Lizzie Black loves everything about beer.
Making it. Sampling it, of course. And serving it to others.
“It touches so many aspects from like water management and quality, to agriculture to get to this point that takes, you know, three seconds for us to do,” Black said, referring to the quick process of pulling a pint from the tap wall. “There's so much that goes into that, and it's really, really beautiful.”
Black is the assistant brewer at American Solera’s location in Edmond. In addition to concocting brews behind the scenes, she also spends a lot of time behind the bar, chatting with customers and pouring their beers.
“We always joke we're kind of like the little local pub, the Cheers bar, because we have so many regulars,” Black said.
American Solera’s Edmond taproom — an expansion from their Tulsa mothership — is doing well, Black said. It just celebrated the two-year anniversary of its opening in November.
There are around 80 craft breweries in Oklahoma, generating about 80,000 barrels of beer and nearly $600 million every year. That number is up from just 14 breweries in 2015, the year before Oklahoma made it legal for breweries to operate their own tap rooms.
“That’s when you really started seeing things blowing up,” said Zach Green, head brewer at American Solera in Edmond.
Green was home brewing, then working at Roughtail Brewing before getting the head brewer gig at American Solera’s Edmond outpost. They’ve watched Oklahoma’s craft brewing scene grow and change in the decade since the boom started in a now-closed Oklahoma City beer mecca.
“We had the Brewers Union,” Green said. “So breweries like Skydance and Vanessa House and Elk Valley, they all got their start in this cooperative facility.”
Those breweries moved out of the Union and started standalone tap rooms, then new breweries moved in. But now, the Brewer’s Union is closed, and so are some of those tap rooms. Green said they think we’re seeing a bit of a market correction in the Oklahoma beer scene.
“At the time, it was all just very grow, grow, grow,” Green said. “It felt very alive, and like there was just this infinite capacity for growth. And I think that, if we're being honest, if your business depends on a certain amount of constant growth, maybe that’s not very sustainable.”
A handful of those closures hit a few blocks of OKC’s Midtown. Over the past two years, the area has lost Elk Valley, Twisted Spike and most recently, Vanessa House.
Good things come to an end at Vanessa House
Vanessa House was a place where everybody knew your name too. The taproom featured a colorful full-wall mural, a bank of arcade games and a wall of pop culture collector's items.
“We were just trying to be as authentic to us as we could,” said Nick White, one of the five friends who founded Vanessa House in 2016. “We’re nerds and people who want to have fun. So it was just trying to tie it all back to that.”
Vanessa House was born at the beginning of a craft beer boom in Oklahoma. White and his co-founders used their retirement funds as seed money, which they acknowledged with their flagship brew: the cream ale 401K.
But from 2019 into 2020, street construction made it difficult for loyal patrons to visit Vanessa House and even harder for new customers to stumble across the taproom. That roadwork went so long over schedule that Vanessa House sued the city government for lost revenue and eventually settled out of court.
The roadwork ended as the COVID-19 pandemic hit, taking a huge chunk of Vanessa House’s business.
According to Andrew Carrales, White’s co-founder at Vanessa House, they didn’t make much money on beer sold outside the taproom.
“Any beer that you have somewhere else — while I will thank you all day, every day for doing that as well, it does not help craft breweries,” he said.
Part of that is because of Oklahoma laws. Breweries can self-distribute (like to local liquor stores or restaurants) or pay for the services of a larger distributor. But they can’t do both.
Carrales said many breweries, including Vanessa House, use a distributor because it provides a bigger reach and eases some logistical stress. But then you have to give the distributor and retailer much of your profits. For Vanessa House to sell 401K at Costco, for example, they would have been losing $7 or $8 per case.
“At some point the economics of it flip, where you start making more money in distribution,” Carrales said. “But that is a long road, and your tap room really has to subsidize that to help get you there. It didn't for us, is what it comes down to.”
White said after a while, they realized they wouldn’t be able to dig themselves out of a hole.
“We just got to the point where we couldn't do it anymore, where we didn't have any more money, and we’d exhausted all resources,” White said. “It was kind of like a gut punch because these people believed in us.”
Oklahoma’s brewing future
The pandemic hit everybody, and there are other universal challenges for breweries, too. Inflation means people are much more choosy about luxury goods like craft beer. And nobody in the brewing world can seem to figure out Gen Z’s deal with alcohol.
“One month they just want to smoke, the next month they want to drink, the next month they’re like, I'm not going to do anything for three months,” White said. “So trying to forecast your business according to that trend got really, really hard, because you didn't know what month everybody was in.”
Still, White thinks OKC’s breweries were hit especially hard. The Oklahoma City metro area has lost seven in the last three years.
“I would say Tulsa is still doing pretty good,” White said. “I mean, they've had some closures as well, but just not as many as Oklahoma City.”
Brian Welzbacher wrote a book about Oklahoma beer, fittingly titled Oklahoma Beer. The state is home to around 80 breweries, with the biggest clusters in OKC and Tulsa. Welzbacher says Tulsa’s breweries tend to be more specialized than their OKC counterparts.
“I think it's unique that every brewery kind of has their own unique offering,” Welzbacher said. “You have Neff with gluten-free. You have Nothing's Left that does just wild, crazy beers with a bunch of adjuncts and things. Dead Armadillo kind of stays pretty mellow…” And so on.
It helps people develop loyalties that match their tastes and keeps breweries from competing too much, Welzbacher said.
“OKC kind of has that, but I felt like there was too much of a blend of things that everybody's offering kind of the same thing,” Welzbacher said.
White said he’s done with those considerations now that Vanessa House is closed.
“I think I've learned enough that if I wanted to do something else, business-wise, I could be like, ‘I don't want to do a brewery.’” he said, laughing.
White also said his experience as a small business owner changed where he spends his money.
“We always had a love for small businesses,” White said. “But now it's like, I don't want to do anything else that's not a small business. I know that this is somebody's dream that they finally figured out how to do.”
This report was produced by the Oklahoma Public Media Exchange, a collaboration of public media organizations. Help support collaborative journalism by donating at the link at the top of this webpage.
