Last call for The Portsmouth Brewery
May 17—The folks at The Portsmouth Brewery have poured their last pint.
Try more than 7.5 million glasses of beer served since the state's first craft brewery opened on Market Street in Portsmouth in 1991.
A ruptured sprinkler system that flooded the brewery and restaurant last June made reopening too costly for owners Peter Egelston and his wife, Joanne Francis.
"Until recently, we were holding out hope to rebuild and reopen," Egelston said in a phone interview Friday.
"I always had this fantasy to turn it over to a new owner," said Egelston, 65. "We had a great run at The Portsmouth Brewery. We've seen a lot of change in the city of Portsmouth and in the hospitality industry and certainly in the craft brewery industry."
The cost to bring the buildings at 48 and 56 Market Street up to present-day building codes proved too much for the partners, who married last December.
"Try as we might to find a way around it, at the end of the day, this simple arithmetic forced our hand," Egelston said in a separate announcement.
Egelston, who founded Smuttynose Brewing Co. in Portsmouth in the 1990s, said he didn't get an overall estimate on what insurance wouldn't cover, but upgrades would have required, among other things, a new exit for the basement bar.
The two buildings were listed for sale last week for a combined $8.125 million. The restaurant occupied both.
"The response has been amazing," Peter Montesanto, executive vice president of Duston Leddy Real Estate, which is handling the sale.
"There is such a lack of premier properties for sale downtown that we knew it would get a lot of interest," on Market Street "right in the heart of Portsmouth," he said.
Francis said the place holds many memories.
"Over the years, people have shared stories about meeting their significant others, celebrating milestones and wild tales that could fill a book," she said in the announcement.
Constructed in the 1800s, the buildings include five apartments and more than 9,000 square feet of commercial space.
An insurance engineer figured that on the second floor, a compression fitting ruptured in a joint in a 2-inch pipe that was part of the sprinkler system, which was installed in the mid-1980s, according to Egelston.
It was estimated more than 20,000 gallons of water escaped in less than a half hour before the system was turned off, Egelston said.
The owners had business interruption insurance, allowing them to pay their bills and their staff of around 45, he said.
More than 3,000 people worked there over the years.
"Right now, the business has been effectively dismantled," he said. "The water damage in our space was so extensive that we had to take everything out, so if you walk into the space that was The Portsmouth Brewery, what you're going to see is studs and rafters and joists."
The business, which is for sale separately, kept its retail shop open the past year.
"We wanted to show people we were keeping a light burning and we were still alive if only just barely," he said.
In 1991, Egelston founded the brewery with his sister, Janet, at 56 Market St. An adjacent building was bought several years later.
Before the flood, the owners had done some preliminary work toward a possible sale. He wished he could have left on his own terms.
"I've enjoyed coming into work every single day for the last 30-plus years and to kind of have that flipped off like flipping a switch, it wasn't really the outcome we were hoping for," Egelston said.
