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Downtown Beaverton's only brewpub closed last week after less than a year in business.
With the closure of Brannon's, the 'Tron's only brewery is now Uptown Market, which sits just a few feet inside the city limits and primarily serves Portland's deep westside neighborhoods.
What went wrong?
That's been the subject of some conjecture. Ezra Johnson-Greenough of The New School wrote a piece based on reports from unnamed former employees that made a few damning allegations for why it failed.
This morning, former owner Kevin Brannon called to share his piece of the story.
First, neither he nor anyone else involved is bankrupt—he traded the complete contents of the brewery for enough money to buy out his lease. That even includes a few kegs of still-good beer, which are sitting in the cooler until someone else buys the turn-key 10-barrel brewery.
Brannon also had some advice for what the new owners, or anyone else looking to open a Portland-style brewery in the Beav, should and shouldn't do.
"Keep it small," he says. "Keep it simple—not just in physical terms but limit the menu a lot. It turned out to be a very price sensitive market. I mean, a $10 hamburger just outraged people. And you see what's on that strip—Arby's, McDonalds, Taco Bell—and as much as I heard 'Oh, we need something like this!' well, a few of them did maybe, but not enough for a place the size of mine."
"The other thing you have to do is just get closer to the street and just blast signage, because that's what they're used to."
Brannon said he worried the place was too big from the beginning, and that construction that went "way, way, way over budget" and ate into the working capital needed to grow slowly.
"I didn't bring to that market what it wanted," he said. "We knew going in that we were going to have to build a business base...I think we could have made it eventually but it would have taken more time than we had."
He also said the decision to pull the plug was made back in June and that managers knew three weeks in advance, with the rest of the staff finding out two weeks in advance and getting bonuses to stay on the end if they were willing.
"So we shut down in an orderly way at least. I've toured spaces where they obviously just locked everyone out without any notice—there were personal belongings and purses sitting out and everything. I couldn't do that," he said. "All the perishables went out to food banks."
WWeek 2015