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Ale Asylum brewery and tasting room at 2002 Pankratz St. has closed after 16 years.
Madison’s largest craft brewing company has closed.
Ale Asylum, the maker of Hopalicious, Ambergeddon and a long list of other beers, made the announcement Friday via Facebook, Instagram and the homepage of its website. The company, founded in 2006 and now located near the Dane County Regional Airport, had been up for sale for nearly a year and had appeared to have secured a buyer as late as last month.
However, those plans have fallen through, idling a 45,000-square-foot brewing plant, putting 15 people out of work, and ending a business that helped define the city’s craft beer scene.
“We began with a dream and a bag of hops in May of 2006. Since then, we’ve grown into a big family of brewers, cooks, bartenders, service staff, marketing, sales, and more,” the company statement said. “The past couple years have been difficult for all businesses but with your support we were able to weather the storm. However, under circumstances we cannot control we have made the decision to close our doors.”
The brewery had closed its kitchen last fall but kept the the taproom and brewery open in what co-founder Otto Dilba termed “continuation mode.” The taproom expanded its hours in late spring, and Dilba said the kitchen was set to reopen after the sale. Dilba said the new owner had plans to expand the brewery’s portfolio beyond the traditional but often hop-forward beers that it traded on in its first 16 years.
Thursday was the company’s last full day of business, but Dilba said late Friday that he is hoping to sell the brewery’s brands to other brewers in an attempt to keep the recipes alive. It’s likely equipment and other assets of the brewery will be sold at auction. He also said the prospective buyer was not another brewing company.
Otto Dilba, co-founder of Ale Asylum, talks about the area's craft beer scene in 2015.
“The situation just didn’t turn out the way everyone had hoped with the buyer,” Dilba said during a phone interview. “We had worked for the past several months to get things to where we wanted them to be, but they just didn’t pan out.”
But in June, Dilba seemed encouraged that a sale was imminent.
He told the Wisconsin State Journal’s Beer Baron, Chris Drosner, that several prospective buyers had emerged last fall and that one of those buyers, who wanted to continue the brand after the sale, was in the final stages of purchasing the brewery.
“We have the buyer, it’s just taken longer than we thought,” Dilba told Drosner in the June 19 column. “We’re still as excited to move this thing forward as we were back then.”
The loss of Ale Asylum will be felt by many who enjoyed its beers and by other brewers in the region who credit the company with helping grow the local craft beer scene and provide encouragement to other entrepreneurial brewers.
Ale Asylum's tasting room was a popular spot for craft beer lovers on Madison's North Side.
“So many of us wouldn’t be here today if there weren’t forerunners like Ale Asylum that had really jumped in and made craft beer grow in this market,” said Jessica Jones, who co-founded Giant Jones in 2018 with her partner, Erika, at 913 E. Main St. “All of us are always going to be in their debt and a part of their legacy. The market’s really complex, especially on this side of COVID. We’re really in this totally unique moment where everything is surprising and nothing is surprising.”
Dilba and fellow co-owner Dean Coffey met while working at what was then Angelic Brewing Co. in Downtown Madison. Coffey was the brewmaster, and Dilba wanted to put his marketing skills to use. In 2005, they created the Ale Asylum brand and eventually ran out of room at their brewing facility at the corner of Stoughton Road and Kinsman Boulevard, which is now home to Karben4 Brewery. In 2012, Dilba and Coffey, plus a group of investors, opened a sparkling $8 million brewery and tasting room at 2002 Pankratz St.
Ale Asylum patrons visit the tasting room last summer.
At that time, the duo had visions of producing 100,000 barrels of beer a year, but as the craft brewing industry continued to explode, brewers faced challenges trying to squeeze their brands onto limited shelf space, in coolers and into bars and restaurants with limited tap handles. Loyalty also has become an issue throughout the industry as craft beer drinkers are typically not wedded to a single beer or even a single brand.
More recently, COVID-19 has rocked the industry with supply chain problems that hiked the price of equipment and aluminum cans. Meanwhile other major breweries in the area such as Octopi Brewing Co. in Waunakee and Wisconsin Brewing Co. in Verona have capitalized on using their facilities for contract brewing, making beer and other beverage products for other companies while their own brands only account for a small fraction of production.
Over the years, Dilba said, the monthly lease rate on such a large space “became insurmountable.” In 2020, Ale Asylum produced 14,500 barrels of beer. Prior to the pandemic the company employed more than 45 people.
“We’re all very sad,” Dilba said of the closing. “It’s certainly not the outcome that we all wanted, but we have a lot of good memories to look back on.”
This story has been corrected after misidentifying the gender of Erika Jones, co-founder of Giant Jones Brewing Co.
Madison began falling in love with hops in 2006.
People had just started calling it “craft beer” instead of “microbrew,” and the hop — a bitter, pungent little flower cone that’s been a key ingredient of beer for centuries — was starting to become the star of the show.
That July, a new business called Ale Asylum opened in a former print shop in a nondescript industrial strip mall near Madison Area Technical College, becoming the first brewery of the craft era to make and bottle beer in the city limits.
It launched with 11 beers, all of which would be familiar to Madison beer fans today and four of which hit six-packs in those stubby “heritage” bottles.
One, Hopalicious, absolutely took off.
An American pale ale — not an IPA! — loaded with piney, citrusy Cascades (a variety of hops), it was hoppy enough in aroma and name to hook itself to the hottest class of craft beers while being balanced enough to appeal to Madison’s masses.
Within five years Ale Asylum was making so much Hopalicious that it had more or less maxed out its brewery and began planning for its current facility, which opened in fall 2012 off Packers Avenue near the Dane County Regional Airport.
Chief engineer Alan Sponem checks Ale Asylum's labeler as the first-ever bottles of Unshadowed hefeweizen move down the bottling line on April 8.
An upstairs lounge area at Ale Asylum in Madison.
The bar area at Ale Asylum in Madison.
The patio area at Ale Asylum in Madison.
Windows in a seating area offer a view into the brewery at Ale Asylum in Madison.
Of Ale Asylum's duck poppers, Hathaway Dilba, partner and director of promotions, said: “If we took these off a future menu, we would literally get hate mail."
A seating area at Ale Asylum in Madison.
Lemon Pepper Shrimp Tacos with chips and salsa are a favorite at Ale Asylum.
The bar area at Ale Asylum in Madison.
Ale Asylum is located at 2002 Pankratz St. in Madison.
The beer taps at Ale Asylum include crowd favorites like Hopalicious.
Ale Asylum recently unveiled their Feliz Gravitas variety pack, which contains a beer for hop heads, gravity heads and malt heads. All come at a higher ABV so you’ll be wearing a nice beer coat to combat the winter weather.
Madison’s Ale Asylum released its first pilsner, 12 oz. Curl, this spring.
Ale Asylum is a brewery with a full food menu, located at 2002 Pankratz St, Madison, on Thursday, Apr. 8, 2021.
Demento from Madison's Ale Asylum is a 4.7 percent ABV American pale ale.
The Feliz Gravitas six-pack contains two each of three holiday-friendly beers, including the new Off Switch Double IPA.
High Coup is the latest IPA from Ale Asylum and one of at least eight IPAs the Madison brewery will release this year.
Oktillion is the first lager Ale Asylum has bottled since it was founded in 2006.
Marc Nienhaus, an electrician with Faith Technologies, installs solar panels on the rooftop at Ale Asylum in Madison in 2014.
Marc Nienhaus, an electrician with Faith Technologies, wires solar panels on the rooftop at Ale Asylum in 2014.
The label for Unshadowed was designed by Ale Asylum co-founder Otto Dilba over some two weeks earlier this year. He described the design as "delicate but ominous."
This was not the best new beer Madison’s Ale Asylum released this year, but it was unquestionably the most successful, and it’s obvious why without even cracking open the can. This beer’s label perfectly captured the zeitgeist at the time of its release in early April, and it never really stopped resonating. The pilsner was followed by a hazy pale ale version, and both were taken national by the new Wisconsin-based distributor Brew Pipeline. Locally, the brewery has offered the FVCK COVID duo and many of its other beers for $6 a six-pack for most of the year. By the way, my favorite new Ale Asylum beer also had a “ugh, 2020” theme: MRDR HRNT, the first in a new “Apocalypse Bingo” series. It’s a pale ale heavily dosed with Mosaic, Denali and Trident hops that create an intense, nearly hard seltzer-like lemongrass-lime character.
8/13/2011: Vines of hops decorate the booth of Madison's Ale Asylum Brewery as visitors to the Great Taste of the Midwest craft beer festival enjoy samples of the vendor's offerings Saturday. Thousands of craft beer enthusiasts converged on the grounds of Olin-Turville Park in Madison, Wisconsin for the 25th annual gathering of the event.
Brewmaster Dean Coffey, left, and head of sales Ross Hubbard prepare to deliver Ale Asylum's new Stray Forth hard seltzers to Madison area stores.
Hopalicious Continuum: Mosaic is the first in a new Ale Asylum series that will showcase different varieties of hops.
Ya know, I didn’t think a whole lot of dis brewski at first, er even really much ‘bout it to tell ya da truth. Sure, I like dat Charlie Berens guy who da Ale Asylum team’t up wit fer dis one, but ya know me, I’m one-a dem fancy craft beer guys, so I ain’t really inta da light lagers ’n’ stuff like dis one. But ya know, guy, I picked up a sixer anyway, and just kept drinkin’ tru it, and wouldn’t ya know, after two-tree of ’em, it really started grew on me! And cripes, inn’t dat just da whole point a dees kinda beers -- ya just drink ’em, ya know?
Dey were a big trend from dem craft brewers dis year. But Keep ’er Movin’ was just, ya know, better den da ones from Founders er Sierra Nevada -- maybe cuz it was made wit’ none of da corn dat kinda defines da style, ya know, er maybe just cuz it takes a cheesehead brewery to brew da right light beer fer cheeseheads.
Ale Asylum sez Keep ’er Movin’ has been movin’ pretty quick, and it’s figgerin’ out whether it’ll keep movin’ in 2019. I say yah.
Ale Asylum’s new Apocalypse Bingo: MRDR HRNT pale ale uses a relatively new brewing technique called dip-hopping.
Otto Dilba of Ale Asylum
A new hard seltzer line from Ale Asylum called Stray Forth is now arriving in Madison area shops and bars.
Ale Asylum recently introduced a new line of flavored hard seltzers under the name Stray Forth.
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Ale Asylum brewery and tasting room at 2002 Pankratz St. has closed after 16 years.
Otto Dilba, co-founder of Ale Asylum, talks about the area's craft beer scene in 2015.
Ale Asylum's tasting room was a popular spot for craft beer lovers on Madison's North Side.
Ale Asylum patrons visit the tasting room last summer.
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