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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Open-and-shut case?

Rick Bonino

Customers crowd Slate Creek's taproom for its closing night last Wednesday. (Carolyn Lamberson photo)

Two weekends ago, No-Li’s John Bryant participated in a panel discussion at the Great American Beer Festival about the challenges facing breweries today.

“In this room, we can look left and right, and we probably all won’t be here in three years,” he told fellow brewers in the audience. “I hate to take the romance out of what we’re doing, but we’ve gone from a couple thousand breweries (nationwide) to coming up on 6.000 and it’s getting really crowded out there.”

This past week, Bryant’s words hit home with the announced closures of two North Idaho breweries, Coeur d’Alene’s Slate Creek (already shuttered) and Post Falls’ Downdraft (final weekend Nov. 17-19).

They’re the fifth and sixth local breweries to hang it up over the past four years, following BiPlane (Post Falls) in 2013, Ramblin’ Road (Spokane) in 2015, and Budge Brothers (Spokane) and Zythum (Fairfield) last year.

Declaring trends can be tricky. Most of those decisions have involved personal and family issues beyond any business concerns, and each brewery has its own financial needs and goals.

Downdraft, the only one to publicly discuss its reasons for closing, said it simply can’t afford to invest the time and money it would take to succeed in an increasingly competitive market.

“From a business perspective, we had our best year this year, so we’re really proud of that,” Downdraft’s Aimee Brayman says. “We’ve just been burning our candles at both ends working full-time jobs on top of running the brewery.”

And with competition continuing to grow, she says, “Sadly, I think we won’t be the last to make this type of decision.”

Five years ago, there were nine operating breweries in Spokane and Kootenai counties. Now, even without Downdraft and Slate Creek, there are 33 with at least nine more in various stages of progress.

“Unless there’s a burst in the population of craft beer enthusiasts, every time a new brewery opens, there’s a brewery somewhere else that struggles,” says Jeff Whitman, owner of Kootenai County’s oldest brewery, Selkirk Abbey, which opened in Post Falls in June 2012.

“It’s a tough business,” Whitman says. “We’re struggling. I know a lot of other people are struggling. It comes down to who can stay the distance until things shake out.”

North Idaho can be a particularly challenging market, he adds: “There are still a lot of fizzy yellow beer drinkers over here.”