Decision to close downtown pub ends chapter in the saga of NH’s craft beer industry
Portsmouth Brewery Owners Peter Egelston and Joanne Francis have decided to sell their property rather than reopen, citing the high cost of rebuilding after the downtown business was damaged by flooding last year. (Photo by Laura Cleminson) HOSPITALITY
To use the word “iconoclastic” would be an understatement when addressing Peter Egelston, who co-founded the Portsmouth Brewery in 1991. As I sit on my front porch on a comfortably warm day in late May, sipping my last 2017 Smuttynose Really Old Brown Dog — from another brewery Peter founded — I find it hard to imagine myself witnessing the end of an era. But that is where I find myself, writing a eulogy I never anticipated.
When I saw the post on social media announcing that the Portsmouth Brewery would not be reopening its doors, it was late in the evening, as Paul Simon would say, and it brought a tear to my eye. As one of the first beer podcasters in New Hampshire on “The Tap Handle Show,” I had the privilege of interviewing and befriending Egelston, cofounder of both Smuttynose and the Portsmouth Brewery with his wife, Joanne Francis. We shared war stories, lamented about the current state of affairs, and fantasized about what “beer” could be many times.
When Anheuser-Busch opened a brewery in Merrimack in 1970, nobody thought much about it beyond local jobs. But 20 years passed before anyone else filed for a brewery license in the Granite State, and it was Peter Egelston who shook things up.
Did I mention how good this Really Old Brown Dog is tasting? Forgive me if I lose myself for a moment in the revelry — I have reviewed beer, judged beer, professionally brewed beer, and saved beer in the cellar, and this is a choice old-selection that might never be seen again. Brewing “cellarable” beers is almost a lost art, and both Smuttynose and the Portsmouth Brewery mastered this form.
However, fate is a fickle friend, and the gods of plumbing struck down the Portsmouth Brewery last June with a burst pipe that unleashed 100,000 gallons of water onto one of my favorite watering holes, destroying everything in its path.
“This isn’t how we envisioned winding down our careers in craft brewing,” Egelston said in a recent interview. “In fact, Joanne and I were seriously discussing finding a new owner for the Portsmouth Brewery and handing over the keys to someone else. We hadn’t made much progress when the pipe exploded and flooded the place.”
To trace a step back to the 1990s, when craft beer didn’t exist and supermarkets only sold a few brands, nobody, including Egelston, envisioned anything other than what we now call “macro” (rice-heavy light lagers) ruling the market.
“We used to fantasize about craft beer reaching 3%, then maybe 5%. I remember Kim (Jordan) from New Belgium giving a keynote speech at a craft brewers conference, saying she thought ‘craft’ beer could reach 10% of the market, and everybody just laughed,” Egelston said.
It is now 24.7% of the market. How times have changed. When I asked Egleston what he had been through, he mentioned a few things: the battle of consistency versus relevance, the search for a new production facility, the change in the Portsmouth scene from locals-only to out-of-state thrill seekers, the impact of having a world-recognized beer (Kate the Great), and the punch of social media — all of which resonate with the challenges of our little state.
“Thirty years ago, if you’d asked me what our function was at the Portsmouth Brewery, I would have said we were there to make great beer, serve delicious food, serve our guests and make money,” he said. “But as time went on, it became increasingly clear to me that our real purpose was to create a public space where people could gather.”
As far as their impact on the local scene, and on the beer world, Egelston had little to say. He mentioned how new brewery owners had no idea about the battles that had already been fought with legislation and distribution, how he and Vermont Pub and Brewery founder Greg Noonan and Jim Killeen, founder of Nutfield Brewing in Derry, had already fought them decades ago.
Egelston referenced opening the 75th small brewery in the country, when there are now almost 10,000, and being not only the first small brewery in New Hampshire but the first brewpub as well, and the struggles that entailed with fighting legislation and the entrenched three-tiered system and the sheer power of social inertia.
“We were a statistical blip,” Egleston said. “We were like a rounding error in terms of volume.”
He went on to say that he had been through a series of significant transitions in the last 30+ years, the biggest being the loss of Smuttynose, which fell victim to increased competition from craft beer upstarts that chipped away at Smuttynose’s sales after 20 years of consistent growth.
“That day in 2018 when the auctioneer’s gavel came down after 8.5 minutes of bidding, we saw 25 years of our work and almost every penny we’d ever made and saved go up in smoke,” Egleston said.
This was when Peter and Joanne put all their efforts into the Portsmouth Brewery. But the combination of COVID and bad plumbing laid it all to waste.
“In hindsight, it’s easy to say that the best time to sell a business is when you’re having the most fun,” Egleston said. “It’s probably true, but it’s also the hardest time to sell — for the same reason.”
The Portsmouth Brewery broke through walls like they were the Kool-Aid man. There are very few professional brewers in New England who cannot trace their lineage back to Peter and Joanne’s touch in some way.
Said head brewer John Bergeron: “To stand on the shoulders of giants at the Portsmouth Brewery? I knew I’d need to wake up every day and give it everything I had.”
Michael Hauptly-Pierce started homebrewing in 2010, and began his podcast, “The Tap Handle Show,” with a partner shortly thereafter. He hosted “MHP Untapped” as a regularly occurring segment on “Food For Thought” on 107.7 The Pulse for several years, and in 2016 opened Lithermans Limited Brewery, which he sold in 2022.
