Two Vermont crafts may soon be one.
In a very good and newsworthy post yesterday, Andy Crouch revealed that Long Trail Brewing is going to buy Otter Creek/Wolaver Brewing. Both are located in Vermont and such a merger would be another major step along the increasingly traveled road of craft brewery consolidation of late.
In his discussion of the story, Andy touches on the proverbial elephant in the room for the craft segment: a lot of the early pioneers are getting a bit long in the tooth.
Just consider, as Andy notes in passing, how many crafts celebrated 20th anniversaries in recent years. At the very least, he suggests, ownership of some very familiar businesses will shift in the decade ahead, either to other members of the family or outsiders or as a result of being bought up by a competitor.
A good story and one that should generate some discussion.
I should acknowledge that I got the news through Lew, who was up and on the job later than I last night. Not surprisingly, he brought the events at Penn Brewing in Pittsburgh into the mix as well. Whenever the Big Fella travels to the other side of the state, he tends to come back and wax poetic about virtually every single thing he did there.
I made one of those trips with him a few years ago and I can tell you from personal experience that he beams from ear to ear the entire time he’s within the boundaries of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers and driving over all those bridges. He is so confident and at ease there that (true story) he can knock on an absolute stranger’s door in a motel in the wee small hours and ask to come in and use the bathroom and get away with it.
Lew lived in Pittsburgh for a while back in the day and obviously has great memories of those times, which likely accounts for his posting pattern when he gets back home. Others might quarrel with that interpretation, of course, and suggest instead that singing the praises of the state’s second city is merely an uncontrollable manifestation of his latent and deep-seated dislike of all things Philadelphia, but anyone doing that would obviously be intent on nothing more than causing mischief and and that just wouldn’t be right.
Yes.