4204 Main Street Brewing Co. makes a ‘humbling’ decision to put brewery on the market
Belleville’s craft brewing pioneer, 4204 Main Street Brewing Co., is putting up for sale its brewery and canning facility as beer keg sales to restaurants suffered during the COVID pandemic.
The company’s restaurant at 4204 W. Main St. and its banquet center next to the brewery at 6435 W. Main St. will remain open. The company will resume brewing beer in August on a smaller scale with its original brewing equipment inside the restaurant.
About 80% of the beer produced at the brewery was for kegs sold to restaurants while the remaining 20% was sold in cans at grocery and liquor stores, according to company CEO Todd Kennedy.
When restaurants were closed or operating at reduced capacity during the coronavirus pandemic across 4204 Main Street Brewing Co.’s distribution area in Illinois, Missouri and Kansas, the company’s sales of keg beer plummeted, Kennedy said.
“We’re going to have to put the production brewery up for sale,” Kennedy said Wednesday.
“So what does that mean? Because there’s a banquet center in there and there’s people that have events booked and I want to make sure that everybody understands that (the sale) will not affect those events because the way we are structuring to sell it, is we will sell the production facility and lease back the banquet side.”
Disappointment in brewery decision
Kennedy said he’s disappointed he has to shut down the large-scale brewing operation.
“It’s sad,” he said. “We put a lot of energy and time into trying to build a brand and unfortunately it has not panned out to be what we hoped it would be. We have a lot of great followers of our brand. I’m sure they’re going to be disappointed, too.
“I wish there was another option but unfortunately there just isn’t.”
Kennedy said the brewery is losing about $40,000 a month.
Besides Kennedy, there were 15 others invested in the project. He told the investors this week about the decision to shut down the brewery and sell it.
Kennedy said it was “humbling” to deal with the decision to scale back his plans and not continue the growth he saw initially.
Kennedy is listing the brewery with Cushman & Wakefield, which has real estate sales offices in 60 countries.
“Hopefully they’ll find a buyer that can come in and take over that facility,” Kennedy said.
A sales price for the brewery was not yet available, Kennedy said.
It cost about $3.5 million to develop the brewery and banquet center. This included the purchase of the building, renovating the site and installing the brewing equipment valued at $1.5 million, Kennedy said.
Brewery operations
When Kennedy established 4204 Main Street Brewing Co. in 2014 in an abandoned restaurant building at its namesake address, his company became the first commercial brewer in Belleville since the closure of the Stag Beer plant in 1988.
Three years later, Kennedy opened the brewery and banquet center at 6435 W. Main St. in a former Mad Pricer grocery store.
The new brewery has the capability to produce nearly 100,000 barrels of beer a year, but Kennedy said at its peak the company produced only about 6,800 barrels a year.
To put that in perspective, the largest craft brewer in the St. Louis area in 2019 was Schlafly, which produced 31,000 barrels of beer, according to a St. Louis Business Journal report last fall.
4204 Main Street Brewing Co. opened as the craft brewing industry was riding a wave of expansion.
The Brewers Association, a national trade group for craft brewers, reports that there were 284 breweries in the country in 1990 but that number had grown to 8,884 by 2020. While the number of breweries rose in 2020 compared to the previous year, craft beer sales volume was down 9.3%, according to the trade association.
Outlook for the 4204 brand
The 4204 Main Street Brewing Co. brewery and canning facility will be in operation through the end of July.
Kennedy expects to have enough Pecan Brown Ale, Off Duty and other favorite 4204 beers to last through the end of the year.
The company will revert to its original brewing operation inside its restaurant.
Like restaurant owners across the country, Kennedy has had to deal with labor shortages and restrictions enacted in an effort to control the spread of the coronavirus since March 2020.
The 4204 restaurant offers dinner Monday through Friday. On Saturday, there is a lunch and dinner menu and on Sunday, there is a brunch to complement the lunch and dinner hours.
“It’s saddening and upsetting but the reality is that we need to get back to who we were in the beginning and what made us ... great in the beginning: We were a local restaurant that served great food that made craft beer and we kind of lost focus on that and that’s what we’re going to go back to,” Kennedy said. “So the restaurant won’t be affected in any way whatsoever.
“The only difference will be that once that beer that’s down there in tanks is put into cans, we’ll obviously will be selling it off to distributors if they still want it or, if not, we’ll be selling it here at the restaurant to people who might want to get the last case of Pecan Brown that they can get canned.”
