In some ways, St. Louis’ newest brewery is one of its oldest.
Urban Chestnut Brewing Company, the city’s fourth-largest beer maker by volume and one of the “Big Four” independent brewers that sprouted up in 2011 in the shadow of Anheuser-Busch and Schlafly, has announced a multimillion-dollar cash infusion to reimagine its taprooms in Midtown and The Grove and double down on core brands. Together, the moves signal renewed focus on local sales and experience for the regional distributor in response to a stagnating climate for craft beer across the nation.
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“This is something that you don’t hear in craft beer too often: a long-term strategic plan,” says UCBC investment partner Brian Travers. “Our strategy is field-level engagement, making friends with bar and restaurant operators, engaging wholesalers, and having passionate people in the market. Hand-to-hand selling. That’s what grew the big brands. You know how people always say this isn’t your father’s whatever? Well, this is your father’s strategy.”
The strategy emerges at a time when, for the first time in two decades, craft beer isn’t experiencing exponential growth. In fact, it’s showing signs of contraction. According to the Brewers Association, the trade group for craft brewers, overall U.S beer and imports were down 1 percent last year, while craft beer volume sales dropped 4 percent, reducing independent brewers’ overall market share. More concerning was the fact that 529 U.S. craft breweries closed in 2024, the first year that number outpaced new brewery openings since 2005.
Fear among local drinkers that UCBC might be among those closures was stirred last September, when the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. But the company assured everyone that the move was part of a strategic reorganization. Production was unaffected; neither taproom shuttered. No jobs were cut.
“We had experienced year-over-year growth every year since we opened in 2011, and 2019 was our best year ever,” says co-founder David Wolfe. “We actually started 2020 off with a bang. Our No. 6 lager [in honor of Stan Musial] was probably our most successful launch ever, and it was all teed up for Opening Day at Busch Stadium. But, you know, then 2020 and 2021 were what they were. We had to downsize who we were. It affected our retailers and our on-site sales. Many businesses had to change how they operated.”
The key part of the reorganization was the arrival of Travers, a self-proclaimed “St. Louis guy” with a long and distinguished resume of helping retailers such as Walmart, Rite Aid, Walgreens, and Best Buy with merchandising and marketing. He had long been a fan of UCBC beer and saw a path forward that started with investment in the physical space. With the larger craft beer market tightening and retail shelf and tap space increasingly limited, Travers, like many American brewers, wanted to bring more people into the taproom, where margins are better and consumer relationships are traditionally forged.
“I think we’re going through kind of a reimagination of our physical locations,” says Travers. “We don’t want to change what either place feels like; we want to highlight the Bierhall and Biergarten experiences that existed before. But we also want people to come here for more than just beer.”
To that end, UCBC has invested in new furniture, umbrellas, and landscaping at the Midtown Brewery & Biergarten, with updates to the outside bar coming and all-new outdoor media coming soon. At The Grove Brewery & Bierhall, new multimedia and sound systems have already been installed throughout the hall, event space, and terrace. Additional changes will include a new lounge area off the downstairs entrance, which is currently used for retail. This will also serve as a private event space.
Coming to the taproom for “more than just beer” is also to be taken literally: The owners plan to introduce a new spirits program at The Grove location in the coming months.
But this emphasis on drinking draft Zwickels, Stammtisches, and Schnickelfritzes, as well as cocktails, hop waters, and N/As straight from the tap while taking in a televised ballgame doesn’t mean UCBC is turning its back on its distribution, which extends to four states, in addition to almost all of Missouri. Travers says another prong of the reorganization is leaning on knowledgeable brand reps and salespeople who are maintaining relationships with bars, restaurants, stores, and wholesalers. After all, Travers’s expertise is in retail.
And the new look, attitude, and products won’t displace the emphasis on the reason that UCBC exists in the first place: beer.
In fact, the owners are launching a Blue and White initiative to get behind the new UCBC label that has been their biggest mover in recent years, Zwickel Light. Not only will this American light lager continue to be available in crushable 12-ounce cans, but it will also come in an old-school 12-ounce brown bottle served in ice-filled buckets at the bierhall and biergarten. After all, St. Louis has always been a lager-drinking town.
“Our sense is that consumers like drinking out of a 12-ounce bottle,” says Travers. “There’s a romance there, harkening back to the Anheuser-Busch experience that everybody is rooted in [in St. Louis]. When you talk about a bucket of bottles, the first thing you think about is a bucket of Budweiser. But these lagers have a different flavor and do it the UCBC way.” And Urban Chestnut was founded by Wolfe and Florian Kuplent, both with roots at Anheuser-Busch.
