Bear Republic to close original Healdsburg brewpub next month

Pedestrians walk by the Bear Republic Brewery and Restaurant on February 21, 2014 in Healdsburg, California. Pedestrians walk by the Bear Republic Brewery and Restaurant on February 21, 2014 in Healdsburg, California. Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close Bear Republic to close original Healdsburg brewpub next month 1 / 3 Back to Gallery

After nearly 25 years in operation, Bear Republic Brewing Company will close its original brewpub location in Healdsburg, the company confirms. Its other two locations, a main brewhouse in Cloverdale and a brewpub in Rohnert Park, will remain open.

On Friday afternoon, the brewery posted news of the November 22 closure on Facebook, writing, "We’ve brewed award-winning beers, witnessed weddings, watched families grow and made countless friends in Healdsburg. We’ll never forget where Bear Republic Brewing Company was born."

The Norgrove family opened the small brewery-restaurant in 1995 in Healdsburg's downtown square. But in recent years, says CEO Ricardo Norgrove, the brewpub's building has required construction projects that Norgrove says the building's landlord should cover. After trying to renegotiate for the leasehold improvements for a year, he says, he realized it was "time to pull the plug and close."

Business is great, particularly in Rohnert Park, Norgrove says, but for it to continue growing, the company needed to make a change. "The long and skinny is I can't keep rebuilding someone’s buildings," he tells SFGATE.

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Norgrove says the brewpub building's woes are indicative of a larger problem in Healdsburg. The cost of business has gone up, and the town's demographics and dining habits are different than when Bear Republic first opened.

Sonoma County as a whole is feeling the financial pinch. Earlier this year, the California Association of Realtors released a report that found more than three-quarters of Sonoma County's households cannot afford to buy a median-priced home in the area. The population of the county has also continued to dip since the Tubbs Fire in 2017.

"I've lived in town for 20+ years," Norgrove says. "When we moved [here] the high school graduating class had 300 kids, and this year maybe they’ll have 105. We couldn’t field a football team this year. The brewpub model in 1995 just isn't working [today] in what I call 'Beverly Healdsburg.'"

The hardest part of the closure, he notes, is the 35 employees who work there. Some, however, will stay on and work in one of the two other Bear Republic locations.

"It was a really tough family decision," Norgrove says. "I think people have this vision that were much larger than we are — we’re family owned ... [This] is what we need to do to be sustainable into the future."

Alyssa Pereira is an SFGATE digital editor. Email: apereira@sfchronicle.com | Twitter: @alyspereira

