The founders of Noble Wave, a brewpub with a “conscious capital” business model that planned to open in the Electric Depot development on Government Street, are scrapping their Baton Rouge plans and say they’re taking their concept to Oregon.
Noble Wave billed itself as the first brewpub in Baton Rouge where beer would be brewed and sold onsite. The founders, Riley Vannoy and Karl Schultz, planned to pay employees full salaries and benefits, and donate half of the tips earned to community-enhancement projects as part of their “conscious capital” ethos.
But in recent months, the two determined that Louisiana’s restrictions on beer sales and distribution made the project too risky to move forward with in Baton Rouge.
“We don’t want to scare anyone away from opening a brewpub here,” Vannoy says. “Our biggest thing was that it was just riskier to open it here when we were handcuffed by what we could do legally.”
The owners now plan to take their concept to Salem, Oregon, which they say has a “best-in-class regulatory environment” and an unsaturated craft beer market, among other things.
Louisiana currently doesn’t allow self-distribution, and requires microbreweries to choose between restaurant and bar sales or retail sales, according to Cary Koch, director of the Louisiana Craft Brewers Guild, who says 37 states allow some form of self-distribution. Noble Wave leaving for another state when Louisiana already lags behind others in the budding industry is equivalent to a “brain drain” on brewing talent, Koch says.
The fledgling industry in Louisiana—which ranks 48th in the country for number of craft breweries per capita, according to Koch—is one of several that have tried to change longstanding rules to accommodate new business models.
Uber and Lyft led an unsuccessful campaign during this year’s legislative session to regulate ride-hailing at the state level, and Tesla has struggled to convince state officials to allow it to sell cars absent independent dealers. While there are a handful of microbreweries throughout the state, Koch says some current regulations are handicapping the industry.
The guild has also weathered rules surrounding food sales by brewers, and Koch says the group will have an agenda aimed at getting state lawmakers to loosen rules on the industry fleshed out in time for next year’s legislative session.
“Noble Wave is an ambitious concept,” Schultz says in a statement. “We were not going to be well-served by opening in a place, like Louisiana, that forces us to forego significant revenue options that would be available to us in other states.”
Noble Wave had planned to begin construction late this year and open next fall at Electric Depot, a large-scale and widely-heralded redevelopment of the former Entergy site in Mid City. The owners planned to offer more than a dozen unique beers on draft, plus New York-style pizza and other food and drinks.
Dyke Nelson, developer of Electric Depot, says he has three or four groups looking at the space that was expected to be the home of Noble Wave, and he anticipates it will still be home to a similar microbrewery and restaurant concept.
“I wish Noble Wave well,” Nelson says. “I’m sorry they couldn’t make their concept work in the state.”
—Sam Karlin
