Morgantown Brewing: Pivoting to success

Today’s Morgantown Brewing Company (MBC), is a wonderful example of how a staid, old brewery tied to an oppressive business model can be reinvented and come out the other side, updated, enthusiastic, and growing.

Four years ago when Cody Cheesebrough and Chris DeFazio bought Morgantown Brewing, it was a brewery that appeared tired and out-of-date. It seemed to struggle with beer quality and struggle to compete in statewide beer distribution. It was becoming increasingly less relevant as the West Virginia craft beer community focused its attention on newer, more exciting breweries, such as Weathered Ground, Big Timber, Stumptown Ales, and Chestnut Brew Works. Buying a business like MBC was surely a risky move.

Today, the sun is shining on Morgantown Brewing.

The overarching lesson we learn from their story is that you can successfully transform a brewery, but you need to be brave, bold, caring, and flexible. It took two guys who were well-grounded in business basics, saw the big picture, exercised good judgement, and had a strong moral compass. They showed dogged determination in moving the pile, but were equally adept at pivoting around obstacles.

Listen in to our West Virginia Beer Roads podcast as Erin and Charles interview Chris and Cody to get their take on transforming a stagnant brewery operation into a growing, exciting business enterprise.

It’s not just about beer

It’s not just about brewing beer. So much of what they accomplished is in the peripheral environment. Here are some examples:

• treating employees well so turnover is no longer a problem,
• improving the bottom line by cutting off the low-margin distribution program and focusing on building taproom sales,
• creating an exotic beer image that attracts new customers in preferred demographics and greatly increases social media mentions,
• developing a series of in-house special events that create excitement, bring out large crowds, and generate high profits, and
• cutting back on and focusing food menu selections to improve order times, reduce waste and increase profitability.

Moving beer quality to the front

Speaking of their beers, Chris and Cody, who also share leadership of the brewing activities, have developed a beer menu that is day and night ahead of what they inherited when they began. Just looking at their 23 new beer releases in 2021 alone, those beers collected 2,592 unique customer ratings on Untappd and scored, on average, a very strong 3.90. This placed Morgantown Brewing among the top 4 highest scoring and most often reviewed breweries in West Virginia for new beer releases in 2021. That is an impressive accomplishment.

Morgantown Brewing Company LINKS

Past Morgantown Brewing podcast
Morgantown Brewing Facebook page