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Ale Asylum, a pillar of the Wisconsin craft brewing scene, has closed after failing to find a buyer.

This time, there’s not much to cushion the blow. Ale Asylum, the brewery that led Madison into the craft beer era as we know it, is closing.

A deal that had been in the works for some 10 months to sell the brewery to an undisclosed party finally fell through for good, and last week Ale Asylum pulled the plug on the taproom, its last remaining operations.

The beer, hopefully, will live on, and co-founder Otto Dilba told me last week that there’s an outside chance that another inquiry could result in what he called an “in-place sale” that would revive the business in its current location just off Packers Avenue. But after months of optimism, Dilba emphasized he and co-founder and brewmaster Dean Coffey are now focused on finding not just a buyer for Ale Asylum’s intellectual property — the beer recipes and labels — but the right buyer.

“Our biggest goal right now is to find the best steward for the brands moving forward that we possibly can,” Dilba said. “We want to do right, as best we can, by the beer, because that’s always been the most important thing. And also selfishly, we want to be able to grab Ambergeddon off the shelves and even have it still taste awesome. We want to be able to grab Hopalicious and have it still taste awesome.”

Even after 10 months of thinking about this possibility, I’ve found it hard to accept that whatever remains of Ale Asylum going forward will be doing so without the people who made it into a pillar of Wisconsin beer.

In Madison, Capital Brewery and the Great Dane pioneered the path, but when Ale Asylum opened in 2006, it captured the cool and excitement of what was just coming to be known as craft beer.

It caught the front end of the wave of hoppy beers (at least in the Midwest) with a fantastic flagship, Hopalicious, that brought many local drinkers their first beer name with a hop pun. (There would be thousands of them in the years that followed, almost all of them attached to IPAs; a key reason, I believe, so many erroneously believe Hopa is an IPA.)

Ale Asylum’s first five years went so well that it drew up plans for big growth via a brand new $8 million, 45,000-square-foot brewery that opened in 2012. In a column ahead of its opening, I called it “The House that Hopalicious Built,” but it’s clear in hindsight that it set goals the business couldn’t — or at least didn’t — meet.

According to numbers reported to the state, its production peaked in 2015 at 22,000 barrels, still short of the new brewery’s capacity.

During our conversation last week, Dilba noted the growth in the number of breweries since the new brewery opened in 2012, not just locally but from out of state as well, all competing for finite draft lines and shelf space. “I don’t think we anticipated quite the explosion, which is great for the craft beer enthusiast, myself included,” Dilba said. “But I think the timing for us, it was certainly a factor. And one that we didn’t quite anticipate to that level.”

COVID-19 dealt a blow to every brewery, but Ale Asylum’s survival mode seemed even at the time particularly desperate. With draft sales gone and its kitchen closed, it began selling $6 six-packs at the brewery and launched what would be a temporary lifeline for the business: a FVCK COVID series of beers that captured the beleaguered zeitgeist of 2020 and sold nicely in national distribution channels. Last year, though, production fell again to just over 9,000 barrels, less than it made in its last year in its original location and most of that in lower-margin sales of six-packs.

All of this is very clinical and skips over Dilba’s “most important thing” — the beer. And Ale Asylum’s beer was mostly very good. Hopalicious is on the Mount Rushmore of Madison-area beers. Contorter Porter, Madtown Nutbrown, Unshadowed, Velveteen Habit and Coffey’s Belgian beers were all excellent. And oh, man, Bedlam. There’s no Belgo-IPA like it. The past couple of years I had an unexpected Ambergeddon reawakening, the hoppy take on a red ale hitting just perfectly. And I loved Beerio, a little pale ale rolled out last year.

All of these beers have a common thread: They’re just plain beer. Coffey and Ale Asylum were steadfast in their belief that beer should not contain ... other stuff. (Even, for many years, barrel-aging.) And “other stuff” — be it fruited sours, pastry stouts or milkshake IPAs — has been a major theme in beer the last few years and, really, since, oh, 2012 or so.

Was that dedication to traditional ingredients a factor in Ale Asylum’s demise?

“I think it would be arrogant to think that that couldn’t be a part of it,” Dilba said. “Certainly, and maybe even the messaging as to why we were doing it, maybe that did hinder things.

“At the end of the day, whether people liked or didn’t like what we made or what we did, nobody can say with a straight face that we didn’t do it from the heart.”

Now, all of Ale Asylum’s stuff — including brewing equipment that Dilba notes is in particularly good condition — will likely be sold at auction. The market is what it is, but I can’t help but think that this is a brewery that deserved better.

“The thing that I’ll remember most about that place was just the heart and soul that was brought there everyday by everybody that worked there and by the fans who showed up,” Dilba said. “Thank you to everyone — to everybody that’s ever worked there, and the community and everybody that supported us.”

Got a beer you’d like the Beer Baron or Draft Queen to pop the cap on? Contact Chris Drosner at chrisdrosner@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter @WIbeerbaron. Contact Katie Herrera at cellaredkatie@gmail.com or on Twitter @CellaredKatie.

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Ale Asylum, a pillar of the Wisconsin craft brewing scene, has closed after failing to find a buyer.

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