Lost River Brewing Company, a retrospective

When I got the news that Lost River Brewing Company closed at the end of January, it started me thinking. Although I only visited there a few times during its roughly nine years of existence, I liked the place. I think it had a significance beyond the small size of its annual production. I mean, how many towns with a population of 271 have their own local brewery? (2010 Census)

I met the original proprietors of Lost River Brewing Company, briefly, in Chicago back in April of 2010. We were all attending the annual conference of the Brewers Association, the national trade group for small breweries.

Scott and Sandi Stambaugh, Lost River’s founders, were a nice younger couple, who had come over to West Virginia from northern Virginia. Scott was an experienced homebrewer, and the two of them opened their pub in Wardensville in 2009 and began selling their own beer around Feburary 2010. I remember thinking at the time that opening a brewpub with just a homebrew-sized half-barrel brewing system could be a risky move when it came to earning enough money to make a living. All I knew about Wardensville, then, was that it was a tiny little town deep in the mountains near the Virginia border. Could this possibly be a good place for a brewery, I wondered.

The Stambaugh’s experience schooled me a little on the changes folks were beginning to see in that area. Having resided and worked in the D.C. metro themselves, they knew other people from that area were also buying property and spending weekends in and around Wardensville. With the town only 100 miles from D.C., it was very accessible to those wanting a break from the Beltway rat race. The Stambaughs sensed a coming boom and wanted to participate in it.

This was back before the craft brewery explosion, which today has so energized beer in northern Virginia and Washington, D.C. Back in 2009, there was no Port City Brewing, no Aslin, no Mad Fox, no Crooked Run, no Corcoran, no Lost Rhino, no Adroit Theory, no Bad Wolf, no Old Busthead, no (Three) Brothers, no Blue Jacket, no 3 Stars. DC Brau had only opened that same year. Throughout the whole region, local craft beer was still in its infancy.

Wardensville, a town in transition

I’ll have to say, the Stambaughs were right about Wardensville. It is changing. These days, it attracts lots of folks from the D.C. metro. The area has received plenty of news coverage discussing this. (The Washington Post 1  2 )

Lost River Brewing was definitely on the leading edge of the local brewery movement, which has now swept over the region. I figure the Stambaughs were probably just a bit too early in the craft beer market development cycle. They maybe didn’t have all the parts you needed to make a go of it in the bar and restaurant business in a town that was just then starting to draw people ready to spend money there. Since John was working two jobs (his D.C. job and the brewery), I think he found it difficult to put in sufficient time at the brewery. So, for their own reasons, the Stambaughs decided to close the business and put it up for sale in the late summer of 2010.

Myers moves to the mountains

Enter Walter “Wally” Myers, a Chesapeake-Bay-area Virginia restaurateur, who took over the brewpub business in November 2010. He put his sons Adam and Daniel in charge of operating it. Daniel would serve as Lost River’s executive chef. Adam would run the brewery. Due to a string of difficulties obtaining a West Virginia brewery license, they did not get their final brewing permits until late 2011, more than a full year after buying the place.

Calling in help to get the beer flowing

Adam Myers was a not a brewer by trade but was determined to learn commercial brewing so he could get the brewpub back in the beer business. Lost River made a good move early on by seeking some outside advice.

“I got a call from Adam,” remembered Daniel Maerzluft, now head brewer at Antietam Brewery in Hagerstown, Maryland. “They had heard about me from my time at Mountaineer Brewing (in Martinsburg, WV).”

Adam and Wally had some questions about brewing on the little half-barrel SABCO Brew-Magic system they had obtained when they purchased the business. They asked Maerzluft if he would come over and take a look at their system and show Adam a thing or two.

Maerzluft made trips over to Wardensville and helped brew some beer with Adam. This took place off and on over several months. Adam used Mearzluft to review his beer recipes and make sure everything looked good.

“He was a really nice guy,” Maerzluft added. “Adam and I spent a lot of time together talking in those months, I know the town was difficult for those guys.”

He got the impression that some folks there didn’t want a brewery in town. Fortunately, over time, as the town begin to change, it would warm up and embrace Lost River Brewing as one of the town’s business cornerstones.

Lost River beer back on tap

Once Lost River Brewing got its state permits, Adam’s beer finally hit the taps in January 2012. He continued brewing on the original half-barrel system, making a small series of beers to serve in the restaurant bar. The Black Ale, which was a malty, dark brown English porter with a little American hop twist, turned out to be his best beer, one the brewery continued to brew until it closed.

One thing the Myers family did early on was seriously upgrade Lost River Brewing’s restaurant operation. Due to their Chesapeake Bay connections, the restaurant always featured fresh seafood items along with premium restaurant fare of steaks, chops, and poultry. Popular specialty items included their bison meatloaf, oysters on the half shell, and jumbo lump crab cakes. By Wardensville standards, the place was very up-scale, like something you’d see around D.C., and it was said more than once that they also charged D.C. prices. The restaurant and bar seemed to cater to tourists more than to local residents. While the service could often be slow, the food was usually solid and garnered generally good reviews on TripAdvisor and Yelp. Patrons did occasionally grouse on social media about the cost of pints ($6) and growler fills ($19).

As Adam got his brewing legs under him, the house-made beers were usually pretty good. He developed a real affinity for the brewery side of the business and soon got his family to invest in upgrading the brewing equipment. In 2013, they made a major investment in a nice seven-barrel brewing system and tanks built for them by Portland Kettleworks in Portland, Oregon. This gave them much greater capacity than they needed in their restaurant and allowed Lost River to go into the distribution market.

Lost River Brewing hits distribution market

Instead of starting out with self-distributing, they decided to sign up with beer distributors. In the summer of 2013, Adam put four beers into distribution through their local Northern Eagle Distributing, which would also get them access to other parts of the state through the then Eagle network of Anheuser-Busch distributors. Initially included in distribution were the flagships Black Ale, Pale Ale, Amber Ale, and West Virginia Common, and occasionally a seasonal. The brewery would later switch its distribution to North Central Distributors.

The Black Ale and the West Virginia Common seemed to be the two most popular products. While one might show up now and then around the state, it was not common to find a Lost River beer beyond the eastern panhandle and Morgantown areas during the 2013-2015 years. But if you visited the brewpub, you were often treated to some tasty specialty products. One that Adam was quite proud of was a wet-hopped Harvest Wheat IPA, which included 120 lbs. of local Cascade hops, grown over in Staunton, Virginia.

During this time, Adam would set up his table at a few West Virginia beer festivals and seemed to enjoy the camaraderie of the brewing community. I remember talking with him at the 2014 Bramwell Oktoberfest and hearing his enthusiasm when discussing the beer he was brewing.

John Yevuta, who writes the West Virginia column in Mid-Atlantic Brewing News, says he liked Adam a lot and that Adam would always go out of his way to spend time with him when he visited the brewery. He also remembers Adam attending festivals.

“One of my fondest memories,” Yevuta said, “was at Brew Skies (Craft Beer & Music Festival) when Adam brought a bushel of fresh oysters and shared them with my wife and me.”

Sam Mauzy, co-founder of Big Timber Brewing Company, says he too remembers Adam bringing those oysters to Brew Skies. He said they were so good paired with the Black Ale. Mauzy enjoyed several of Adam’s beers, especially the West Virginia Common and Black Ale.

Exit Adam, enter Ray

Things changed as 2015 arrived and Adam left Lost River Brewing to devote his time to other projects. Later that year, the brewery hired Ray Waszczak as its brewer.

Coming from the Pittsburgh area, Ray was a good homebrewer and brought his own brewing ideas with him. While he was required to keep brewing Lost River’s flagships, he would have the freedom to brew some up-and-coming craft beer styles, as well as some more obscure ones. In late 2015, John Yevuta wrote in Mid-Atlantic Brewing News that Ray added local produce to some of his beers, including a “spiced ale with sweet potatoes and a Belgian ale featuring red beets.”

When I stopped in to see Ray in June 2016, he was brewing a Double IPA with Huell Melon and Galaxy hops, exclusively for the pub. He told me he was interested in brewing a Grodziskie, which is an old Polish-style ale made from oak-smoked wheat malt and imported Polish Lublin hop. His interest in Polish beer came from his grandfather who was a native of Poland. I don’t know if he ever got to make the Grodziskie, but I hope he did.

Waszczak brewed the flagship beers, like Black Ale and West Virginia Common, on the 7-barrel system, but would most often be brewing small-batch, specialty beers for the pub on the 15-gallon SABCO system. Sometime in the last half of 2017, Wally Myers made the decision to sell his 7-barrel brewing system and tanks. Once it was sold, Waszczak would continue brewing on the little SABCO to supply the restaurant with beer until the business closed.

Brown paper covered windows

When the end of January 2018 rolled by, brown-paper-covered  windows hinted that Lost River Brewing Company was no more. No formal announcement was made, no news release, just a quiet building where a business once stood. The brewery’s Facebook page and website had no mention of its closing. (A message did appear briefly on the brewery Facebook page before it was shut down.) No coverage was found in the county newspaper. As of mid-February, Lost River Brewing was still listed as Wardensville’s #1 restaurant on TripAdvisor. Folks posted dining reviews on Yelp up through mid-January.

The closing was pretty abrupt. Not even their beer distributor got a heads-up. Mike Folio, vice-president of North Central Distributors, said they sent a truck over to see what was going on and found the place locked up tight.

“They did not notify us that they were closing.” he said. “We stopped by on Monday (Feb. 12), and it was totally shut down.

Folks associated with two other Wardensville businesses told me they heard that the Lost River Brewing owners had not been able to renegotiate their lease. The previous five-year lease was about to end, so the owners closed it up. However, one of owners of the building that housed Lost River Brewing said the closing had nothing to do with the lease. So it’s not clear just what caused the brewery to call it quits. No one offered any additional insight on other factors that led to the closing.

People tell me the town is busy recruiting a new restaurant operator to take over Lost River Brewing’s building. They hope the new business would also include a brewpub, with brewing equipment scaled more for supplying only their own pub. Expect that if such an announcement is made, Brilliant Stream will cover it.

If a tree falls in the woods, does it make a sound?

“It’s a shame to see one leave our brewing community,” said Sam Mauzy, who also serves as president of the WV Craft Brewers Guild. “It’s the first one we’ve lost since 2011.”

Beyond Mauzy, other WV brewers, and the folks in Wardensville, I don’t think many will mourn the loss. It’s kind of sad to me, but Lost River Brewing Company probably won’t be missed by many craft beer drinkers. There are just too many other good beer options today — too many very good breweries in West Virginia and elsewhere.

While Lost River Brewing had some decent beers, their flagship line-up was a bit dated. I never got the impression that they brewed or sold very much beer. The Brewers Association listed Lost River’s production at a generous 400 barrels for 2016. The number in 2017 was very likely less. That would mean they brewed only about four of five batches per month on their 7-barrel system — not a very efficient use of an expensive brewhouse that is capable of brewing a batch or two a day.

The brewery was so remote to most of West Virginia that it was easily overlooked. Out of sight, out of mind. As the number of West Virginia’s local breweries rapidly grew during the 2010s, there just weren’t many tap handles available for an average-quality local beer from Wardensville. Though they had a good head start, Lost River Brewing was soundly surpassed by newer mountain-town breweries such as Big Timber, Stumptown, and Berkeley Springs, who all brewed harder and distributed smarter.

Rich Ireland, an owner of Arrowhead Bike Farm in Fayetteville and former beer columnist for the Charleston Gazette, sold an occasional one-sixth-barrel of Lost River Black Ale last summer at the Bike Farm’s tavern. Upon hearing the brewery had closed, he commented that it’s getting harder in this market for little breweries offering mostly basic, traditional styles of beer to make a go of it in distribution.

Lost River’s attempts at making interesting new specialty beers never really caught on with the wider craft beer community, probably because most of them were only brewed 15 gallons at a time on their half-barrel SABCO system. Few went into distribution.

Lost River beers generated relatively few check-ins on Untappd. Through the years, most of those who did check-in Lost River brews gave them mediocre to mid-pack ratings. While no one should think Untappd is the be-all end-all, it is an indicator of a brewery’s market presence. In roughly six years, from March 2012 through mid-February 2018, Untappd showed Lost River with 1,919 unique beer ratings averaging an overall score of 3.34 out of 5. That’s near the lowest score of any brewery in West Virginia. For comparison purposes, Berkeley Springs Brewing, during its 2.5 years in business, has already collected over 2,500 ratings averaging 3.59. Stumptown Ales, in its 2.5 years, has collected 5,380 ratings averaging 3.91. Big Timber Brewing, in its 3.5 years, has collected 19,923 ratings averaging 3.7.

Lost River Brewing seemed caught in that middle, grey area that is so tough for a brewery. It had way more brewing capacity than it needed for its restaurant and bar, but wasn’t adept at selling beer in distribution. It couldn’t or wouldn’t commit employees to get out on the road and regularly promote its beer in other bars and restaurants. It likely spent little money on marketing its beer. It never created a buzz about its beer of the kind necessary to get a distributor to sell much of it for them, or for consumers or bars to demand it. They were stuck with flagship beer styles that were getting long in the tooth and receiving mostly mediocre to mid-pack ratings. In the final analysis, they never developed the beer-making or beer-marketing savvy needed to be a factor in our increasingly competitive craft beer market.

Lost River Brewing, a retrospective

In Wardensville, Lost River Brewing was known primarily as a restaurant with a nice bar. Folks seemed to think of it as a restaurant first, and a brewery second. Maybe that’s the way the owners intended it. And even though their restaurant had business, who knows if they really made any money on the food side. Many restaurants don’t.

Running a brewpub with a full-service, premium restaurant, along with a distribution brewery, is the riskiest end of the brewery business. There are so many parts that you have to get right. If one of them breaks, it puts real drag on your business.

While we honestly do not know the reasons that caused Lost River Brewing to close, in the end, it probably doesn’t matter. Maybe the family decided it had other, more important priorities; maybe there were personal issues; maybe they wanted to cut their losses; maybe they were just worn out, worn down, or pissed off. I don’t know. I do know it had a good run and lasted longer than I thought it might. I had some good dinners there. I had some good beers there. I enjoyed the people I met there. I’ll miss them.

West Virginia’s brewery businesses have been remarkably stable while the state has undergone a rapid expansion in the number of breweries. Lost River is the first West Virginia brewery to close since Mountaineer Brewing stopped brewing in late 2010, officially closing in 2011. During that time 22 more breweries have opened. Four or five  more could open this year.