In a Controversial Brewery’s Retreat, a Cautionary Tale About Embracing the Culture War

The definition of irony is notoriously tough to pin down, as Alanis Morissette can attest, but most people agree it’s either bitter or delicious, depending on which end of the stick you’re on. Savor the flavor on this beer-industry play in three parts and you tell me what you taste:

I. A military-themed brewery moves to a military-themed town in search of a thirsty customer base and a base of operations.
II. The townspeople, demonstrably down with beer and troops, nevertheless take umbrage at the culture-war baggage on offer; they fight, and they lose.
III. Just a year later, the military-themed brewery announces its retreat from the military-themed town, blaming the “local woke mob” that it vanquished for its sudden defeat.

While you decide on your tasting notes, allow me to fill you in on the dramatic rise and fall of Armed Forces Brewing Company. This strange story from Virginia’s Tidewater region is part comedy, part tragedy, and utterly bizarre, but I unspool it in these pages less as entertainment than as a cautionary tale.

In fair Verona Norfolk, where we lay our scene, Armed Forces Brewing Company (AFBC) announced last week, outta nowhere, that it was closing up the brewery it had opened up there in early 2024. On its face, this outcome isn’t surprising, even if it happened a bit faster than usual. It’s probably necessary, in the aggregate, to balance the national ledgers after the second craft beer boom, and Norfolk has plenty of breweries with deeper roots, stronger communities, and from what I hear, better beer, too. (AFBC’s stuff has drawn mixed reviews.) Breweries fail for all sorts of reasons. But in a memo sent last week to the brewery’s 11,000 investors — it raised, and continues to raise, money via equity crowdfunding, a là BrewDog — chief executive Alan Beal blamed a very unusual one.

“Our ability to profitably operate in Norfolk was severely affected by the local woke mob – a few individuals in the area who have no love for the traditional American values we hold as a company,” wrote Beal. “We fought back and will continue to do so, but the cumulative effect of their actions have made it impossible to profitably run the taproom and business from Norfolk.” The brewery is supposedly scouting for locations to reopen in “a more pro-small business social and economic climate.”

Having reported on Beal and AFBC a handful of times over the course of this decade, that didn’t sound like the full story to me. It’s true that the firm was not well-received upon its arrival in Ghent (Norfolk’s historic gayborhood), where public records I obtained show the Commonwealth of Virginia lined up some $300,000 in potential tax incentives for it to take over the vacated location of another brewery that had recently closed. But what Beal omitted from the litany of grievances about community activists that he sent AFBC investors last week, and the emails he sent Hop Take earlier this week, is that this wasn’t exactly an unprovoked battle.

Most of the objections community organizers made to the brewery’s proposed presence in the neighborhood centered around two issues. It displayed apparent disregard for obtaining approval from Norfolk’s neighborhood associations and proper permits from the city itself, which resulted in a lot of ruffled feathers and at least one stop-work order during its renovation. Those were surmountable problems, and AFBC did overcome them at a pivotal permitting meeting in November 2023, even if it never fully managed to make nice with the hundreds of residents that packed the Norfolk City Council meeting to speak against it at the hearing. (The brewery also had many supporters in attendance that night, including one dressed in full military garb. I could feel the tension through the livestream.)

More damaging in the effort to win hearts and minds was AFBC’s relationship with Rob O’Neill, a Navy Seal-turned-conservative pundit who served as a face of the brand and held a spot on its board. The brewery’s “national brand ambassador” (as he was listed in various filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission prior to the hostilities) has a track record of saying vile things about marginalized people, including one high-profile incident in May 2023 where he went on Fox Business to smear an enlisted drag queen from Norfolk that the Navy had tapped for a brief ambassador program. “It’s just not acceptable for the queer community here,” Eric Hause, the founder and publisher of Outlife757, the region’s LGBTQ+ magazine, told me in late 2023.

It’s hard to imagine a worse brand ambassador for a firm hoping to do business in Norfolk’s LGBTQ+ enclave, but Beal and co. somehow made it worse by downplaying O’Neill’s bile as mere “mean tweets,” then scrubbing mentions of him from AFBC’s consumer-facing website and dodging questions about his relationship with the brewery. O’Neill’s name still appeared on SEC filings throughout the ordeal, though, and after AFBC received the greenlight to open from city officials, they returned his information to the website. (The most recent filing, made four days after the announcement, lists the commentator as a controlling shareholder with 11.4 percent of voting shares, but not a board member or brand ambassador.) Straight shooting, that ain’t.

Contra the above, Beal insists that his brewery has been a model member of the community during this process, and throughout its short tenure in Norfolk. His email to Hop Take contained a rundown of all the military-oriented charity work the brewery has done — or in some cases, would’ve done, if not for the supposed obstructionism of this “local woke mob,” which he contends “polluted the market against” AFBC from the jump. Beal also sent me a dozen itemized accusations against named antagonists; he ignored my request for documents or evidence corroborating these claims. But the gist is that some of the organizers that opposed AFBC’s permit never stopped opposing its presence in Norfolk. Beal claims these foes warned off other vendors and organizations from getting involved with the brewery, smeared it via anonymous social media accounts, and called in spurious complaints about its taproom to local officials and police. After the closure was announced, he tells Hop Take, “someone even spray painted ‘Gh3nt Wok3 Mobb’” (and misspelled it) on the side of the building.

Some of these allegations would constitute illegal behavior, and Beal told investors that AFBC plans “to file criminal complaints in Virginia against some of the perpetrators and intend to assist with prosecuting them.” Maybe he will. But if this “local woke mob” was illegally harassing and defaming the brewery for the past year, why wouldn’t its chief executive have taken legal action before its closure, rather than after? Via email, Beal declined to comment on that question, and ducked another about The Virginia Mercury’s report that AFBC had stiffed its workers out of their final paychecks and various vendors and partners out of tens of thousands of dollars. He also ignored two requests for a phone interview.

The Mercury’s piece, published by Tidewater journalist Jim Morrison earlier this week, complicates, if not entirely debunks, the idea that AFBC was run out of town by local activists. This is the other side of the story, the one missing from Beal’s notes to investors and to Hop Take. It’s also the least remarkable part of this whole affair: the brewery wasn’t doing well. AFBC lost over $4 million in the 18 months through mid-2024, per SEC filings, and was on the hook for an eye-popping $549,600 in rent each year. One former salesperson told Morrison that AFBC’s contract brewer, Brew Hub, had dropped it after Beal failed to pay the bills. (Brew Hub declined to comment for this column, citing a confidentiality agreement.) Another posted to Facebook that “The closing of AFBC had nothing to do with a ‘woke mob’ […] When Alan [Beal] stopped paying bills and stopped complying with the agreements in place that all dried up.” Other vendors have told local news outlets similar stories.

Beal, in an emailed statement, pushed back on the idea that AFBC lost its battle on the financial front, seeking repeatedly to frame the failure as something done to the brewery, rather than something it did to itself. “Even companies like Amazon and Facebook lost money for years before they became profitable,” the embattled CEO insists. “If the Norfolk facility had performed as we believed, even at the levels the previous brewery was doing at the time, there would have been no cash flow problems and none of this would have happened.”

But it did happen, and while some of the battlefield conditions precipitating AFBC’s retreat are unique, there’s a more broadly applicable lesson in it for thousands of breweries across the country. With the exception of “drinkable beer,” the most important asset for a brewery AFBC’s size is a supportive community. Not in the touchy-feely sense, either, though that helps: I’m talking about butts in seats and cards down on open tabs. There’s little point to having a taproom in 2025 — let alone an obscenely expensive one — if it’s not earning out. There’s even less point if you can’t pay your contract brewer to fill the off-premise demand you’re hoping to generate with a brand-building taproom. And least of all if you come in hot with the locals then lack the diplomatic skill or will to reach a detente.

To succeed in a market this competitive, craft brewers need every weapon in the arsenal. For a taproom, community is the big one. Isn’t it ironic, then, that a military-themed brewery in a military-themed town struggled to arm itself for the mission?

Hop-ocalypse Now

I wasn’t surprised last week to receive a press release from New Brunswick-based Moosehead Breweries announcing its new marketing gimmick for Trump’s market-tanking trade war. A crate of Moosehead — 1,461 Canadian lagers, one for each day of his term — makes for a shareable photo, and that’s the whole point of this sort of publicity stunt. Oversized packages are a time-honored gag in the brewing industry; fair play. I was, however, a bit surprised to learn that the company has already sold out of its so-called “Presidential Pack,” which was listed for 3,490 loonies. (The firm didn’t disclose how many units it had for sale, but still.) Canadians are rightly ripshit at the U.S. right now, but “four-figure spite-beer purchase” is a whole other level.

Ups…

Monster Beverage Company’s co-founder/-CEO Rodney Sacks, currently 75 years old, announced he’ll step down in June… Constellation Brands will take Corona Sunbrew national in 2025… Modelo’s stateside owner says it’ll increase its college sports marketing spend 63 percent this year… Congrats to all the winners of Untappd’s second-annual Community Awards…

…and downs

Trump threatened a 200-percent retaliatory tariff on European alcohol that could take effect “shortly,” whatever that means… Molson Coors is closing Blue Moon’s brewpub in Denver at the end of the month as the brand’s flagship Belgian white keeps losing dollars and volume in the off-premise… Embattled Pabst contract-brewer City Brewing is now exploring turning itself over to its lenders in an out-of-court deal… Walgreen’s will be sold to private-equity firm Sycamore Partners for $10 billion plus a bunch o’ debt… Trump also announced a 50-percent tariff on Canadian aluminum on Tuesday before walking it back the same day, what are we doing here, man…

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