After 35 years, Massachusetts-based brewpub Cambridge Brewing Co. (CBC) has announced it will shut its doors at the end of 2024.
“To our dear CBC friends and family, our time is coming to a close,” the brewery wrote on social media over the weekend. “Our last day of service will be December 20. But what a time it has been!”
Unlike common culprits behind craft brewery closures of late – punishingly high rent costs, a distracted drinker base, a slowing industry – CBC is going out on its own terms, founder and owner Phil Bannatyne told the Boston Globe.
“I want to retire,” Bannatyne told the Globe. “There comes a time in everyone’s life when that becomes apparent, and I think that time for me is now.”
CBC opened in Cambridge’s Kendall Square neighborhood in 1989, before the area became home to bustling biopharma giants and tech startups. One of few craft breweries with on-premise service in the region at the time, CBC had an outsize influence on the development of New England craft beer.
“We opened in 1989 with essentially two goals in mind,” CBC wrote on Instagram. “First, to spread the word on what local craft beer was and could be. From a humble start with a three-beer lineup we’ve expanded the possibilities of craft beer and the myriad styles available today.
“We were the first commercial brewery to produce a Belgian-style beer in this country and one of the first to embrace multiple yeast strains in-house and even to intentionally invite wild organisms into our brewery,” CBC continued.
In 2017, the Brewers Association (BA) recognized longtime CBC brewmaster Will Meyers with the annual Russell Schehrer Award for Innovation in Brewing during its annual Craft Brewers Conference.
“CBC literally changed the landscape of craft beer locally and nationally, bringing awareness to classic beer styles, obscure ones, and a few cool ones we invented ourselves,” Meyers wrote on Instagram. “It’s been an incredible honor to have had the opportunity to work with my friend Phil for 32 years (holy smokes!), and I am eternally grateful for the faith he put in my artistic drive and in the creative force that is the brewing team at CBC.”
CBC’s beers have been similarly decorated, with 12 medals won at the BA’s Great American Beer Festival (GABF), two from the organization’s World Beer Cup and one at the Great British Beer Festival.
In addition to brewing the first Belgian-inspired beers in the U.S., CBC pioneered pumpkin ales with its Great Pumpkin Ale, the Northeast’s first iteration of the style, in 1990. To celebrate the beer that helped launch a beloved seasonal style (bordering on trope), CBC began hosting the Great Pumpkin Festival in 2007, which occurred annually until the COVID-19 pandemic canceled it in 2020.
CBC produced 1,387 barrels of beer in 2023, according to the BA’s May/June issue of the New Brewer Magazine.