As Rebel Mettle closes its doors I’m left with a terrible feeling inside my soul. This one is a real heartbreaker for me as a massive lager fan (and a huge fan of how these guys were going to go about all of this). There were a lot of reasons that this brewery should have flourished here in Cincinnati… and yet it just didn’t work. I’ve spent the last few days working this over in my mind trying to figure out what exactly I think the blame is – the location? The beer? Covid? There’s a lot that I’d like to point at, but that just doesn’t quite satisfy me.

I know one thing for certain… Rebel Mettle’s tagline was that “fortune favors the daring” – Rebel Mettle was daring. They had moxie. The brewery was true to who they wanted to be, and for that – I’m proud of them.

The Location

On one hand… because of the pandemic, downtown certainly took a hit over the last couple of years. I can’t deny that. But 2021 and early 2022 were freaking epic. The Bengals were on a historic season, that saw tons of folks hanging out just a couple of blocks away from the taproom.

Conventions started returning… you can walk through a parking lot from the convention center and immediately be in the taproom.

Heck… if you hate driving downtown, you can get off 75, make one quick turn, and park without really having to get into the city itself.

It all adds up to a location that shouldn’t be to blame for this closure. But if it wasn’t the location… what was it?

The Beer

It’s hard to start your life as a lager-only brewery in 2022 – especially in the midwest. Rebel Mettle was really careful to try to create beers that satisfied not only traditional lager fans but also fans of some more “modern” styles. Their Imperial Juniper Schwarzbier? An easy-drinking IPL? Even the flagship American Light Lager, Stubentiger should have been an absolute crowd-pleaser.

The beers were solid, they were drinkable… and there was so much room for these guys to keep growing and evolving – taking the theme and really rolling with it. If you pay attention to what Untappd says (and I’m not claiming that you should, at all…) Rebel Mettle sat squarely right in the middle, with plenty of breweries “better” and plenty “worse” than they were.

Beer wasn’t the problem.

The Pandemic

Things were tough over the last couple of years. Rebel Mettle opened its doors in September of 2020, 6 months after all hell broke loose. I’ve been a firm believer that if you’re a new business opening during this time – if you can survive it, you’ll be better than you would have been otherwise.

The pandemic turned downtown into a ghost town – people were working from home, and folks started staying in the suburbs more instead of heading down for an evening out. It looked and felt a lot different before and after things shut down in 2020.

When the brewery was in planning – they thought the city was going to look like one thing, and once they opened their doors, it looked like something completely different. Maybe… maybe they weren’t ever able to adapt to that change and make it work. You can start canning your beer, selling it across the state, and try to compete in that market – but trying to make a few lagers stand out on a shelf of hundreds of beers is next to impossible in 2022.

Your taproom has to be ground zero, and for all of the reasons above… it just never became that for Rebble Mettle.

What Can We Learn?

At the end of the day when something like this fails – what are we supposed to walk away with? What lesson can we tuck away to make sure that something good comes out of it?

Nothing is guaranteed in the beer industry these days. This is not an easy road, and definitely not one that comes without a fair dose of chaos. The world changes and this industry has to change with it, or else places like this die. (If you want to read about some of the trends to watch this year – here’s a great post…)

It’s heartbreaking to watch a place like Rebel Mettle never really get a chance to shine before they are shuttered. This easily could have become one of the big names that everyone mentions when they talk about Cincinnati beer – and if they had opened their doors 3 years before they did? Maybe they would have.