The owners of Heaven & Ale have sold off their production facility on the North Shore as well as their Ooltewah taproom, and gone all in on their taproom and restaurant on Chattanooga's Southside.
"Being unencumbered by the whole distribution game will allow us to have a little more fun on the brewing side," owner Joe Winland said. "We're done with all of that - no more canning, no more distribution, no more wholesale."
The pandemic delivered some blows to the craft beer business Winland and his wife, Kathryn, launched in 2013 with a taproom on the North Shore. Heaven & Ale's head brewer as well as a business partner opted to get out of the industry as the pandemic took hold, but Heaven & Ale is coming out of a difficult year in a good place, Winland said.
"The year was awful, but it also gave us a lot of clarity," he said. "Now that we have executed the plan we dreamed up in June last year, things feel great."
The Winlands came to Chattanooga from the Atlanta area in 2013 to open their craft beer tasting room and growler shop on the North Shore. By 2015, they had the Heaven & Ale location in Ooltewah, and in late 2017, they stood up the full-scale production brewery on the North Shore. The addition of the Southside location in January 2020 was part of a streak of steady growth, but the pandemic changed all that, Winland said.
"We decided to get back to what Heaven & Ale was when it was a little growler market selling craft beer on the North Shore," he said. "To make this whole venture really meaningful and successful, we had two more growth spurts to go through, or downsize everything and sell every drop of beer from the faucets in our taproom and be immediately successful."
Cherry Street Brewing out of Atlanta picked up the North Shore location of Heaven & Ale last summer, and will stand up a restaurant, brewing and distribution presence in Chattanooga this year, Winland said. In Ooltewah, five years after they led the opening of Heaven & Ale there, Ryan and Rebekah Hargrove bought the business in 2020 and changed the name of that location to Hoptown Beer Bar.
"That was in discussions for quite a while, and the pandemic slowed that down, but we closed that deal in late spring or early summer 2020," Winland said.
The Heaven & Ale taproom on East Main Street on the Southside will continue to sell the beers that built the brewery's reputation, including Cloudfall and Love Supreme, Winland said. A recently revamped menu has expanded the food options at the one remaining location of Heaven & Ale, and he's optimistic about the success there, he said.
"Since the fall of last year, because our patio is huge, we were able to put 50 to 60 people socially distanced on it, and we did a really good job of sanitizing and masking up and creating an environment people feel great coming to," he said.
As the weather warms up, vaccines roll out and mask recommendations loosen, he expects the already brisk business will pick up even more, Winland said.
"There's so many factors playing into us being really busy," he said.
Contact Mary Fortune at mfortune@timesfreepress.com. Follow her on Twitter at @maryfortune.