Earlier this fall I learned that Boundary Bay Brewing would permanently close in September 2025. This news hit me harder than any other brewery closure notice of late. Much harder.

Boundary Bay opened in Bellingham, Washington, in 1995. That’s the same year I graduated from high school in a town about 30 minutes south. After a bit of hopping around to various colleges, I ended up at Bellingham’s Western Washington University for my senior year.
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I lived in a big Victorian mansion along with 17 other college students just a few blocks “up the hill” from Boundary Bay. That year, I spent more than a few hours on their bar stools. The brewery became part of my college lore and is a big part of my identity as a lifelong craft beer drinker. Let’s face it, I have been drinking craft beer since the early days of its existence.

As many of you know, HeidiTown sort of “blew up” right about the time I started writing about beer festivals in 2010ish. At that point, there was no stopping this little town! Fueled on beer and good times, HeidiTown took off.

Fast forward to today. I am connected to craft brewery owners, craft beer groups, craft beer writers and influencers, which means that I wake up to brewery news every single day. And lately, that’s been a never-ending list of closure announcements. To say it’s depressing is an understatement.

There are all kinds of reasons for the downturn in the industry including high rents and changes in drinking habits of the younger generation. Many of them don’t drink alcohol at all. Apparently, we GenXers were/are lushes.
Amidst this unfortunate news, I learned that Boundary Bay would close in September 2025, sending me into a weird mood. The slowdown of the craft beer industry has made me sad. As an owner of several small businesses, I hate to see any small business close, let alone a brewery.

Breweries have been a major part of Ryan’s and my life, and have played a major role in our personal story. When Ryan and I travel we have always looked for a brewery first. No matter where we are, a brewery is a place that we know will feel welcoming. We know we’ll find a spot that smells of hops and feels familiar, even if we’ve never been.

Many of our travel memories involve breweries, and hundreds of nights spent in our own town have involved breweries. We like to tell the story of how we parked across the street from a brewery in San Miguel, Mexico. Not realizing it was there, Ryan parallel parked our janky rental jeep with nonworking seatbelts and no windshield wiper, when we realized we were across the street from Cerveceria Punta Sur.

On our way to Toppled Turtle Brewery in Dumas, Texas, we drove through a dust storm. Ironically, we were on our Dust Bowl Road Trip. One of our happiest memories from the trip, we made friends with everyone at the bar, and I got to play with two working cattle dogs. We found out that they were the same owners of a brewery we’d visited in Trinidad, Colorado, in 2016. The brewery was called Dodgeton, and when they closed shop and moved back to Texas, they opened Toppled Turtle in Dumas. By the way, Toppled Turtle is my favorite brewery name, ever.
If you’ve been around it for as long as I have, the brewery world is a small world indeed.

I was the first blogger to write about Grimm Brothers Brewhouse here in my town of Loveland. This was before they had become an actual business. The Pourhouse Bar & Grill had done a Grimm Brothers tasting in downtown Loveland circa 2009, and I wrote about it. This brewery eventually became our local until they recently sold and moved to the other side of town.

I have fond memories of stopping at Riff Raff Brewing and Pagosa Brewing in 2013. We have continued going to Riff Raff over the past decade and just stopped at their new location this past April. Pagosa Brewing closed in 2023.

I could go on and on recalling brewery visitation memories, but the truth is, it’s the first business Ryan and I seek out when we are visiting a new town. And the first place we visit again when staying in an “old” favorite town, like Breckenridge (Broken Compass), Del Norte (Three Barrel) Durango (Ska & Steamworks), Meeker (Smoking River), Sterling (Parts & Labor), etc.

So why, after being well aware of an industry undergoing enormous change, has the impending closure of Boundary Bay Brewing hit me so hard?
After much thought, I believe I have landed on why this has affected me like it has. The 2025 closure represents not just the end of an era—Boundary Bay has meant so much to the Bellingham community—but the end of the era of my youth.

Not only is Boundary Bay going to close after thirty years, but next year is my thirtieth high school reunion. As I face fifty in two years, I’m not facing it as fiercely as I did forty.
Facing Forty Fiercely
The fact is, I’m not young anymore. That’s difficult for me to comprehend, although the way my back feels each morning is a reminder every day.

I wish I had some wise words to wrap up this article; like a tidy little bow on top of a beautifully wrapped gift, but that isn’t life. And it isn’t me. I’m not a tidy person with perfect nails or perfect eyebrows. And that’s what I loved about Boundary Bay and all the breweries that followed in my life. A visit to a brewery never made me feel like I needed to be perfect. I could simply come as I was and that’s an incredibly comfortable feeling that started at Boundary Bay.

With that in mind, I have made it a mission this year to return to Boundary Bay Brewing in Bellingham, Washington, one last time, to say goodbye to the brewery that started it all. And it truly is goodbye because they are closing permanently. But I am not saying goodbye to the industry because despite changes, there are still much-loved spots out there to explore.

I wrote most of this article while drinking an All-American IPA at City Star Brewing in Berthoud, Colorado. A brewery I’ve been going to since they opened in 2012, it is going strong and is much-loved by the community. So, you see, even if I’m facing down fifty in two years, I’ll face it with a craft beer a hand with unmanicured nails. Long live craft beer and long may we all keep drinking it no matter what.
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What a lovely, wistful essay – thank you.
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Thank you, Jon-Mark. This one was definitely from the heart!