Mike Yates is working in the backroom at White Lion, the downtown Springfield brewery where he’s brewmaster. The room is full of large and loud metallic equipment.
“This is where the brewing process starts. We get our grain in 50 or 55 pound bags,” he said, as he poured the contents of one bag into a large grate. "It's the part of the job that I enjoy because it basically keeps me in shape.“
Yates helped start While Lion six years ago, but it’s hardly his first beer gig. Yates has worked for eight breweries around Massachusetts over the last two decades.
“When I first started in the industry, craft beer was only 3% of the beer market share," he said. "And over the next 20 years it blew up.”
When Yates and his business partner, Ray Barry first started the White Lion brewery, craft beer — with a large selection of IPAs and ales — was on the upswing. Nationwide, the number of breweries had gone from a couple hundred to around 9000.
But that was just before 2020. White Lion had started brewing their own beer but Yates and Barry were still looking for a taproom location when the pandemic hit.
“Obviously, Covid took its toll on a lot of breweries that were scraping by because people couldn't attend,” Yates said. “Breweries definitely depend on taprooms for a source of their revenue.”
By that time, many analysts said, the craft beer market was already becoming saturated with breweries. And White Lion owner Ray Barry said Gen Z has not been as enthusiastic about craft beer as the previous generations.
“It was the millennials truly that propped up the craft beer industry, and their palette changes,” Barry said. “So they may not be as loyal to craft. They may drift off into something else."
Encouraging brewers of color
Barry also has another incentive for wanting White Lion to be successful. He’s one of only a handful of people of color in Massachusetts who own breweries.
“It’s part of the way beer was marketed,” he said. “People of color just didn't see as if they were part of the overall conversation.”
Barry named the brewery "White Lion” after an African prosperity legend. He said the first tools for brewing came from Africa.
“A lot of the tutoring of brewing came to America by way of the slave trade and the Native Americans,” Barry said. “But along the way, some of the stories have been lost. And I think if the stories were at the forefront, you would see more Black and Brown people involved in the trade.”
Nationwide, fewer than one percent of breweries are Black-owned, according to the National Black Brewers Association.
But that number is growing faster than the overall brewing industry, which has been falling in the past few years.
Craft beer is still a quarter of the market, according to the Brewers Association of America, but overall production last year went down 4 percent. Several of the Massachusetts breweries where Yates worked have gone out of business.
“Raw materials have just keep going up and fuel costs keep going up,” Yates said, adding that tariffs on aluminum have also strained the industry. “So now there's been a contraction. …and a lot of the smaller guys will not survive.”
White Lion used to have a second location near UMass Amherst but closed it last year. Yates said college students can be a hard sell for craft brewing.
“A lot of them prefer five dollar pitchers of inexpensive beer versus an eight dollar pint of delicious beer,” he said.
"Find a way to make it everlasting"
And these days, there are many other types of popular craft drinks competing with beer, in addition to legal cannabis.
To hold its own, White Lion has expanded its own offerings. The brewery now sells canned cocktails and hard seltzer and is finding other ways to make money.
White Lion hosts a regular beer garden in downtown Springfield with live music and a food truck, which they also bring to music festivals and other events.
“Like any business, you have to find a way to make it everlasting,” Barry said. “And if you stay in that single lane or that silo, that's what makes it difficult for folks.”
Barry said he expects the craft beer industry in Massachusetts to lose a few more breweries before it levels off, but he’s not planning to be one of them.
[See Part 1 of this series for a historical perspective on brewing in Massachusetts.]
