Adam Cowan, the owner of Williamsburg’s Old Firehouse brewery, once said that if you had feelings, you needed to leave them at the door when you walked into a firehouse. I’m going to break that rule a little bit today, because I’m sad this weekend. I’m sad not just because with the closing of The Old Firehouse Cincinnati is losing a brewery, I’m also sad that we’re losing something that was the shining example of what a neighborhood brewery could be.

I’m heartbroken to watch people that I considered friends lose something that I know meant more to them than a lot of people will understand. Adam made it a point to always say that while the brewery might be his, it really belonged to the community, and when he said this – it wasn’t some marketing spin, or some b.s. meant to capitalize on a neighborhood.

If we wanna be honest, when the brewery opened their doors, you couldn’t really capitalize on Williamsburg. Old Firehouse moved into a town that didn’t know it needed a brewery. It didn’t take long, though, before they embraced what that space was and it became what I think was an integral part of the fabric of Williamsburg. I don’t know how many different massive charity events were thrown in that taproom. I don’t know the number of birthday parties, bachelor/bachelorette parties, baby showers and other “life events” that happened in that taproom, but I do know that it was exactly what people talk about when they talk about taprooms becoming the new “pubs”. Old Firehouse was something special, not just in Williamsburg, but in Cincinnati – and it’s a shame to see that it couldn’t work long-term.

The First Meeting

I didn’t actually know what I was getting into when I started writing about Cincinnati beer. I was a fan of drinking beer, sure – but I hadn’t ever really sat down and talked to any of the people that owned or brewed at these places. I wanted to start a blog that really just sort of cataloged everything that was happening in Cincinnati and from that it just started growing.

I started blogging anonymously for a lot of reasons, but the biggest one was that I never wanted this “thing” to be about me – it was about the beer, about the community that was growing around the beer. I wasn’t planning on becoming friends with the people that I was writing about. I had no idea was I was getting myself into, actually.

The first time I broke that “anonymity rule” while I was writing something was when Old Firehouse was getting ready to open their doors. I fired off an email to Adam and Lori just to start chatting about what they were doing and they invited me out to see for myself. From that conversation on, things have been different for what it means to be the Gnome. While I still like to play in the shadows of semi-anonymity a bit – I figured something out about craft beer that I don’t know I fully appreciated before that.

It’s not about the beer. It’s about the people, and why they do what they do.

What Does This Mean

I feel like a broken record when I say that this isn’t spelling some kind of doom and gloom for Cincinnati Beer. This isn’t a stinking beer bubble, and it doesn’t mean anything for any other brewery that you can name. It means that Old Firehouse wasn’t right.

I won’t try to dive in and give you all my things that I think they could have done differently to survive the changes in craft beer that we’ve seen, but when you ask what it means the answer is very simple. It means that they just didn’t work out. As our community keeps growing and evolving, the model will change for what it means to be a brewery, and places are forced to adapt and change with it. Sometimes you have the capital, or the ability to change with it – sometimes as we’ve seen with a couple closures… the numbers just don’t add up.

Say Goodbye

While you might be required to leave your feelings at the door of most firehouses, don’t do that this weekend. Go. Say goodbye to the taproom that changed Williamsburg. Raise a pint and tell all the folks at Old Firehouse what they meant to you. They are closing their doors for good tomorrow night, 9/29/19.