A trio of bills in front of the Texas Legislature could improve the fortunes of the state’s craft brewing businesses. Credit: Shutterstock / Anton Vierietin

As Texas weathers a storm of craft brewery closures, Mad Pecker Brewing could be the next to go.

“We might not make it through the month,” Jason Gonzales, owner of the Northwest San Antonio brewpub, told the Current.

Mad Pecker produces about a dozen beers in-house and also offers pizza, sandwiches and burgers from its kitchen. The business opened during 2015’s craft-brewery boom, when the industry grew 16% nationwide, according to the Brewers Association.

However, since the pandemic, Mad Pecker and its 11 full-time employees have struggled to keep the taps flowing. Its slump comes as high-profile Alamo City beer operations Busted Sandal Brewing Co. and Weathered Souls Brewing Co. recently closed due to economic pressures.

“Coming out of COVID, we haven’t been able to generate the revenue,” Gonzales said. “There’s a lack of people coming through the door.”

The Texas Craft Brewers Guild launched a program this spring which it hopes can offer a lifeline for Gonzales and other struggling brewers across the state.

The guild’s Brew City, TX initiative works to promote craft breweries as tourist destinations and encourages municipal governments to help bolster the businesses, officials with the trade association said. Through the program, the guild can help organize craft beer events and provide municipalities and breweries with marketing, public relations and press materials.

The Texas Craft Brewers Guild also can connect cities to entrepreneurs looking for space to expand or open a brewery.

To date, 30 Texas cities have paid the annual $350 fee and joined Brew City, TX. That far exceeded the guild’s expectations, according to Executive Director Caroline Wallace.

“Boerne was the first city to join,” Wallace said. “We got a lot of emails from small towns that wanted a brewery.”

The guild helped organize Boerne’s Bock Walk in May, a promotional event for the six breweries based in the town north of San Antonio. Boerne and New Braunfels are the closest Brew Cities to San Antonio, with Austin being the largest Brew City so far.

“Most Brew Cities are small and mid-size communities,” Wallace explained.

Big cities slow to join

The guild contacted the City of San Antonio, Visit SA and other destination-marketing organizations to get the Alamo City on board with the program. While Wallace said she’d love to see SA take a more active role in promoting its breweries, she acknowledges that it may take a while before big cities take a shine to the effort.

Mad Pecker’s Gonzales said he sees how the Brew City initiative could help promote craft-beer tourism. However, it’s likely too late to help his business, he said.

“There needs to be a lot more done locally,” Gonzales said. “It’d be nice to see something from the city.”

He pointed to a tourism commercial paid for by the Houston suburb of Conroe as an example of something a city can do to promote its craft-beer businesses.

“In the commercial, you see all the breweries in Conroe,” Gonzales said. “The City of Conroe put that together.”

Too little too late?

Mad Pecker has raised beer prices nearly 20% since Gonzales opened it nine years ago, but the brewing side of the business still isn’t making the kind of money it should. Part of the problem, he acknowledges, is that the Culebra Commons shopping center, five minutes down the road, has opened chain restaurants that have cut into his customer count.

“When we opened there was no Stone Werks, no Bubba’s,” he said. “It’s hard to compete with restaurants.”

Gonzales is weighing whether to end brewing operations and operate solely as a restaurant. He also could scale back the beer-production side of the business to improve the bottom line.

“If my survivability meant I had to close the brewery and operate as a restaurant, I would do that,” he added.

While brewery openings are still outpacing closures nationwide, according to data from the Brewers Association, Wallace of the Texas Craft Brewers Guild said costs are becoming prohibitive for many brewers around the state. That’s especially true in big urban areas where land is more expensive.

“Breweries that opened 10, 15 years ago have had their rent raised a couple times,” Wallace said.

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This article appears in Oct 16-29, 2024.