Brian Ivey isn’t naive to the ways of late-stage capitalism, but the former Catawba Brewing Co. retail marketing and communications director is nevertheless disappointed by what he feels is a lack of honesty and respect that the brewery’s new owners, Alabama-based Wiregrass Equity Partners, showed him and his leadership team colleagues on their way to the unemployment line.

On Nov. 1, after running the company for 22 years, Catawba co-owners Jetta and Billy Pyatt sold the business and Charleston, S.C.-based Palmetto Brewing Co. to Wiregrass — whose portfolio includes the craft beer collective holding company Made by the Water, LLC, which owns and operates the Florida-based Oyster City Brewing Co. According to Ivey and former Palmetto marketing manager Tarah Gee, who were present during meetings with the then-prospective buyers, Wiregrass assured the team that everyone’s jobs were secure.

“Wiregrass claimed they were investing in our people, whose work they’d observed and admired from a distance for many months,” Ivey says. “We were told that our six-person leadership group would be integral to leading the company into its next generation.”

But by Nov. 12, Ivey, Gee and another leadership group member had been fired, along with several other employees. The Pyatts declined to comment for this article. MBTW CEO Alexi Sekmakas, however, says no such employment guarantees were made. He notes that product development and brewing positions “remain fragmented and individualized per [MBTW] location,” but that finance, HR and other administrative support jobs “are fully integrated across the platform.” Factor in less than ideal current market conditions, and he says initial operations for Catawba and Palmetto are leaner than he and his colleagues would have hoped.

“Our goal was to bring these companies together in as harmonious a way as possible,” Sekmakas says. “Through all the issues we’ve been having with COVID and supply chain shortages and this highly tumultuous, unprecedented time, we just had to make some changes. It’s not something that we ever want to do, but we’re heading into a slow season and we’re coming out of a global pandemic, so I’m hopeful that we’re going to be able to make deeper investments and hire more and more people over the next couple of months, once we come out into the spring.”

In hindsight, Ivey says the lack of communication that followed the Nov. 1 deal should have been a red flag, but the Catawba team was told the new owners were focused on closing a deal on a new production facility in Mobile, Ala. He now believes MBTW’s plan all along was to slash …….

Source: https://mountainx.com/food/beer-scout-catawba-acquisition-results-in-job-loss/