The craft beer industry is undergoing a shakeout after years of growth, so if you’re going to expand your small brewery it helps to have some help. Like 182 solar panels.
“It’s the idea of sustainability but I would almost say it’s now survivability,” said David Stewart, owner of Blasty Bough Brewing Company in Epsom. “If the cost of things are going to go up with the current political situation it becomes an issue of how do you reduce costs so you can stay in business?”
The panels, with a maximum output of 82 kW DC, were installed in November of 2023. Over the course of the year they produce more electricity than his small brew pub uses. He sells excess electricity at any time back to the utility.
“At the moment it’s generating $700 to $1,000 worth of credits a month,” he said. His brewery is all-electric and that’s roughly equivalent to the amount he was spending on electricity before the panels were installed.
Under New Hampshire’s laws the price he gets for selling power is less than he price he pays for buying it when solar production is low, so it makes more financial sense to use all the power produced by the panels
“I went and bought an electric car because that’ll help. Fuel it up for free,” Stewart said. Ongoing expansion of the tap room and brewery will probably use all of the panels’ output, he said.
All-in cost for the project was $305,000. It would have been lower but the array was built in a field opposite the brewery, which added costs for trending and the ground-mount array.
A third of the cost was covered by grants: $100,000 from the Rural Energy for America Program (REAP) through the U.S. Department of Agriculture and $10,000 from New Hampshire support. The Trump administration killed the REAP grants but they have since been returned in a more constrained form.
Payback for the system in terms of energy savings will take many years but Stewart said the certainty is a plus in turbulent times.
The brewery used to be McClary Hill Farm but Stewart decided that brewing was a better business. The farm stand “pretty readily translated into a tap room and brewery” and has done well since. Yankee Magazine made it an editor’s choice for craft brewery in their Best of New England edition.
The brewery is expanding. Its two 10-by-15-foot rooms are now one big 30-by-50-foot room, with an expanded kitchen and larger output, going from two barrel to three barrel production. It will remain just a taproom with no outside sales, Stewart said.
The expansion comes as the industry is struggling. Total craft brewery production peaked in 2019 and has fallen about 10% since, with the number of independent breweries falling in 2024. That’s partly a reaction to a decade of hype-driven growth but also reflects competition from other types of drinks or, in other states, legal cannabis as well as an overall decline in alcohol consumption.
Stewart says the decline is obvious when looking at listings of used brewing material for sale. “There’s a surfeit of equipment on the market,” he said.
“The days of just making it on your beer are gone. You just have to have some kind of experience for folks to keep it going,” he said. “We’re a destination. It’s the beautiful setting, music in the upstairs listening room. Unless you’ve got that, you have problems.”
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