In two weeks, Durham’s first microbrewery will pour its last pint. Yesterday afternoon, the owners of Triangle Brewing Company announced their plans to close, via Facebook.

“It is with deepest sadness that we announce today that on Monday, May 2nd, after nearly nine years of calling the Bull City home, Triangle Brewing Company will close its doors for good,"longtime friends Rick Tufts and Andy Miller wrote.

They moved to Durham and set up their brewery in 2007, making Triangle Brewing Company the first microbrewery to make its home in the Bull City. TBC quickly became an institution in a downtown that was starting to “find its cool.” I’d venture in from Chapel Hill, barely old enough to taste its wares, to see bands set up on the floor or loading dock. Red Collar released its first album there. When Future Kings of Nowhere frontman Shayne Miel was battling cancer, his friends hosted a daylong benefit concert there.

But Durham isn’t the same city it was then. The once-tiny local beer sections at local grocery stores have swollen, crowding out old, traditional standbys with new labels and novel flavors. The greater Triangle area now boasts dozens of taprooms and brewpubs, part of a statewide explosion of craft beer. Triangle Brewing Company’s goodbye post acknowledges this growth in competition.

“We began in the earliest days of the craft beer boom that we are all still witness to today,” the owners wrote. “At a time when names like Highland Brewing, Red Oak, and Carolina Brewing Company were far from household names, when Top of The Hill, Carolina Brewery, and Front Street Brewing were local curiosities, and Sierra Nevada and Samuel Adams were the alpha and omega of craft as far as most people were concerned.”

How much that competition factored in Tufts and Miller’s decision to close the brewery is unclear. (We’ll have an interview with them next week.) Their post discloses no reason for the closing, but it does promise a grand finale.

“On Saturday, April 30, we will send this venture out in style,” they write. “The brewery’s doors will open at 4 p.m. and stay open until the last drop of beer is gone.”

So cheers to Durham’s first microbrewery. You’ll be missed.

The full text of Triangle Brewing Company’s release is pasted below:

It is with deepest sadness that we announce today that on Monday, May 2nd, after nearly nine years of calling the Bull City home, Triangle Brewing Company will close its doors for good.

We began in the earliest days of the craft beer boom that we are all still witness to today. At a time when names like Highland Brewing, Red Oak, and Carolina Brewing Company were far from household names, when Top of The Hill, Carolina Brewery, and Front Street Brewing were local curiosities, and Sierra Nevada and Samuel Adams were the alpha and omega of craft as far as most people were concerned.

In the aftermath of Pop The Cap and the birth of the locavore movement we found ourselves blessed with a perfect storm of circumstance and we landed with a bang, selling beer as fast as our Co-Founders and childhood friends Rick “da brewer” Tufts and Andy “da bloke” Miller could make it.

At moments like this the urge to romanticize and spin stories is all too easy, but there are no tales we could tell that would equal those created by our many fans as they enjoyed one of the over four million beers it has been our pleasure to provide.

We can never say thank you enough so we hope you’ll settle for hearing it just this once, Thank You. While we always brewed for us we never once lost sight of the fact that we were only able to do so because there were a great many people that agreed with us about what it meant to brew great beer.

So rather than sing songs of friendships forged and memories made we instead want to take this opportunity to invite you all for one more round. On Saturday, April 30th we will send this venture out in style. The breweries doors will open at 4pm and stay open until the last drop of beer is gone. We hope that you will all join us for one more Golden Moment, and accept our sincere and never ending gratitude for helping us live our dream while allowing us to be a part of your lives. We look forward to seeing you all then.

Cheers,

The Triangle Family