This week a new bar officially opened in Fort Wayne. When I say a “new” bar, what I really mean is, the revival of bar in an old space that has been serving folk as a restaurant/bar in one form or another for basically 100 years. The Packard Taphouse boasts 20 Taps. and although I likely won’t use the venue much, I wish them all the luck in the world and I truly hope that they survive and thrive. It’s good to have neighborhood spots. This small ray of light sits against the more sombre happenings of the last 12+ months in and around Fort Wayne. I know that the days of exceptional, thriving beer scenes in moderately sized cities throughout the USA have been over for years but, what’s been going on in Fort Wayne of late deserves a closer look. In the last 12 months, the following have occurred;
- Trubble closed Roanoke in November 2023, and then closed Broadway and pulled out of the Fairfield avenue project
- 2Toms closed down their Fishers location
- Summit City Brewerks has closed
- The Landing Brewing Co. closed, and then its Gnometown replacement moved out as well – that was weird
- Ted’s Beerhall closed
- Junk Ditch in Huntington closed, and then FW venture bit the dust
- Chapmans closed Angola, had already closed in Huntington, and then in Columbia City (Chapmans has also come and gone in various guises at Fortezza, the Coventry location and at the airport)
- A new build for More Brewing Co. going completely silent for since September 2023
The reasons for these closures are many and various. Problems with buildings/locations/leases, issues with finances, lawsuits, consolidation, venues giving up on beer etc., but when all is said and done they all reflect the fact that beer in the USA is in such a malaise in general. It’s no wonder that the types of businesses we are talking about here have only very small chances of survival regardless of the particular nuances. It’s a miserable (beer) scene out there for now. So what happened? My theory is simple. The kids don’t like beer – they literally don’t like the taste of beer. They want fruit (mostly in the form of fake sours), melted candy bars (mostly in the form of pastry stouts), and flabby, bloated, soft orange juice flavors (mostly in the form of hazy ‘IPAs’) – real beer is out of fashion with them, they hate the taste of beer, and this has been the case for several years. It likely all stated with the overreach of the “craft” scene, with an ever increasing number of players chasing a mostly non-expanding/non-existent customer base. In order to pull non-beer drinkers into the fold, more and more ‘beer’ became ‘non-beer’. When those fickle, non-beercentric hipsters moved on to the next thing, masses of useless and empty capacity was left behind with the inevitable consequences. For my part the trends that I speak of above, and have been banging on about forever, have generally driven me out of bars. As I routinely report, the most common situation I have found in recent years is that I would only ever entertain the idea of trying 2-3 out of any given tap list in most contemporary US bars. I don’t drink beverages that have flavor profiles that children enjoy, so that keeps me at home. Most of the beer that I drink these days is imported directly from Belgium, or by mail order internally where the contents of each delivery are most from outside of the US too, So what does it leave us with locally? Well, most prominently Hop River, 2Toms, Dot & Line, Chapmans and Fortlandia. Hop River remains my choice in FW mostly because their beer is the most traditional, and there is a decent sized bar. Fortlandia is a special case that really doesn’t fit into the same model (either in terms of beer or as a business) as the others, and perhaps the same is true of Dot & Line. Both Fortlandia and Dot & Line have brewed a few excellent beers, but my issue with both of those places is the same – tiny bars, and a tap list where sometimes over 80% of the beer offered is stuff that I would never dream of drinking, meaning it’s not brewed in classic styles (Fortlandia sometimes does a better job of that then Dot & Line does). 2Toms falls into the same category as Dot & Line, where far too many of their beers are things that I would never, ever drink. It’s such a shame because I know that Phil and Tom can brew, but also that they also have to cater to a market that doesn’t like (actual) beer that much. A quick note about Ted’s. There was an awful lot of ‘woe is me’ bleating from various sources about the closure, but the fact of the matter was that the ownership/management/investors group (whatever the correct terms to describe those in charge), simply decided that they wanted a different concept other than a beer-centric bar. Fine, that’s their prerogative and their business, but spare me the crocodile tears when the decision was simply made to abandon beer and do something else – they ring very hollow. So what of the future? I think Todd Stone of Junk Ditch is a good brewer, so hope that he pops up again somewhere else. I think Scott Fergusson at Chapmans cares a lot, and now that his interests have been 100% consolidated they have a great chance of doing well. The only thing I worry about there is them being so tied to The Electric Works project. Utterly unconnected to Chapmans as a brewery, I remain very unconvinced about the retail/food/market side of things over there. I suppose the office space might just carry it all, but it all seems a bit fragile to me. I think that the airport should easily be able to support Hop River in a modest way, but a lot of the optimism that people spoke about in many of the interviews I’ve conducted over the last couple of years seems to have mostly evaporated. It’s time for a re-set and a re-boot, and maybe The Packard Taphouse, that has opened with a tap list that has a heavy emphasis on local beer, can be part of that process. However, as long as those local beers are in styles for the kids and not for the legacy drinker, I’m unlikely to be a large part of any potential revival. Good luck!
