Is a craft beer apocalypse coming to Atlanta?

Craft beer sales fell 2% nationally last year, with more than 385 breweries closing their doors.

Photograph by Klaus Vedfelt/Getty Images

When Sam Kazmer ranks 2023 as the worst year of his life, we know it’s serious. After all, in 2017, the former Army Ranger fell several hundred feet to the ground in a horrific skydiving accident that forced him to take early retirement and undergo months of rehabilitation. What could be worse than that?

It turns out it’s a profession.

Last year, Sam and Sara Kazmer, the husband-and-wife duo behind Atlanta’s Elsewhere Brewing, were struggling to run their Grant Park taproom while opening a second outpost in Midtown. Sales had declined so much that closure was imminent, and an unpleasant thought gradually occurred to them: perhaps people had lost their taste for local beer. Shouldn’t they be somewhere other than Elsewhere?

“There were days when we looked around and just thought: Oh yeah, we’re screwed“, Sam said. “We were going in and out of bankruptcy.”

The story of the Kazmers is more common than expected. Craft beer had its gold rush in the 2010s, with new breweries opening across the country faster than you could say Hefeweizen. “The theory used to be: Make craft beer and they will come,” Kazmer says. “And it’s just not that anymore.” The beer business has been losing a bit of froth lately — and it’s not entirely Bud Light’s fault.

According to the Brewers Association, craft beer sales fell 2% nationally last year and more than 385 craft breweries closed their doors. More than a dozen have closed their doors in metro Atlanta alone, including Orpheus Brewing, Second Self Beer Co. and Biggerstaff Brewing. Others have contracted, like Sandy Springs-based Pontoon Brewing, which abandoned a second location in Tucker less than a year after launching. Other operators could close their doors later this year.

Atalante from Orpheus Brewing — Orpheus Brewing was among the Atlanta breweries that closed their doors last year.

Who has taken the plunge into craft beer? There is no guilty person. Industry experts and brewers attribute the situation to a range of factors, including rising labor costs, inflation and supply chain issues that have driven up the price of ingredients. “For about 20 years, there were just new brewery openings, openings, openings and virtually no closings,” says Joseph Cortes, executive director of the Georgia Craft Brewers Guild. “Now there is a stabilization, which is the case with small businesses: they certainly go up and down every day.” Cortes denies a coming “beer pocalypse,” but admits that the craft beer scene is “mature,” meaning it may already have peaked.

Still, Cortes and others believe beer still has plenty of room to grow in Georgia, which ranks 44th in the nation in total brewery licenses. Part of the problem is moldy Prohibition-era laws, still on the books in Georgia, that prevent brewers from selling their alcoholic products directly to bars and restaurants. Instead, they are forced to go through middlemen: wholesalers and distributors with their warehouses and beer trucks. In 2023, Orpheus Brewing founder Jason Pellett upped his ante and headed to the greener pastures of the Netherlands; in an essay he wrote for the digital anthology, How I would fix Atlanta, he cited the legal handcuffing of craft beer makers in Georgia as one of the reasons he decided to quit. “You can thank Georgia’s liquor distributors and the deep pockets they have emptied on Peach State lobbyists for decades,” Pellett wrote, “for what results in one of the most unjust alcohol in the whole country.”

To address this problem, a group of bipartisan lawmakers introduced the FOAM Act this year, which would have allowed small brewers to sell up to 6,000 barrels of beer off-site per year. Alas, he failed to make it out of committee, despite the efforts of more than a hundred Georgian brewers who gathered outside the capital, brandishing a petition signed by thousands of customers.

Like other local brewery owners, the Kazmers are fighting to stay in business. They lowered prices and ramped up the programming of daily events like drag brunch and trivia games. Their current slogan: “Survive to 25”.

A version of this article appears in our May 2024 issue.