It’s hard to believe looking back from 2024, but not too long ago, there were no production breweries in Lexington County.

Up until 2018, every brewery that opened in the Columbia area operated east of the Congaree River. Lexington had brewpubs such as Old Mill and Keg Cowboy, which brew beer for on-site consumption, but other activity was subdued.

Columbia’s first wave of breweries took root starting in 2013, responding to America’s craft beer boom and a change in state law that allowed breweries to sell food and produce beer for purchase outside their doors simultaneously, and started with a trio of operations — Conquest, River Rat and Swamp Cabbage — that moved into industrial areas near Williams-Brice Stadium, the University of South Carolina’s football mecca.

Fast forward to today, and all three of those initial craft breweries have closed, leaving Richland County with four local production breweries, while Lexington County has added four of its own — Steel Hands, Hazelwood, Savage Craft and Angry Fish. And multiple other craft-focused businesses offering cozy spaces to drink or take home beer and wine have opened and flourished in the county.

And these watering holes are having a big impact. They’re helping to bring new life to areas where activity had waned. Some are actively reshaping and preserving historic structures.

West Columbia’s Savage Craft Ale Works won recognition for the renovation of its home, which comprises both the former Brookland Fire Station and City Hall built in 1925 and the former New Brookland Jail built in 1908. Hazelwood Brewing Company lit a new kind of fire in the former boiler room of the town of Lexington’s circa-1890s Old Mill, enhancing its vibe with repurposed barn wood.

Since the pandemic, craft beer’s bubble shows signs of popping nationally, with big breweries announcing closures and reductions in production. Last week, Lagunitas Brewing Co. announced the closure of its Chicago production facility after 10 years. Colorado’s Oskar Blues Brewery, which still operates a large East Coast production facility near Asheville, closed it Austin, Texas, operation in November. Last summer, Japanese beer titan Sapporo shuttered one of its acquisitions, San Francisco’s Anchor Steam Brewery, one of the first big names during craft beer’s first wave.

And the Columbia market has seen its own closures, with Cottontown Brew Lab joining the aforementioned stadium trio in ceasing operation.

So what’s fueling craft beer’s ongoing surge into the Midlands’ western frontier?

Local owners in the industry pointed to a few key factors, such as affordable rent and the ability to nestle in close to burgeoning neighborhoods yearning to carve out their own distinct identity.

Be where the people are

Angry Fish, the production brewery that became the county’s first six years ago, will celebrate that anniversary with a big party next month.

Chatting with The State as they washed and filled kegs early on a Wednesday evening, owners Kenny Hodge and Joseph Turner said they feel lucky to have found their space just outside the town limits of Lexington on U.S. 1 near Lake Murray and Lexington High School.

The rents, if they’d landed in or close to downtown Columbia, would have been much higher, they explained, and they’re near growing neighborhoods flush with people eager to drink well without venturing far from their homes.

“There’s so many people within a 10-mile radius,” Hodge said, adding that once residents realized Angry Fish was there, many of them started coming with regularity. That’s been big for Angry Fish, particularly when events outside its control slowed things down in 2020.

“They pretty much kept us in business through the pandemic,” he added.

West Columbia’s WECO Bottle and Biergarten — which offers expansive outdoor space, a quickly shifting selection of curated craft beer and a rotating assembly of food trucks to keep its customers fed — has seen its proximity to the city’s rejuvenating neighborhoods pay similar dividends.

It’s one of a few newer businesses — including the jazz club Chayz Lounge and the just-opened coffee shop Brickhouse — bringing fresh activity to a stretch of Meeting Street that was, for a long time, pretty dead.

While his location has been a boost, WECO owner Phill Blair reasoned that the location of those first three Columbia breweries by the stadium ultimately became a hindrance.

“They popped up there, and they were a destination for a while,” he said. “But as these other things come online … suddenly you don’t have to go as far to get to a brewery. Why would you trek all the way from Main Street Lexington to go drink by the stadium when you’ve got a brewery like Hazelwood out there?”

A place to call their own

Hazelwood owner Matt Rodgers echoed Blair’s sentiment, noting that his revenue breakdown is about 80% on-site consumption versus people buying beers to take home.

Beyond the ease for people in and around the town of Lexington to get to the brewery, he said Hazelwood benefits from its regulars becoming invested in the notion of supporting a place with good craft beer that’s not just in the area they call home, but the town they call home.

“I think people don’t think of it really as a destination brewery as much as they do a gathering place for their friends and their family,” Rodgers said. “We just try to be that place while being a craft beer artisanal place.”

Blair said WECO gets a similar boost with being embraced as part of the culture of West Columbia.

It’s made efforts to boost that sense of local pride in the last year by collaborating on beers with some of the Carolinas’ more popular breweries, crafting a dark lager with Asheville’s Highland Brewing Company last fall and a crisp Kölsch ale with Charleston’s Edmund’s Oast Brewing Co. earlier this month. That most recent beer is still on offer at the shop.

“I think people want to go to a place that makes them feel like they live in the right place,” Blair said.

“I feel like these people are about what I’m about. And that’s where I want to spend my money and hang out,” he added, speaking to the kind of places where he likes to drink.

The similarly structured business Craft and Draft opened its second bottle shop and beer bar in Irmo in 2020, six years after it opened its first in Columbia’s Shandon neighborhood. Co-founder Kellan Monroe said the vibe they were seeking with both locations was a place where the drinking experience was communal, not a solitary activity done quickly on the way home from work.

“We wanted to be sort of a community gathering center where you weren’t trying to come out and forget your problems; what you were trying to do is go out and hang out with all your friends and be social,” he said.

Make it cozy

All of the owners The State spoke with emphasized that you can’t get people into your spot to start feeling like a bar or brewery is a part of their community unless you provide a space that is comfortable and welcoming.

Hazelwood has heavily invested in making its space one that is attractive and cozy, using reclaimed wood to give the taproom a pleasant tavern vibe and continuing to enhance its attached beer garden as work has wrapped up on the Old Mill Pond dam behind it, which was damaged during heavy flooding in 2015.

Many craft breweries from earlier in the industry’s boom, including some of the early ones in Columbia, set up shop in uninviting industrial spaces and didn’t do much to make their interior spaces much more than a bar attached to a room filled with tanks and bags of raw ingredient.

“I guess we got lucky when we found the beautiful location here and were given the opportunity to turn it into something cool,” Rodgers said. “It just comes natural, the style, and the way we like to create a cozy, comfortable, eclectic environment is just a result of our backgrounds and the places we want to be every day and feel comfortable ourselves.”

Angry Fish is located in an industrial space that recalls those early craft breweries, sitting back off the road in a small warehouse down a driveway littered with potholes. In the small taproom, part of the space is set aside as a living-room-esque lounge area, and they bring in food trucks and entertainment to liven things up. Decorations such as a skeleton fisherman in a jon boat that hangs from the ceiling let the owners’ personalities show through.

But the owners don’t argue that their space has become an impediment, and that — along with wanting to increase the size of their brewing system — has them seeking another one. All the same, they’re not looking to add investors to build a big new facility as some have. They both have other jobs and are just fine growing Angry Fish on the side until it can perhaps become a full-time gig.

“They relegated us to spaces like this,” Turner said of how state regulations box in breweries. “Unless you build on your own property and build your own building, it’s hard because you can only be general commercial or industrial.”

Fading stigma

One challenge the owners said is falling by the wayside is stigma against businesses centered on selling alcohol, which the owners said they have seen fade away in a county that is still largely rural and conservative.

Monroe said he got questions along those lines when Craft and Draft first opened in Columbia

“Even when we started on Divine Street, one of the distributors came in, and they’re like, ‘Oh, we’ll get your window covers so people can’t see the people drinking, because nobody wants to be seen drinking,” he said. “We basically were like, ‘No, that’s not the crowd, we’re going for. We want you to come in and relax and see your friends.’”

And that way of thinking about things has won out, he added, both in Columbia and in Irmo.

“Everybody settled into that’s an acceptable thing,” Monroe said. “And they understand that, while being alcoholic and an adult setting, it’s still somewhere where you can take your kids and hang out and see your friends and not have to push it too hard.”

WECO’s Blair pointed to a present threat to the South Carolina alcohol landscape that could curtail craft beer’s advance in Lexington. Many people in the industry are continuing to push the state Legislature to address a law that has sent liquor liability rates skyrocketing in recent years, making it increasingly hard for some businesses to get by.

Blair said in November that if insurance rates keep rising, WECO could be forced to close. He again made a dire prediction talking to The State recently.

“The beer growth/movement into Lexington County all comes crumbling down sooner than later due to liability insurance and our state government being so insanely inept at dealing with reality,” Blair said.