Brewpub that went all-in on Tacoma has closed for good. What went wrong?
After three years in Tacoma, Odin Brewing has closed its restaurant in the St. Helens neighborhood and, for the time being, its production brewery in the Nalley Valley.
The company shared the news Friday, June 9, on social media. Owner Dan Lee told The News Tribune the decision was, at the end of the day, a financial one.
“Through the pandemic, it was always, ‘Well, if could just get past the lockdowns, then we’ll be OK. Then if we can just get past the 50 percent [capacity]’ — there was always that,” he said. “But by now, we kind of have at least a year of really living that day-to-day. A lot of those chips that we placed bets on during the pandemic, they’re coming home to roost now.”
Debts in particular became untenable to manage, he said, an underappreciated challenge of the pandemic era. Many restaurants, like Odin, took on debt simply to keep the doors open, but the downstream effect of those risks, without a full recovery, “basically tips over the apple cart,” explained Lee.
Timing was not on Odin’s side for its expansion to Tacoma in 2020. Lee, who opened his brewery in Tukwila in 2009, signed the lease for the old Hub space at 203 Tacoma Ave. S. mere weeks before the pandemic took hold. The restaurant eventually opened that summer, with another business, Pint & Pie, below it. (The latter moved last year to 610 Pacific Ave., formerly Pacific Malting and Brewing and, briefly in 2021, Mother Fern Brewing.)
Odin debuted with an executive chef, Kristen Lyon, who developed an updated menu of comfort food, with sandwiches, rosemary-cheddar mac and cheese, and stone-oven pizzas with beer-infused crust. In 2021, she competed on a Cooking Channel show and later that year parted ways with the brewpub. Last summer, Odin had plans to open a separate pizza concept downstairs, with a bonus patio, called Midgard, but the idea fizzled.
Staffing challenges played a role in the restaurant’s demise, said Lee, as did supply-chain hiccups that bled into 2022.
Another wrinkle — one not faced by most restaurants — was the beer side of the business. When Odin Brewing launched 14 years ago, it was the 118th licensed brewery in Washington state, said Lee; today there are about 500. The company moved to a larger facility in Tukwila in 2014, but in 2021 lost that lease.
“That’s probably the other major issue we had to deal with on top of everything else,” he said. “We had to decommission our existing brewery and rebuild it on a smaller scale at elevated pricing. There was a 6-month window where we weren’t producing any of our own beer. We essentially lost access to shelf space that took years for us to build.”
That new production facility was also in Tacoma, off South Tacoma Way in the Nalley Valley. While a comeback for the brewery — known for its Viking mythology branding and European-style ales and lagers that notched several regional brewing awards — is not out of the question, for now it’s unlikely.
“I think there still is a pathway to rebuild,” said Lee, “but the timeframe that it would require is just not practical.”
It’s almost impossible to operate a brewery these days without a viable retail operation, he added, whether it’s just a taproom or a full-service restaurant, as opposed to relying on ever-tightening distribution channels in a saturated beer market.
“My thought originally was, if one part of the business was struggling, the other part of the business usually picks up the slack,” he continued. “Over the long run, you have a more sustainable system. But the pandemic really created a situation where we had both sides of the business failing simultaneously.”
One of the biggest struggles was the lack of lunchtime business.
Lee admitted that, in addition to those elements out of their control, they made plenty of mistakes along the way. He also posited that had he started Odin in Tacoma from the advent, the conversation might be different.
He teased that another group would be trying its own hand at a brewpub concept in the space, which boasts high ceilings with exposed wooden beams and brick walls, plus a spacious back room for big groups and events. (The News Tribune and TNT Diner hosted a panel discussion there with local chefs and restaurateurs last September.) Through the entrance at 204 St. Helens Avenue, Stadium Cafe, which opened this spring, will remain.
