So Chapman’s is the latest casualty. However, I really don’t think this is quite what it seems, or at least not as simple as the comments that I see from people that know nothing about beer, and who simply declare, “The Craft Beer Boom is Dead”.
I have other thoughts (and posts) about the general decline in the industry, and that might be part of the equation here, but I’d bet my life that the much larger issue here is Electric Works itself. There is clearly is an absolutely impossible to manage double-whammy at EW of staggeringly expensive rents/leases, and a lack of foot traffic. Vendors are paying an absolute fortune to be exposed to hardly any customers. Guess what – that’s not economically viable! I’m not remotely surprised by this though, and I just don’t think that Fort Wayne has the population or the $ base to support a venture like EW.
On the whole, Chapman’s beer was solid. Is it the greatest that has ever been brewed? No, but if you understand beer you know that most of it was stylistically correct, and of a commercial standard. The range did a decent job of catering to people like me (the legacy drinker) with traditional styles presented within style parameters, and catering to an entirely different audience with the things that kids (apparently want, or at least the few that drink, want) with the things like sours and hazies.
Chapman’s did a pretty solid job of not alienating me, which today is a minor miracle. The space that they occupied was not to my liking – industrial chic (if that’s what it is) leaves me oh so cold – but I could tolerate that for a pint of Valiant which I’ve enjoyed for the last eight years starting in Columbia City back in the day. I’m sorry to see them go.
Chapman’s demise is a great shame to me personally since I’ve come to know Scott and Zach a little in the last couple of years. They are honest folk with an interest in beer. I have no inside track on what’s next for Chapman’s – (I’m largely uninterested in any ‘new, exciting concept’ in that space at EW) – but there is an expensive, state of the art brew system sitting idle right now. It’s hard for me to believe that will be abandoned long term. Chapman’s absolutely has a model to operate on a smaller scale, in a more community based brewery, and has the track-record to prove it. There must be a space in FW that will work for them, somewhere, somehow. I honestly hope this happens, we can’t have producers of traditional beer going by the wayside like this.
