Pitcher This: Olde Towne looking for new home
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An entire industry nearly vanished from the state of Alabama last month.
The state’s only commercial brewery, Huntsville’s Olde Towne Brewing Co., was destroyed by fire July 5.
Despite the name, Olde Towne’s not been around all that long. And despite the fire, founder and brewmaster Don Alan Hankins says the brewery will be back.
When Olde Towne opened in 2004, the microbrewer became the state’s only commercial beer bottling operation. The fire came just as the company was starting to taste success.
“We had just started to turn the corner,” Hankins said recently from the temporary office where he’s spent the last month pressing insurance claims and scouting property for a new brewery.
Olde Towne’s profile was growing to the point where Alabama beer lovers made a point to look for its products. The company brews a modest range of styles, including a pale ale and an amber that were available in Calhoun County. The amber is the biggest seller, according to Hankins, its “not too malty, not too bitter” flavor appealing to a broad range of tastes.
Hankins’s favorite is Olde Towne’s hefeweizen, the German style of unfiltered wheat beer.
“I’d put our hefeweizen up against anybody’s” he said.
If it’s not already, all the Olde Towne that was brewed by July 5 soon will be gone from store shelves. The company has identified a few sites around Huntsville and Madison County that might become its new home. Hankins hopes to close on one soon and be brewing again by December.
Until then, the only way to get Olde Towne in drinkers’ hands would be contract brewing – turning the recipe and a big chunk of revenue – over to a larger brewery. The company’s not decided yet whether to do it; while it would keep the brand in front of customers, it wouldn’t help financially.
“Contract brewing for us is not a money-making venture,” he said.
His tenure at Olde Towne isn’t the first time Hankins has worked for Alabama’s only brewer.
After graduating from the University of Alabama with a business degree and learning to hate sitting at a desk, he turned a hobby into a profession. He’d been a homebrewer since his youth and college days, and decided to hone his skills at a brewing school in London.
When he returned to the States, he went to work for Birmingham Brewing Co., then the state’s only beer bottler. By the time it closed in the late 1990s, Hankins was gone, working for a company opening a chain of brewpubs around the Southeast. The he got out of the beer business to sell medical implants. But eventually the craft lured him back. He moved back to his native Huntsville, hatched a plan and met his business partner Howard Miller. They opened Olde Towne in 2004.
Now he’ll get to open it again this December, hopefully picking up right where the company left off.
“It was really catching on, he said. “I never knew how many people knew about the brewery until this happened.”
