Mikkeller announced this week it would permanently close its New York City brewery and taproom—located in the New York Mets’ home stadium, Citi Field—just two-and-a-half years after it opened. The venue was sought as a key outpost for one of the world’s biggest brewery brands, and its end highlights the opaque nature of its ownership and global expansion. The end of Mikkeller NYC marks the start of a new business—Fountain Beverage/EBBS Brewing—and is evidence of the vulnerabilities within the business structure Mikkeller has used for years.
In an Oct. 19 Facebook post, the brewery announced the closure and placed blame on the COVID-19 pandemic. “With no foreseeable customers at Citi Field, Mikkeller is consolidating its NYC brewery with its San Diego brewery and closing Mikkeller NYC,” it read, in part.
That same day, Fountain Beverage Company and EBBS Brewing announced that the Citi Field taproom and brewery will become the new home for both companies. Fountain Beverage and EBBS Brewing are both co-owned by Bruce Wilpon, whose family currently owns the New York Mets. (The Wilpons are in the process of selling the team to hedge fund owner Steve Cohen.) Bruce Wilpon, along with family members, also had a plurality of ownership in Mikkeller NYC. Tomas Larsson, who had an operations role with Mikkeller NYC since 2018, is also a co-owner in Fountain and EBBS.
Wilpon said in an email to GBH that after collective discussions, it was his decision—and therefore not Mikkeller’s—to close Mikkeller NYC. Richie Saunders, former head brewer for Mikkeller NYC, will remain on as the head brewer for EBBS and Fountain. Fountain Beverage produces CBD water and spiked seltzer; EBBS launched this summer and currently sells a Lager, a Gose, a Stout, and five IPAs through ecommerce site TapRm.
In 2018, Good Beer Hunting’s analysis of financial and ownership documents related to Mikkeller outposts around the world, including the one at Citi Field, revealed a murky picture of the company’s runnings. Though Mikkeller founder Mikkel Borg Bjergsø told GBH in 2018 he has “100% control of any decision” related to Mikkeller locations—which number roughly two dozen in 16 countries—he was not listed as an owner of Mikkeller NYC. The outpost was part of an overall business structure that leaves large portions of Mikkeller operations, including brewing and retail, to other business partners.
In essence, Mikkeller licenses its brand and intellectual property to business partners who run the taprooms’ and breweries’ operations, as Bjergsø described to GBH in 2018. And for Mikkeller NYC, it appears this was to the business’ detriment. (Mikkeller did not respond to GBH’s questions.)
New York breweries over the past decade have found success as neighborhood gathering spots, the types of places where customers know the owners, brewers, and bartenders. Mikkeller NYC had no such face—Bjergsø wasn’t actively involved, and Bruce Wilpon was better known for his connection to baseball than beer. Dan Lamonaca, owner of Brooklyn beer bar and bottle shop Beer Karma, says questions around who owned and operated Mikkeller NYC hindered it from the start.
“They’re intentionally blurry,” he says. “That was a factor for them not succeeding because it was like, ‘Well, what are you?’”
Lamonaca says that, despite the high-quality beers that Mikkeller NYC was producing, the brewery didn’t become a full part of the city’s increasingly localized beer scene. Its location in Citi Field rather than a walkable neighborhood hampered its ability to develop regular customers, but that wasn’t its only struggle. Lamonaca’s perception is that the brewery’s owners thought the Mikkeller brand name would carry the business, and that they felt little need to engage with locals through tap takeovers or other events. He says Mikkeller NYC had its own sales representatives early on, but eventually, those positions were either cut or not filled when staff left.
“It still felt like part of the Mikkeller empire even though Mikkel was just peripherally involved,” he says. “It didn’t let Mikkeller NYC act like an autonomous brewery. It didn’t let them be their own thing. It was like, ‘We have an existing brand, it will carry.’”
The very thing intended to be the selling point for the NYC brewery and taproom—the Mikkeller name—ended up working against it. Without Bjergsø’s direct involvement, and lacking a local face, Mikkeller NYC was seen by some as generic and unrelatable.
“I don’t think Mikkeller could ever get its hands around, ‘How do we position ourselves as a New York City brand to people in New York City?’” says Chris O’Leary, creator of NYC beer website Brew York.
As an example of an early misstep, O’Leary cites two beers, Say Hey Sally and Henry Hops, that Mikkelller released to celebrate the launch of Mikkeller NYC. Though the cans’ artwork featured baseball players in New York uniforms, the beer itself was brewed at Mikkeller San Diego.
“I understand they were trying to do it as a PR move to build excitement but it was perceived as not an authentic New York thing,” O’Leary says.
The complicated ties between Mikkeller NYC, San Diego, and its European headquarters continued to dog the brand. Lamonaca regularly bought Mikkeller NYC beer for Beer Karma, but says he stopped when prices for the brewery’s beers suddenly increased in December 2018 from barely $100 per sixtel keg to $120-$140 per sixtel. He believes this was a decision made by Mikkeller NYC’s distributor, Remarkable Liquids, which intended to bring prices for Mikkeller NYC beers in-line with Mikkeller beers imported from Europe. The intention was presumably not to undercut sales for imported Mikkeller beers, which Remarkable also distributes, at other retailers. Again, Mikkeller NYC’s association with its global brand worked against its business locally.
Mikkeller NYC’s location at Citi Field—normally home to at least 81 Major League Baseball games every year, as well as concerts and other events—also didn’t help attract regulars. In March, when COVID canceled live performances and drastically altered the MLB season, Mikkeller NYC also closed temporarily, then began offering curbside pickup and delivery in May. This month, the closure became permanent. Wilpon said in an email response to GBH that the brewery had “no intention of closing” before the pandemic.
This is perhaps a lesson in the importance of genuine connection between breweries and customers during the pandemic. Lamonaca contrasts Mikkeller NYC with other NYC breweries like Kings County Brewers Collective (KCBC) and Fifth Hammer Brewing Company, where brewers and owners are regularly at their own taprooms, interacting with guests.
The Wilpons, to be sure, are not typical brewery owners. Bruce Wilpon is a partner at Sterling Equities, which his father, Fred, co-founded. In 2008, when Bernie Madoff’s financial fraud was revealed, Fred Wilpon lost $500 million he’d invested with Madoff; three years later, he and his business partner were sued for $1 billion in relation to Madoff’s crimes. Those losses and debts, Bloomberg columnist Joe Nocera writes, negatively affected the Mets organization, which on its own was losing $50-$75 million annually.
That the Wilpons are not small business owners was perhaps to their detriment during the pandemic. When COVID-19 closed taprooms and to-go beer sales became the lifeline for many breweries, owners at Mikkeller NYC didn’t have the face-to-face connection with locals that would translate to those customers taking a train to Citi Field for curbside sales. New Yorkers living in other boroughs and without cars would have to take a subway to Queens to pick up beers they could perhaps more easily find on store shelves.
“When the world shut down, suddenly someone had to buy a shit-ton of their canned beer, and there wasn’t the market for it,” Lamonaca says, adding that sales of beer from Fifth Hammer, for example, are up at least 25% at Beer Karma since COVID began. He notes that drinkers have told him they want to support small, local breweries.
EBBS Brewing is in the process of seeking community board approval to open its taproom in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which may help it establish a more neighborhood-based following. Crucially, the company will need to prove it has a local presence. So far, neither the brewery’s website nor a Q&A posted to TapRm’s blog attach any owners’ or brewers’ names to the brand.
Lamonaca sees this as purposeful opacity, and as detrimental to craft beer as a whole. He says this “intentionally blurry” approach to ownership is common among contract-brewed brands, too, and alienates drinkers from what craft beer purports to be about: locally brewed beer sold by companies consumers feel attached to.
It’s not clear how the owners of Fountain Beverage Company and EBBS Brewing plan to correct what went wrong with Mikkeller NYC, or to develop stronger ties to NYC drinkers. Asked what the team will do differently at the Citi Field location, especially as COVID-19 continues to batter the hospitality industry and event-based venues, Wilpon responded via email that “it’s too early to know.”
He maintains the team was “successful at CitiField [sic]” and says with the leadership of head brewer Richie Saunders, the company will “continue to offer our high-quality craft liquid.”
Words by Kate Bernot