To understand the excitement surrounding the launch of Platform Beer a decade ago, it’s helpful to appreciate the local craft brewing scene that existed at the time. In terms of breweries in Cleveland, there was only Great Lakes, Market Garden, Nano Brew, Portside Brewery and tiny Indigo Imp. A beer lover would have to cross city lines to enjoy the likes of Fat Head’s, BottleHouse, Brew Kettle and a small handful of others.
“Back then, the landscape of the brewery situation in Cleveland was totally different, where any place opening was a big, exciting deal,” recalls Leslie Basalla-McCafferty, who operated brewery tours under the name Brew Bus. “So, here’s a new place opening in Ohio City – a part of Ohio City that was, at the time, neglected. It was really exciting.”
And from the start and in almost every way, Platform elected to pioneer a different path than most. Unlike its brethren, which segregated the brewing functions from the customer-facing transactions, it felt more like a garage startup that welcomed neighbors in to sample the latest batch. Brewers and guests shared the same space, giving many craft beer drinkers their first behind-the-scenes look at the entire process. And while local stalwarts built their reputations around a stable of flagship beers, Platform was more of a moving target with respect to what flowed from the barrels – hundreds of different beers a year.
Over the course of the next few years, Cleveland would welcome a dozen more breweries, but none would grow as much or as quickly, nor garner as much criticism.
To understand the mixed emotions surrounding the demise of Platform earlier this year, it’s helpful to appreciate everything that happened in between.
How did a community-focused shop become one of the fastest growing breweries in the country, a darling of Ohio’s craft scene, the newest crown jewel of Anheuser-Busch Inbev’s craft collective, and just a few years later, one of the few – and certainly most surprising – local closures?
Scene talked to two dozen former employees and industry experts about Platform’s history, from the early days to the last, when AB abruptly shuttered it all with little more than a shrug after paying $15 million for the enterprise.
With scores of staff over ten years, there are as many stories as there were Platform beers. But what’s clear is that the version of the brewery that existed at the end bore some but little resemblance to the one that existed in the beginning at the little taproom on Lorain.
“It’s always a little bitter to see something that seemed to have such a great concept and so much potential at the beginning fall apart,” says Basalla-McCafferty. “If it had stayed small and focused on quality and just maintained what made it cool to begin with, then we wouldn’t be here having this conversation.”
Two years after Paul Benner opened the Cleveland Brew Shop in Ohio City, an invaluable resource for homebrewers, he hooked up with Justin Carson, who also was operating a beer-related business. Carson was the founder of JC BeerTech, which designed, installed and maintained draft beer systems at restaurants all over the country. In early 2013, Carson purchased a two-story brick building on Lorain Avenue at W. 41st Street for $95,000. Soon after, he moved his company’s headquarters into the second floor of that building, which was constructed 100 years prior to serve as a Czech social hall.
After bringing in Shaun Yasaki as head brewer and partner, Platform Beer opened its doors in 2014. From the start, Platform was designed to be different from pretty much every other brewery in town. The owners sought to duplicate the type of taproom experience they enjoyed elsewhere but that didn’t exist in Cleveland, one that focused on beer over food, community over exclusion.
“We’re going after that West Coast taproom feel, which for some reason doesn’t really exist around here,” Benner told Scene at the time. “In Colorado or Portland, tasting rooms are just the place where beer is made and people drink. It’s all about brewing and pouring beer, not serving $12 meals.”
At Platform, guests in the 99-seat taproom were immersed in the brewing process, enjoying unobstructed views of Yasaki as he worked at the 3-barrel brewhouse or at the fermentation and conditioning tanks on the cellar side. When it came to the selection of beers that Yasakai was brewing, Platform also sidestepped convention by leaning into variety over repetition.
“I’m not really big on flagship beers,” Yasaki told Scene back then. “I don’t want people to come in and expect certain beers. I would like people to come in with the expectation that there’s going to be a completely new lineup of beers and that’s why they want to go there.”
But even more trailblazing than the laid-back taproom vibe and shying away from flagship brands was the brewery’s commitment to train the next generation of brewers, even if it meant increased competition. Every three months, a new homebrewer would be accepted into an educational program designed to scale up one’s knowledge of the craft. Those sessions included brewing time with Yasaki, lessons on branding and marketing, help drafting a business plan, even an assist on negotiating the vexing web of state and federal regulations. The guest brewer would then be given the “platform” to brew his or her recipes for a much wider audience.
Kyle Roth was invited to be Platform’s first “Guest Brewer.” Roth was an avid homebrewer, informed beer blogger and skilled graphic designer. He brewed under the name Ferndock Brewing, going so far as designing labels and tap handles to “market” his garage creations.
“I had a lot of connections in the beer world already from doing the blog, Cleveland Hops,” Roth says. “Then I started homebrewing and would share my homebrew with different beer people. I submitted beer to a lot of competitions. I got to brew my beer for the Pro-Am Competition at the Great American Beer Festival with Echo Brewing out of Colorado.”
In fact, you could argue that Ferndock Brewing had more brand recognition at the time than his “mentor” Platform Beer.
“We were already building a name for ourselves by sharing with friends in the brewing and restaurant industries – and we were getting some opportunities as far as partnering with investors,” he adds.
Roth met Benner at the Brew Shop before Platform even opened. It was then, says Roth, that Benner approached him about participating in the incubator program.
“That interested me at that point, gaining more knowledge and popularity of the beers that my partners and I were brewing,” he says. “The goal was to open up a brewery, so it made sense to do this and work with Shaun inside of Platform and get the brand out there.”
Roth was eager to pick up the sort of skills that a homebrewer would need to make the jump, things like scaling up recipes, moving beer, cellar work and measurements for carbonation. In return, Roth signed over to Platform a percentage of his future profits if and when he opened the doors to his dream brewery.
In 2014, Roth released Ferndock Brewing Sandusky Pale Ale, a West Coast-style ale, which was brewed under Platform’s license.
“It was distributed to Sandusky, where it was very well received,” he explains. “That’s where the brewery was planned to be.”
Everything worked as hoped, with Roth and his partners teaming up with investors to bring Ferndock Brewing in Sandusky to life. But as the partners really began to crunch the numbers, that prior agreement with Platform was upsetting the balance sheet.
“By the time I met with my investor, the scale of it was shrunk down so much that it wasn’t going to be profitable,” Roth explains. “I think it should have been more of a sliding scale depending on size of production.”
Roth approached Benner and Carson about renegotiating the terms, but “it wasn’t really received very well,” he says. In the end, his plans for the brewery were scrapped.
Only one other homebrewer, Tom Jenkins, would enter the incubator program before it was jettisoned altogether.
Ralph Sgro, who now owns Terrestrial Brewing, was Platform’s earliest employee, joining the company before the very first pint pour. He watched as the grassroots startup quickly changed course.
“Platform had the promise to be this underground homebrewer-inspired brewery that would give people like me a shot at doing our own thing – and it truly started out that way for a couple months, and then it took a turn for a completely different business model,” Sgro says.
In a move that shocked the local beer community, Benner and Carson announced in 2015 that they had purchased the former Leisy Brewery, a 120,000-square-foot complex of aging brick buildings, just a year after opening in Ohio City. Again, the owners touted an altruistic objective, this time to provide production bandwidth to up-and-coming brewers who wanted to scale their beer. Gypsy, as the new facility was called, would charge a flat rate per barrel of beer, absorbing all other costs associated with the process.
“You have to be a licensed brewery in Ohio, but that doesn’t mean you need to have a location,” Benner explained to Scene at the time. “What you have is a host and tenant brewery. We’re the host.”
But just as it had done with its incubator program, Platform quickly shelved the itinerant brewer model in order to focus on greatly expanding and distributing its own product line.
“Platform did see a lot of early success and growth, so why rent out your equipment to somebody else for less money when you can brew your own brand,” Yasaki says of the decision.
The grassroots Cleveland taproom that started with a 3-barrel system, before quickly adding a 10-barrel system, soon fired up a shiny new 30-barrel brewhouse at Gypsy.
“It was awesome,” a former staffer says of those heady days. “We had a great crew, we were selling a lot of beer, it was fun. The sentiment around town was very positive. People were excited to see the Platform guy. They were excited to carry the products. The market, at that time, was changing a lot. You were moving into this time when it was like ‘flavor of the week,’ that’s what the consumer was buying, and breweries like Great Lakes that were true to their core brands were fading to the backburner a little bit.”
But others felt it was too much, too fast for the budding brewery.
“That push for such expansive growth so soon was surprising to me – coming from being in the industry and seeing most places do their growth very slowly, judiciously,” says Basalla-McCafferty. “I always felt like it was Justin who was the one who was really aggressively pushing for growth at the expense of everything else, including at times at the expense of quality.”
It’s a sentiment shared by some of those on the inside as well, as one former Platform employee told Scene: “Paul was more the face of the company. Paul would do the Instagram stuff. It was more Justin day to day, and Justin was kind of the one, to put it nicely, with his foot on the pedal.”
Early on, Platform, unlike most decent-sized breweries, did not maintain an on-site lab, where beers are evaluated for things like quality, shelf-life and stability, and the presence of microorganisms. Instead, the owners often walked samples over to Market Garden’s production brewery, where lead brewer Andy Tveekrem oversaw an analytical lab, microbiological lab and sensory analysis lab.
“The beers were hit-and-miss,” Tveekrem recalls. “They didn’t have the commitment to quality that you needed to be in the can or bottle business. Some had no shelf stability at all because they were refermenting inside the package. Just a lack of regard for fundamentals.”
Within the industry, Platform earned a dubious reputation in terms of consistency and quality, a fact somewhat masked by its commitment to conceiving new brands. But even the brewery’s so-called flagships – beers like Speed Merchant, New Cleveland Palesner and Yammy Yammy – were judged to be unpredictable from batch to batch.
“I never carried Platform Beer. Never,” says John Lane, co-owner of more than a dozen Winking Lizard Taverns. “The quality was never there in the beginning. There were times when the carbonation levels were different, there were times when there were off flavors, and when we did try to get the Palesner in, because it was one that I believed was kind of a flagship for them, we’d get one batch and then the next batch – they weren’t close.”
Reports of inconsistency aside, Platform continued to charge ahead, despite an increasingly crowded landscape. A couple years into its meteoric rise, the Ohio City-based startup would see stepped-up competition in the form of new breweries such as Hansa, Masthead, Collision Bend, Boss Dog, Saucy Brew Works, BRIM and Terrestrial Brewing. The room for error – the space for tolerance and leniency from local beer drinkers – diminished with each new slice into the pie.
“I think it’s fair that people are gonna have eyes on us,” Benner told Scene in 2017. “We’re younger and have grown at a substantial rate. We understand that, which is why we make investments in quality control, in the type of equipment that we use, in all of these processes so people know that if people are paying attention to us, we’re giving them a consistent product they’re gonna have a good experience with.”
Benner and Carson’s ambitious stance – one fueled by a self-distribution model operated by the brewery’s own salespeople and drivers – paid off when Platform was recognized by the Brewers Association as one of the 50 fastest-growing small and independent craft brewers in 2018. By that time, the company operated a taproom in Columbus and was planning another in Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine neighborhood.
Carson and Benner also sought to raise funds, selling 10% of the business to an investor for $700,000, according to state liquor control documents.
To keep pace with demand, the Gypsy production facility added a hulking 60-barrel brewhouse and began operating it three shifts per day.
During his four years at Gypsy, Zach DelPriore worked his way up to brewer after stints in warehousing, distribution and delivery. He was brewing there when it was announced in a meeting that Benner and Carson were selling Platform to AB InBev, a shell-shocker of an announcement even to those who had theorized cashing out was Carson and Benner’s end-game of endless expansion.
“I don’t know if the goal was always to sell out, I just think that the goal was always, always, always expansion, always money, money, money,” cautioned a former employee.
But the two said the deal was about securing a lasting legacy for Platform while allowing them to continue to run the day-to-day operations and continue experimenting.
“The truth is we’re going to stay true to the core to what’s made Platform what it is today, which is an ever-changing, unique approach to how we brew our beers,” Benner told Cleveland.com at the time. “The decision as far as what beers we make, when we make, it was really important for us that that was something we can continue to decide. We were given that freedom through this partnership to continue to innovate.”
Anheuser-Busch paid $15 million for Platform, according to purchase agreement documents obtained via a public records request by Scene. (That did not include the property itself, however. A recent online search of Cuyahoga County property records reveals that Carson is still listed as the owner of both the Lorain Ave. building and the former Leisy Brewery property.)
While DelPriore and his fellow brewers were morally devastated by the news, and while local craft fans deplored a Cleveland craft favorite selling out to Big Beer, he says the mega-brewery did invest about $30 million toward upgrading the building’s infrastructure as well as improving quality, consistency, safety, pay and benefits.
“We are excited to invest even more into our local economy through capital improvements and job creation… We will be able to provide our staff with resources like robust healthcare benefits including parental leave, 401K and growth opportunities that we currently don’t have and will make Platform an even better place to work and grow,” Carson said in a statement at the time.
“AB really upped the quality standards there a lot,” DelPriore says. “Most of the bad rap is from the early days, when they were pushing shit out as fast as possible.”
As a shift brewer, DelPriore would follow a schedule that told him what beer to brew and when. Given Platform’s focus on variety, that docket was full of surprises. “My high there was 189” different beers in a single year, he says. For conservative breweries that tend to stick to a stable of flagships sprinkled here and there with a few seasonals, those numbers are unfathomable.
“It’s a fickle marketplace and everybody is trying to figure out what works, but they took it to a degree that I was flabbergasted by,” Tveekrem says. “I couldn’t even keep track of all the brands; they just kept sticking them out there. You could tell that they were just throwing shit at the wall to see if it would stick.”
Perhaps unconventional, but the reception at the Ohio City, Columbus and Cincinnati taprooms to that approach was always enthusiastic. Many craft beer drinkers are novelty seekers, eager not to kick back with the same-old, same-old but rather to sample something completely different. It’s a risk/reward proposition that diehard Miller Lite drinkers could never comprehend. And when Platform struck gold in the form of, say, an Orange Blossom Gose or Holiday Donut Cookie, the owners could opt to scale it up and package it for wide release.
And beer lovers would descend upon Platform’s Ohio City taproom in droves for events like Fresh Beer Fridays and Saturday can releases.
“We had so much fun releasing two or three beers every Friday,” says Shelly Svonavec, who worked for years as a bartender and general manager at Platform. “It was hard to explain to people who worked later on because it was just so different. We had our regulars that would come for the limited releases. It felt more like a community rather than a bar.”
It was a framework that appealed to a certain set of craft beer drinker, one who enjoyed logging their “check-ins” on apps like Untappd in hopes of earning badges, followers and recognition.
“At that point, beer was the hottest thing,” recalls Sgro. “It was trending before trending on Instagram even existed. Back then, we would chase good beer around the city.”
And regarding that Brewers Association recognition. Brewery production numbers are self-reported. And there is a distinction between production and sales.
“The numbers were realistic,” says DelPriore. “As long as you make the beer, you made that much beer. There was a lot of beer made.”
It was a strategy that appealed to Anheuser-Busch, at least on paper.
“Ostensibly, the reason that ABI purchases these craft breweries is because they are better at innovation than a big, global, mega company,” says Kate Bernot, beer writer and frequent contributor to publications such as Good Beer Hunting. “They can respond to brewing trends faster, they can try new things faster in smaller markets and can then scale up.”
Over the span of about a decade, Anheuser-Busch InBev’s Brewers Collective acquired around a dozen craft breweries, starting with Chicago’s Goose Island and ending with Platform Beer. Only one saw sales plummet after being brought into the fold: Platform.
“Those early years, sales are supposed to go gangbusters, because suddenly you have all the resources of ABI behind you,” Bernot says. “You have an extremely strong distribution relationship, you have, theoretically, lots of money, sales and marketing support, expertise that you might not have had at your tiny, local brewery before, new placements in channels that you might not have been selling in, like stadiums or convenience stores. Those first few years should be like a ticker tape parade.”
Around that time, all craft breweries were facing stiff industry headwinds in the form of Covid, market saturation, and shifting consumer trends that saw the explosion of hard seltzers like White Claw. According to the not-for-profit Brewers Association, in 2020, small breweries saw a 9-percent decline in production year over year, the first such dip in recent history.
“Those are factors as much as they are for any brand, but Platform was performing worse than the rest of ABI’s craft portfolio and vastly worse than craft beer as a whole,” Bernot states.
A former employee rests some of the blame on a shift in the distribution model. Until the sale, Platform had employed a stable of salespeople who repped and sold only Platform products. After the sale, those duties were transferred to House of LaRose, the local wholesale distributor of Anheuser-Busch. When you’re out selling heavy hitters like Budweiser, Bud Light, Michelob, Busch and Yuengling, Platform likely gets short shrift.
“Platform was probably very, very low on their list of priorities,” the former staffer says. “Distributor reps, they’re selling what makes them money.”
In reality, the level of experimentation and risk-taking that worked so well at the taprooms began to lose its appeal to shoppers in the retail marketplace. Sales reps would be stocking store shelves with new Platform brands alongside others that hadn’t budged in months.
“The general community caught that fatigue – it was too much, too fast,” says a former employee. “If you go to the store and you’re looking at a shelf with Platform and there’s literally like 12 different beers, are you going to sift through all of those because you really want to drink Platform or are you just going to keep moving down and buy something else by someone else.”
Others feel that the Platform/ABI marriage was doomed from the start to fail. In pursuit of the shiny-new thing, the mega-brewery didn’t do its proper due diligence to see what it was exactly that they were acquiring, argue those with inside knowledge.
“That production facility on Vega? How does AB buy that and then not realize that they have to make huge, huge, huge infrastructure investments to turn this into the brand they want it to be,” says a former employee. “Brewing beer is expensive, so to do what they needed to at that facility, I would say it’s every bit of $30 million.”
On top of the capital improvements necessary to bring Gypsy into the modern era, adds the former staffer, ABI just isn’t set up to market the type of product line that made Platform an industry darling in the first place.
“They gobbled it up and tried to take the square peg and fit it into their round hole and it never happened,” they say. “It was never a good marriage to begin with and, in a nutshell, I think that’s really why that acquisition didn’t have the effect that they would have thought it would.”
In early 2021, Anheuser-Busch InBev hacked Platform’s brand portfolio to just a handful of core brands, while simultaneously moving production of heavy hitters like Haze Jude IPA, Odd Future Imperial IPA and Canalway IPA to an out-of-state brewery in New Hampshire. It was the beginning of the end for Platform’s local operations, as it got shuffled to the bottom of ABI’s marketing deck amidst lagging numbers.
At the time, Platform’s in-state retail sales were plummeting while its total volume was down from 28,000 barrels in 2018 to 22,500 in 2021.
The problems continued to mount that year, including when the entire staff at Platform’s Columbus taproom walked out in solidarity over working conditions – sharing in an open letter their concerns over low pay, untreated black mold, and coronavirus protocols.
The taproom in general had abysmal sales numbers, and the public humiliation took its toll on Carson.
“He was publicly maligned and attacked in an ugly way,” says a former employee. “He took it very hard.”
But there were real problems, it seemed, there and elsewhere: The Columbus taproom would never reopen.
Carson, around that time, was relieved of day-to-day control at the brewery, says another former employee.
The following year ABI significantly reduced production and staff at the Clark-Fulton brewery, laying off an estimated 25-30 employees.
By then, 75% to 90% of Platform was being brewed in New Hampshire and projections for local production in 2023 hovered around 4,000 barrels, tops.
The writing was on the wall but the news still hit like a brick for those left when, six months after the layoffs, ABI abruptly closed the Ohio City taproom and Phunkenship, the sour facility and taproom in Clark-Fulton – all without advance warning to a majority of employees.
“People were expecting to go to work that day and lost access to Slack,” says one of those staffers.. “One of my friends was laid off and I don’t think any of them saw it coming. I don’t think the managers saw it coming. Two days before, we had a staff meeting and they were going over the details for this new education program.”
In order to receive their severance packages, employees had to sign a waiver and release of claims and “agree to make no public statements and take no public action that disparages or is detrimental to AB or would otherwise cause or contribute to AB held in disrepute by the general public, customers or employees.”
“They put sheets over the windows [of the taproom] so you couldn’t see in and we weren’t given the option to go back in to get anything that we left,” a former bartender says. “They had a security guard there.”
Carson nor Benner made a public statement at the time, or since, and neither responded to requests to be interviewed for this article. Attempts to interview AB staffers were rebuffed as well.
ABI, for its part, issued a brief statement at the time not addressing the closure directly but saying, “As we navigate through the changing industry and operational challenges, it has become clear that Platform’s production and commercial efforts need to be focused on… Haze Jude IPA, Odd Future Imperial IPA, and our new Canalway IPA.”
It’s an ironic fate for a company that prized innovation and variety from the beginning.
In speaking with Scene in 2017 about Platform’s strategy compared to other breweries in town, Benner remarked, “We always said, we were never just gonna pump two beers into the market as far as we can.”
Turns out, it’s three zombie beers, brewed hundreds of miles away.
To some in the local brewing community, the de facto shuttering of Platform is karma for a string of misdeeds that includes shady marketing tactics, alleged non-payment of debts that brought near-yearly lawsuits for long overdue maintenance and legal bills, heavy “borrowing” of Rhinegeist Brewery’s trade dress, and a nasty legal battle against brewer-partner Yasaki, who left one year in to pursue his own brewery.
“It was pretty terrible, to be honest,” Yasaki recalls. “We had just had our first child two weeks before. I was getting dragged into a courtroom and already not getting any sleep and staying up all night.”
The suit by Benner and Carson alleged breach of contract, and the owners sought to prohibit Yasaki from taking any steps toward opening his own brewery. Ultimately, the case was settled and dismissed out of court because it had no merit, he says.
“I was a partner, I was a co-owner,” Yasaki says. “Our operating agreement actually had a provision that members of the company were free to pursue businesses outside, because both of the other partners owned beer-adjacent businesses, like the homebrew shop and BeerTech.”
Whether intentionally or not, Platform did function as a craft beer incubator, seeding the landscape with skilled brewers who went off to start their own businesses. Yasaki opened Noble Beast in 2017, Sgro opened Terrestrial that same year, and Reed Jaskula, who took over brewmaster duties after Yasaki departed, went on to open Fair-Weather Friend in Oklahoma City.
“If it wasn’t for Platform, I wouldn’t have my spot, Shaun wouldn’t have his spot, so good things did come out of it,” Sgro says. “We learned a lot about how not to handle business from them. A lot of my business now is based off of things that I wish they were doing.”
Yasaki says that he learned similar lessons during his short tenure at Platform that helped turn Noble Beast into one of the best craft beer experiences in Ohio.
“It was certainly a learning experience for me, and a lot of that experience has contributed to the success here,” he says. “I learned a lot about myself, managing a brewery, managing employees for the first time in my career, writing recipes, so a lot of the lessons learned were positive.”
While Justin Carson is the easy villain in this story because of his hardline business strategies, aggressive tactics and apparent lack of empathy, those who worked closely with him discovered a different side. And to many in his employ, his decision to sell to ABI was made with the best of intentions.
“What they wanted was to build a company where they could keep people employed and build and grow, not only their brand but their family of people,” says a former employee. “You’ve heard all the things about Justin Carson, but to the people that were in his circle and he gave any kind of shit about, he did care and wanted those people to be taken care of, with good salaries and benefits and 401ks and all of the things.”
Svonavec, who says that she remains close with Carson and Benner, feels a lot of the blame and bitterness directed toward them is unfair. A small measure of empathy, she argues, might serve critics well.
“They started a business pretty young and it grew pretty fast and it developed into something very big,” she says. “I think at the end of the day, with all these things that happened, everyone is human. To me, I would be like, how would you have handled it, what would you have done given XYZ circumstances. Can people do things that you will disagree with, yes. Does that make them a bad person, no.”
One of the last beers to be served at the Columbus taproom before it closed was a high-ABV IPA called Hubris. If there was a more fitting metaphor to encapsulate in a single can the roller-coaster ride that was Platform, it would be hard to find one.
As the brewery’s debt continued to mount, its owners sought refuge in the form of a bailout from Anheuser-Busch InBev, a company with whom it could not have been more incompatible. In hopes of preserving what they created, the founders likely sealed its fate.
“Hubris is not a good thing, but it springs from pride and ambition and wanting to do good things,” says a former employee. “But unfortunately, if you lose sight of the ball sometimes it turns into just plain hubris and ego, and there was a lot of that involved.”
*Updated on 6/17/23 to include AB’s purchase price of Platform.
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This article appears in May 31 – Jun 13, 2023.