Visitors to Willoughby Brewing Company have recently been welcomed not with an open door and plentiful pints of peanut butter porter but a locked entrance with a sign noting the property is for rent.
Alas, it looks like the end for one of Northeast Ohio's first breweries, opened in 1998.
The pandemic has brought on hard times for the operators, who got behind on rent, which has led to the landlord locking the doors and looking for new tenants.
“While we have not received an eviction notice, he has shut the water off from his inside location, even though we paid the water bill (and it is in his name) he has changed the locks keeping us from entering the building and retrieving product (beer) that is canned that we just started selling to vendors and we cannot open our patio and bar and now we have NO source of income,” Willoughby Brewing president Rollin Cooke III
told Cleveland.com. “We got behind in the rent as we were closed for a little over three months. We have been trying to catch up with limitations placed on us by the government mandates."
