Guinness came to Baltimore County with big hopes. It leaves with unanswered questions.

Nearly a decade ago, when Stephen Walsh first learned that Guinness was opening a brewery and visitor center in Baltimore County, “I was almost a little puzzled,” he said. Why was the brand, born in Dublin in the 1700s, coming to Maryland?

Walsh’s confusion turned to delight when he first toured the Open Gate Brewery in Halethorpe, which opened in 2018. For the past four years, Walsh has hosted a weekly trivia night there, attracting a steady group of regulars. “We’ve always had a great time there,” said Walsh, who was born in Ireland. “To be an Irish trivia host in America hosting at Guinness, that doesn’t hurt.”

But this week, parent company Diageo announced that the 10-barrel experimental brewery and taproom is shutting down Nov. 1, more than three years after closing a manufacturing plant on the site. Chrissie Dwyer, a spokesperson for Aramark, said 174 employees who worked at the location in food service and facilities management would be impacted by the closure.

The news brings to an end to Diageo’s eight-year effort to create a tourist destination in Maryland modeled after its site in Dublin. It leaves behind a brewing landscape that Guinness helped reshape — along with unanswered questions about what will come next for the site and the beer brewed there.

“It’s definitely disappointing,” said Jonathan Sachs, director of the department of economic and workforce development for Baltimore County. “When they opened, there was a lot of excitement and a lot of promise. It’s a place we were anticipating was going to attract a lot of people to the region.”

Diageo’s 2017 announcement that it wanted to bring a Guinness brewery to Baltimore County was touted by the company and lawmakers as a boon for the local economy. Gov. Larry Hogan called it “great news for job creation, manufacturing, and tourism in our state.”

Mike Mohler, who served as chief administrator for Baltimore County’s liquor board after retiring as a regional sales manager for Diageo, helped the company bring the Guinness brewery to life. “I was at the right place at the right time,” he said.

Guinness was looking for a foothold in the U.S. market, and Diageo already owned the property, which had formerly been a Seagram’s bottling plant. Mohler navigated them through the permitting process and acted as a liaison with then-Baltimore County Executive Kevin Kamenetz.

But the road to opening wasn’t without hurdles. In 2017, Diageo lobbyists advocated for changes to state law that, among other things, would allow them to sell beer that wasn’t brewed on-site — specifically, Guinness Draught, which is only brewed in Ireland. The rules were initially meant to apply only to Guinness, a fact that left a bitter taste in the mouths of Maryland craft brewers at the time.

“A lot of that legislation started off on the wrong foot,” recalled Adam Benesch, co-founder of Union Craft Brewing, which opened in 2012. Ultimately, though, lawmakers agreed to change the laws to allow all brewers to sell beer from other distributors. “Guinness helped make those laws a little better for everybody,” he said.

There were other positives, too. Nearby Heavy Seas brewery “definitely benefited” from Guinness’ arrival, said Caroline Sisson, director of marketing and hospitality for Heavy Seas and president of the Brewers Association of Maryland. Tourists might come in to visit Open Gate first and stop by the Heavy Seas taproom, also located in Halethorpe, afterward. Moreover, Sisson said, Guinness’ arrival “helped kind of put awareness on this industry.”

For a while, Open Gate Brewery lived up to its lofty expectations. Diageo announced in November 2018 that it had received 100,000 guests within three months of opening, surpassing their projections. But traffic seemed to decline over time, with the brewery hit hard by the pandemic, Mohler said.

While Guinness sales remain strong worldwide, Mohler believes that sales of Guinness Blonde, its American lager produced in Halethorpe and eventually renamed Baltimore Blonde, never lived up to Diageo’s projections. Diageo shuttered its Maryland manufacturing plant in 2023, briefly relocating production of Baltimore Blonde to New York’s FX Matt despite the efforts of Baltimore County officials to keep it local.

Over Walsh’s years hosting trivia at Open Gate, he watched things slim down, with an upstairs restaurant converted into an event space. “The footprint of where they were operating kept getting smaller,” Walsh said. Management seemed to focus more on special events like St. Patrick’s Day celebrations, which drew huge crowds, rather than the day-to-day operations, which might bring scant business.

“They probably were envisioning more traffic than they were probably getting the last year,” Walsh said. Of the 150 guests who might turn up for trivia on a given week, he estimates the majority came because of him.

A spokesperson for Diageo did not respond to questions about whether foot traffic had declined at the brewery.

To some, the final departure of Guinness from Maryland underscores the challenges that even small brewers are facing. “It’s really, really hard in the industry right now,” Sisson said. There are many reasons she can point to, from rising costs “across the board” to changing consumer preferences and a saturated market. “It is this multihead beast,” she said, adding that every brewer she knows is “in survival mode.”

But some hope the closure of Guinness’ Open Gate will prompt more Marylanders to patronize the locally owned brewers in their home state. “I would love it if there was this rallying cry of, ‘Let’s support who’s in our backyard,’” Sisson said.

“The more we can keep those dollars within Maryland,” Benesch said, “the better off the local economy is going to be.”

The announcement of Open Gate’s closure leaves many unknowns, including what will happen to the brewery site in Baltimore County.

Sachs said the county is working in close partnership with Diageo to figure out the next use for the site; he does not know whether the company plans to sell it.

Also unclear is the future of Guinness’ Baltimore Blonde, which is now only available for purchase at Open Gate Brewery.

In the interim, Heavy Seas launched their own competitor to the product: a “Bo*dacious Blonde,” previously called “Bohdacious,” and cheekily named in homage to that other famous Maryland beer to leave the state, National Bohemian. It’s now, Sisson said, one of Heavy Seas’ top five bestsellers.