(Porter Hardy outside the Smartmouth Pilot House in 2017)
By Jeff Maisey
On the eve of its 13th anniversary weekend, founding owner/president Porter Hardy IV announced Smartmouth Brewing Company would be closing its original location in Norfolk by the end of this year.
The announcement came as a surprise to many commenting on social media.
Smartmouth, however, will continue to operate its Pilot House location in Virginia Beach.
When Smartmouth opened its operation in 2012, it, along with O’Connor Brewing Company, was riding the cutting-edge new wave of the modern era craft beer revolution.
State Bill 604 was signed into law that year and breweries were granted the opportunity to sell beer directly to the public through on-site tasting rooms. This was a game-changer for the upstart industry, and thus began a tidal wave in the following decade of new beer makers eager for a piece of the pie.
Success was nearly instantaneous for Smartmouth’s Norfolk brewery; located on a dead-end circle by the Norfolk Southern rail yard in the industrial section of West Ghent (now called Chelsea), Smartmouth hosted numerous block parties on the weekends, while expanding the size of its brewhouse to 20-barrels capable of producing nearly 15,000 barrels of beer annually.
Smartmouth grew to meet increasing demand on multiple fronts. It added an adjoining warehouse to serve as an enhanced tasting room with an indoor stage hosting concerts.
Smartmouth beers were seeming on tap in most regional restaurants. Canned six-packs were on the refrigerated shelves of grocery stores and 7-11 convenience stores.
Then there were the awards. In 2017, Smartmouth’s Safety Dance Pilsner won the Virginia Craft Brewers Guild’s Best-in-Show, crowning the brewery as the overall best in the state. Safety Dance also won a gold medal in 2020 at the Great American Beer Festival in Denver, the Super Bowl of nationwide beer competitions.
On December 16, 2017, Smartmouth Pilot House opened at the Virginia Beach oceanfront in a former US Post Office building Hardy used to frequent as a kid.
“We have never wanted to be a Norfolk-only brewery,” Porter Hardy told Veer Magazine at the time. “We always wanted to be a regional brewery.
“Most of the people who come to our Norfolk location live within a few miles of there,” he continued. “We just felt like we weren’t hitting Virginia Beach enough. So, this cements us as that totally regional Hampton Roads brewery.”
Like most independent beer makers, business peaked just as COVID hit. Then, coming out of the pandemic, the beer industry was slow to recover and, as a double-whammy, a new generation of consumers shied away from beer, preferring craft cocktails, seltzers, and non-alcoholic brews.
Smartmouth adjusted accordingly to maintain the brand.
“Certainly COVID and inflation (including can prices, grain prices, etc.) from the past few years have negatively impacted beer trends in distribution and consumer habits in going out to drink and eat,” Hardy explained. “You’ve seen articles about this in major news outlets this week. Virginia Beach (Pilot House) was built around the retail side of the business and now incorporates a full food menu, while Norfolk was originally designed around distribution. For our own internal reasons, we just decided that we needed to focus on one location and Virginia Beach made more sense in the current environment.”
The Pilot House, named, in part, for its smaller brewing capacity with a focus in pilot batches of new recipes, is less production facility and more about a retail experience, said Hardy, who took a second job (outside of the beer industry) last year.
The Norfolk location will close out its storied life with two signature events: Dark Arts Festival on Friday, November 28; and Krampusnaught on Friday, December 12.
Norfolk is still a great location for a brewery, and we hope someone swoops in and takes it over, but it just didn’t fit our business model anymore,” Hardy said.
Anyone interested in a Norfolk location will find a turn-key, first class brewery looking for renewed life.
