Our Brewery Index flagged 79 US breweries with at least one closure signal across Google, Yelp or Foursquare. We already knew most of those flags were noise on their own, single-source and unconfirmed. What we hadn’t done yet was go after the smallest ones specifically, the true nanobreweries, the ones too small for national coverage but real enough that a local newsroom usually covers them when they close.
So we took the 10 lowest-volume breweries on our flagged list, ranked by historical Untappd check-ins, and ran each one through a real news search before writing a word about any of them. Same rule we used building the original Index: a Google or Yelp flag alone is not a closure, a real dated article is.
Nine of Ten Held Up
- The Rambling Root, Fairmont, WV, closed October 2023 after 7 years. No reason given in the closure post.
- Berkeley Springs Brewing Company, Berkeley Springs, WV, final day May 30, 2026. Co-owner Denise Wagenbrenner told a local outlet: “We have made the difficult decision to liquidate.” Both locations, tanks and equipment went to auction.
- Smug Brewing, Pawtucket, RI, closed August 30, 2025. The owners told a local paper it wasn’t a business failure so much as burnout: “after years of pouring ourselves into the business, we’re ready to explore new directions.”
- Salty Nut Brewery, Huntsville, AL, closed July 31, 2023. Founded 2011, bought by another Huntsville brewery, Straight to Ale, in 2020 specifically to keep it alive. It closed anyway three years later.
- Zony Mash Beer Project, New Orleans, LA, closed June 1, 2025 after 5 years. The Louisiana Craft Brewers Guild’s own president pointed to the state’s restrictive brewery laws (no serving cocktails or wine on-site) as a contributing factor, on top of rising costs and competition.
- 405 Brewing Co., Norman, OK, closed both locations in November 2025 after 11 years, Norman’s first production brewery. Founded by two lifelong friends who started brewing at home.
- Rebel Kettle Brewing, Little Rock, AR, rebranded to East Sixth Brewing under new ownership in mid-2020, then East Sixth itself closed that December, citing the pandemic.
- Longdrop Cider Company (a cidery, not a brewery, it showed up on our brewery-flagged list anyway and the closure checked out just the same), Boise, ID, tasting room closed August 2019. The oldest case here, and a reminder that our flagged list catches closures spanning years, not just the last one or two.
- Beer On Earth, Providence, RI, confirmed closed by three independent directories (Untappd’s own listing says “no longer in business”), though we could not find a single dated news article naming when or why.
One Case We’re Not Counting as Confirmed
LineSider Brewing Company, East Greenwich, RI, has its Rhode Island corporate registration revoked as of September 29, 2025. That is real evidence something changed, but it’s a state filing, not a news article, and we didn’t find press coverage naming this specific brewery as closed. We’re flagging it here as likely closed rather than counting it as confirmed, the same distinction we drew for 61 of the original 79 flagged breweries in the Brewery Index.
What Actually Killed Them
No single cause shows up across all nine. That’s worth saying plainly, because it means there isn’t a tidy narrative here, just several real, different, small businesses hitting different walls:
- Tenure didn’t protect anyone. 405 Brewing lasted 11 years. The Rambling Root lasted 7. Neither long run stopped the eventual closure.
- Being acquired specifically to survive didn’t work either. Salty Nut was bought by a competitor in 2020 explicitly to keep the brand alive in the local scene. It still closed three years later.
- Regulation showed up as a named factor once. Zony Mash’s closure is the only one where an industry figure on the record pointed to state law (Louisiana’s restrictions on what a brewery can serve) as a real contributing cause, not just costs.
- Burnout, not failure, was the stated reason at least once. Smug Brewing’s owners were explicit that this wasn’t a business collapsing, it was two people choosing to stop.
How This Connects to the Bigger Picture
These nine sit inside the same national pattern we cited building the cost-crisis piece: Brewers Association figures put 2025 at 481 closures against 300 openings, both down from 2024, a maturing and more cautious market rather than a collapse. Eight nanobreweries and one cidery, closing for nine different reasons, is what that national number actually looks like at ground level, not a single crisis but a slow accumulation of small, individually explainable endings.
Our closure-risk score already flagged two Arkansas breweries as the highest-risk operational businesses left in the dataset, Core Brewing & Distilling Co. and StudDuck Beers. Neither has confirmed news coverage of a closure yet, which is exactly why we built that score as a watchlist and not a closure claim. If either shows up in a future news search the way these nine did, we’ll update this piece.
None of the nine stood out in our other cuts of this same dataset either, which is itself worth noting. Salty Nut and 405 Brewing had ordinary, unremarkable social media footprints in our social media data study, nothing that would have flagged them as fragile. Berkeley Springs Brewing’s Yelp and Google review volume sat well within the normal range in the popularity paradox piece, not unusually quiet at all before it announced liquidation. And most of these nine had perfectly ordinary weekly hours by the standard we used in the hours-vs-rating study, open the normal amount, rated the normal amount, right up until they weren’t open anymore. Whatever finally ends a small brewery, it usually isn’t something visible in the numbers ahead of time.
Get the Raw Data
The confirmed-closure details for all nine breweries, plus the one likely-but-unconfirmed case, are in a downloadable CSV: brewery name, location, closure date where known, stated reason where one was given, and the source article for each.
Explore the Data Interactively
We went back to Google Places for each of these nine breweries directly, and every single one is now marked CLOSED_PERMANENTLY, confirming the status flag holds up against real news reporting in every case we checked. What it also turned up: their last known Google ratings ranged from 4.4 to 4.8 out of 5, genuinely well-liked places by the numbers, not businesses that lost customers over quality. Switch between the four views below: years in business before closing, months since each confirmed closure, and the last known Google rating and review count each brewery was carrying right up until it shut.
Frequently Asked Questions
How did you decide which flagged breweries to check?
We took the 79 breweries our Brewery Index already flagged with at least one closure signal from Google, Yelp or Foursquare, then sorted by historical Untappd check-in volume and checked the 10 smallest. Smaller, lower-volume breweries are the ones least likely to get national coverage but most likely to get a local news mention when they close, since they’re usually a fixture in one specific town.
Why not just trust the Google or Yelp closure flag on its own?
Because we’ve already shown it’s unreliable by itself. In the original Brewery Index, only 18 of 79 flagged breweries (23 percent) held up once we cross-checked with a second platform and real news coverage. The rest were single-source noise, a business temporarily closed for renovation, a listing that never got updated, or a genuine data error.
Did any of these breweries reopen or relaunch under new ownership?
Smug Brewing’s owners left the door open to someone else reviving the name, but as of this writing no relaunch has happened. Salty Nut was bought once already, in 2020, specifically to keep it alive, and still closed in 2023. We’ll update this piece if any of the nine reopen.
References
- WDTV, “Fairmont brewery closes its doors after 7 years” (October 9, 2023)
- Brilliant Stream, “Sad day could be opportunity” (May 7, 2026)
- Valley Breeze, “Smug Brewing owners talk sale, changing dynamics” (August 6, 2025)
- AL.com, “Huntsville’s Salty Nut Brewery closing at the end of July” (July 22, 2023)
- Fox 8 Live, “New Orleans’ Zony Mash brewery closing June 1” (April 14, 2025)
- OU Daily, “405 Brewing Co. closing after 11 years of business” (October 27, 2025)
- KATV, “Little Rock’s East Sixth Brewing Co. permanently closes due to pandemic” (December 16, 2020)
- Idaho Statesman, “Longdrop Cider to close tasting room in Downtown Boise” (August 21, 2019)
- Brewers Association, “2026 Midyear Report: Pressure Persists as Signs of Stability Emerge” (July 22, 2026)
