Guinness’ decision to close Baltimore County brewery leaves behind a bitter taste

Guinness Open Gate Brewery’s last day open to the public will be Sunday, likely marking the end of almost a century of alcohol production at the Baltimore County site — and it feels like a bad hangover.

A decade ago, elected officials loosened state laws on breweries, adjusted local zoning codes and dangled tax incentives to help the brand’s parent company, Diageo North America Inc.

“In the county we had rolled out the red carpet for Guinness,” said Tom Quirk, then the county council member representing Halethorpe, noting that he pushed through zoning changes for the site.

Some current and former county officials said they were surprised and disappointed.

Diageo has owned the property since 2001, when it purchased much of Seagram’s beverage business. It closed the facility, which made Jose Cuervo and other brands, in 2015, laying off more than 100 workers.

Will Anderson, then the county’s economic development director, said he and other officials talked to Diageo about other uses for the facility. It didn’t stay empty for long.

Guinness had already turned its Dublin brewery into a tourist destination, Anderson said, so Diageo decided to try a similar concept here.

Anderson has also worked on bigger projects, like Tradepoint Atlantic’s redevelopment of Sparrows Point, but he said luring an international beer brand felt “aspirational.” All told, Anderson said Diageo invested roughly $90 million in the project.

“People were very buzzy about it,” he said.

Part of the attraction was that the site sat within an Enterprise Zone, a state tax credit program that waives a large portion of property taxes for businesses that invest in economically struggling areas. A report from the Maryland Department of Commerce said the tax credit was “critical to attracting this project to Baltimore County, to Maryland and to the United States.”

Dakarai Turner, spokesperson for County Executive Kathy Klausmeier, said Diageo received $247,000 in tax credits from 2017 to 2022 through the Enterprise Zone program.

Politicians helped in other ways, too. Despite uproar from beer distributors and some breweries, the Maryland General Assembly lifted the cap on how many barrels a brewery could produce and sell on-site and changed the laws on operating hours.

Dwayne Kratt, then Diageo’s senior director of state government affairs, reassured lawmakers at the time that Guinness’ investment would create a “beer halo” benefitting the entire Maryland beer industry.

“Some feel that we’re going to be stealing from others,” Kratt said during a legislative hearing. “We’re going to grow the pie.”

He also used the opportunity to double down on Diageo’s commitment to Maryland.

“We could’ve taken this project to a number of other, bigger beer states that have easier regulatory regimes,” Kratt said. “We chose Maryland. We want to be here.”

Guinness Open Gate opened in 2018, riding a national wave of brewpub and taproom openings, according to the Brewers Association, an industry group.

But that wave crested around 2023, data from the Brewers Association shows. Since then, closures of brewpubs, taprooms and microbreweries have outpaced openings.

That year, Diageo shut down its large-scale brewing operations in Baltimore County and sold much of the land to the Baltimore-based real estate firm MRP Industrial for $35.7 million, property records show.

MRP is redeveloping the site into a logistics hub called Crossings 95. No sale of the remaining Open Gate property has been announced; Luis Rabago, a spokesman for Diageo, declined to comment.

Guinness Open Gate maintained a 10-barrel experimental brewing operation, and production of the Guinness Baltimore Blonde was outsourced to a facility in New York.

Most weekends and even some weeknights, the parking lot at Guinness Open Gate looked full, said Dennis Clampitt, who lives nearby. Sometimes people had to park in his neighborhood and walk over.

The Maryland Distilling Company opened in 1933 following the end of Prohibition. It changed hands and brands, but it was always making alcohol. Clampitt, who grew up in the area, recalled smelling whiskey when he played outside as a child.

In 2017, Clampitt had stumped for Guinness to open a brewery and taphouse across the street from his home. He spoke at community meetings, urging neighbors to support it too. He went to Annapolis.

For years after, Clampitt personally supported the long-term financial health of the Guinness Open Gate brewery. He drank its beer.

Now he’s worried about the impending truck traffic in his community, and he wonders whether the whole site will become warehouses.

“What the hell are we voting these politicians in for?” said Clampitt, who said he was perplexed that more elected officials haven’t been speaking out about this.

The opening was a huge deal for the state and county, he said; the closure should be, too.

Jonathan Sachs, the county’s current director of economic and workforce development, said Diageo did not give Baltimore County prior notice about its decision to close Open Gate.

He called the closure disappointing, but said it appeared to be part of a larger macroeconomic trend affecting the beer industry.

This weekend, Clampitt and his wife said they’ll go for one last round at the Open Gate. They might even quaff a pint of Guinness, a beer known for its lightly roasted, welcoming flavor — and slightly bitter aftertaste.

“The politicians bent over backwards,” Clampitt said, rehashing the legislative session of 2017.

“Well, you were a little bit of a sucker, too,” his wife, Treena, said.

“No doubt about it,” he said.