178.19 that the company declared it owes to the landlord of its erstwhile distillery in the Port of Newport, for instance. (That debt was first reported by the hometown Lincoln Chronicle.) How does a firm pushing four decades of operation fall so far behind on such a fundamental line item as rent? For that matter, given the vagaries of the real estate market for breweries, why was it renting at all?
“After 37 years, a brewer still paying rent is like a 37-year-old paying rent to live in a friend’s garage apartment,” Lester Jones, the chief economist of the National Beer Wholesalers Association, wrote on LinkedIn. “In these economic times, renting is almost a death sentence. The industry suffers from excess supply and too much capacity with little ability to take price … as everything including rent goes up, it’s a simple recipe for disaster.”
There’s no doubt that Rogue’s apparent collapse is disastrous — if not for its owners and creditors, then certainly for its workers, some hundreds of whom are now out of jobs in a worsening economy. (It’s not clear how many employees Rogue had when it closed; local news reported as many as 500, but I’ve also heard numbers far lower than that. If you have more information, get in touch: [email protected] or dinfontay.11 on Signal.) But it’s also instructive. Rogue’s bankruptcy is the kicker to what may wind up being the most quintessential rise-and-fall story this industry has yet authored. To understand where craft brewing is going, we must examine how Rogue — still a top-50 volume player on the Brewers Association’s (BA) 2024 list, mind you, despite years of waning cachet and sales — arrived here.
The first thing to understand is that Rogue has been around for a long time. Not like, “Yuengling long,” or “Anchor Brewing Co. long,” or even “Boston Beer Co. long,” but no spring chicken bock, either. The brewery opened in 1988, which makes it 37 years old; as it happens, I’m the same age, but there’s a dog years/human years dynamic to consider, and besides, I haven’t been pumping out columns that whole time. (Thank goodness for that.) Median middle age for American people is just over 39, per the United States Census’s 2024 population estimate. I’m not aware of similar data for craft breweries, but the figure is certainly lower, given that more than half of all BA-tracked firms in the country opened within the past 10 years. The year Rogue opened, the U.S. had 199 breweries. Setting aside Yuengling (a craft brewery in BA parlance, but not really in the eyes of rank-and-file drinkers) and a few other notable exceptions, this is no country for old craft breweries, and Rogue is — or was — one.
The second thing to remember is that in Rogue’s heyday, it was in the vanguard, even among its peers. The firm “had come to be seen as a legacy brewery in all the wrong ways,” wrote Jeff Alworth, longtime Oregon beer journalist and author of “The Beer Bible,” in a mid-November blog post at Beervana ruminating on the sudden, slapdash closure of the firm’s six taprooms. (The bankruptcy filing hit the wire Nov. 24.) “This is a curious coda, if this is indeed the end of the line, for a brewery that was for decades known largely for its innovation and experimentation. Well into the 21st century, Rogue was trying stuff no other brewery in the country was considering.”
If you’re a relatively recent convert to craft beer… well, for one thing, the BA is going to want to study you in a lab for clues on how the segment can attract new drinkers, so beware any unmarked vans. But more importantly, Alworth’s claim about Rogue may sound incredible to you. It’s true! Early on, Rogue began selling big, bold beers in high-margin 22-ounce bombers that became a visual shorthand and a key differentiator for the segment. Hell, it moved into craft distilling in 2003, frontrunning that beverage-alcohol boom by a decade. Its founding brewer, John Maier, nerded out on styles that the American drinking public was even less prepared for then than now — oatmeal stouts, barleywines, and, of course, a few years after opening, a hoppy Maibock called Dead Guy Ale. It’s a brutal cliché to liken a craft brewery to the lair of a mad scientist these days, and almost always a gross overexaggeration to boot. But there was an era when some of them really were pushing the envelope of zymurgy and commerce. Dogfish Head Brewery is a more prominent example, thanks to its bleeding-edge beers, and the charisma and good looks of its founding brewer, Sam Calagione. But Rogue very much belongs in that conversation.
Less tangible, but no less germane to Rogue’s rise, was the company’s braggadocio. Its Soviet-inflected aesthetic is one of the most explicit reflections of the dominant narrative of craft brewing’s first wave as a grassroots revolution against corporate swill and the suits that pushed it. The firm rapidly expanded into national distribution, and became one of the first U.S. craft breweries to export its wares abroad in 1993, at a time when there was plenty of domestic thirst still available for the quenching. It challenged its customers with “steep prices and a stand-offish attitude [that] alienated locals,” wrote Alworth in 2018, noting that Rogue was then the 42nd-largest U.S. brewery by volume, but wasn’t even among the top 10 best-selling beer brands in its home state, a bizarre mismatch.
Rogue’s posture toward its workforce would become more notorious. The header on its website’s careers page for many years demanded to know, “Are you Rogue enough to work here?” Below it, a reactionary screed that read in part:
We believe “Job Security” is a myth, seniority is not fair. God gave us 1 mouth and 2 ears for a reason, win-win is a book title not a reality, the risk of insult is the price of clarity, thinking, problem solving, courage are more important than WPM or other computer skills, but we do have pet and legal insurance, 401K match, phantom plan, 2 paid holidays, bad health insurance like most others not paid for by us for Government staff, hurt feelings report.
We do not plan, budget, forecast, or waste time on getting bigger. We only wish to get better.
One 2013 listing for an IT director was so sneeringly exploitative it went viral, promising applicants “[w]e’ll work your behind off but this is not a $50+k position.” Two years earlier, Rogue had busted a union drive. Talk of a brewery bathroom labeled “Human Resources” is easy to find on social media; talk of positive experiences working at said brewery is much harder.
Rogue never made it to the pinnacle of the craft brewing volume charts. It topped out around 117,000 barrels a year in 2014, making it an order of magnitude smaller than Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. today, and just a third of fellow condescension peddler Stone Brewing at its own peak midway through last decade. But having risen to the segment’s upper echelons on the strength of its genuinely compelling beers, remarkable foresight, and swaggering branding, Rogue began to lose steam last decade as second-wave craft breweries, mid-majors, and macrobrewers all crowded into the beer aisle. Its assets became liabilities: its liquid dated, its vision dimmed, its attitude more tone deaf than tantalizing. The considerable real estate footprint, once a marker of the firm’s forward-thinking approach to branded retail, couldn’t have helped.
Rogue wasn’t the only big craft brewery from its era to find itself on the outside looking in on the party it had helped to start. Stone especially comes to mind thanks to its outspoken founder Greg Koch’s proclivity for holier-than-thou paeans to independence and screeds against those who had “sold out,” but there are others — Lagunitas, for example, or BBC’s Samuel Adams. The market started moving fast, with the pendulum swinging back from an artisanal value proposition to a commodity one as newer, nimbler competitors crowded the lane. The bankruptcy filing suggests the business was mismanaged — a cautionary tale others would do well to heed. But upstream of that, like so many breweries of a certain age, Rogue fell behind the American drinking public. Prudent efforts to trim its portfolio and spin Dead Guy into a Voodoo Ranger-style brand family came too little, too late.
Somebody will probably buy Rogue’s intellectual property, if not the rest of its assets. The brand may live on. But its run as the boundary-pushing, industry-advancing brewery that first opened its doors in 1988 is over. The rise and fall of that brewery offers myriad lessons for those that remain. Among the block-and-tackle stuff (”pay your rent,” “win your home market,” “update your branding,” etc.) is a more philosophical message. Every brewery that was once cool will someday not be, and it will still have bills to pay. Or, to dip back into metaphor: You can’t go Rogue forever.
🤯 Hop-ocalypse Now
Shortly after Donald Trump retook power in Washington, D.C., in early 2025, importing beer from Mexico went from a relatively straightforward business dictated by decades of reliable trade law and practice to, uh, not that. While beer is compliant with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), the administration’s corrupt, destructive trade war has forced macrobrewers to rethink how they do business across our southern border. It’s a particularly thorny problem for Constellation Brands, which is under consent decree to produce Modelo and Corona in its Mexican megabreweries stemming from Anheuser-Busch’s spinoff of those brands in 2013. Less so for Heineken, owner of Tecate and Dos Equis. Last month, City Brewing filed paperwork with the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) to begin contract-brewing select SKUs of those brands stateside. A company spokesperson tells Hop Take that “this isn’t new for us,” but declined to offer specifics about the move. If nothing else, as a beautiful reminder that borders are fake and nothing matters — or at least, that import status doesn’t really matter to the American drinking public.
📈 Ups…
The Brewers Association’s keynote speaker for the 2026 Craft Brewers Conference will be Will Guidara, author of “Unreasonable Hospitality” and a fixture on the speaking circuit… Tilray Brands finally implemented that reverse stock split scheme it had paused in August, helping to guard against getting delisted from the NASDAQ… Hell yes, Notch Brewing is doing schnitt-sized cans of Zwickel Bier as smaller packages continue to gain momentum…
📉 …and downs
Tilray is closing yet another craft brewery — this time Revolver’s location in Granbury, Texas… The TTB is working through a big ol’ backlog from the government shutdown, with a goal of handling 85 percent of label applications within 75 days… Torch & Crown closed its original Soho location after a dispute with its landlord over use of a crucial outdoor space…
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