{"id":340163,"date":"2025-12-12T07:40:49","date_gmt":"2025-12-12T07:40:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/recipes\/category-a-b\/beer\/smartmouth-to-close-norfolk-location\/"},"modified":"2025-12-12T07:40:49","modified_gmt":"2025-12-12T07:40:49","slug":"smartmouth-to-close-norfolk-location","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=340163","title":{"rendered":"Smartmouth To Close Norfolk Location"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div>\n<p>(Porter Hardy outside the Smartmouth Pilot House in 2017)<\/p>\n<p>By Jeff Maisey<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>The announcement came as a surprise to many commenting on social media.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Smartmouth, however, will continue to operate its Pilot House location in Virginia Beach.<\/p>\n<p>When Smartmouth opened its operation in 2012, it, along with O\u2019Connor Brewing Company, was riding the cutting-edge new wave of the modern era craft beer revolution.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>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.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Success was nearly instantaneous for Smartmouth\u2019s 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.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>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.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>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.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Then there were the awards. In 2017, Smartmouth\u2019s Safety Dance Pilsner won the Virginia Craft Brewers Guild\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<p>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.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe have never wanted to be a Norfolk-only brewery,\u201d Porter Hardy told Veer Magazine at the time. \u201cWe always wanted to be a regional brewery.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cMost of the people who come to our Norfolk location live within a few miles of there,\u201d he continued. \u201cWe just felt like we weren\u2019t hitting Virginia Beach enough. So, this cements us as that totally regional Hampton Roads brewery.\u201d<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>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.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Smartmouth adjusted accordingly to maintain the brand.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>\u201cCertainly 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,\u201d Hardy explained. \u201cYou\u2019ve 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. \u00a0For 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.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>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.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>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.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Norfolk is still a great location for a brewery, and we hope someone swoops in and takes it over, but it just didn\u2019t fit our business model anymore,\u201d Hardy said.<\/p>\n<p>Anyone interested in a Norfolk location will find a turn-key, first class brewery looking for renewed life.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>(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.\u00a0 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[137],"tags":[4065,9483,36542,164283],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-340163","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-beer","tag-close","tag-location","tag-norfolk","tag-smartmouth"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Smartmouth To Close Norfolk Location - Som2ny Network<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=340163\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Smartmouth To Close Norfolk Location - Som2ny Network\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"(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. 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