Faced with $80k in closing costs, Copper Kettle launches GoFundMe to pay landlord

Jeremy Gobien started choking up as he uttered the words “I’ve never asked for anything like this before.”

Gobien, owner of Copper Kettle Brewing, was giving a speech at the brewery’s 15th anniversary party last week in advance of its previously announced June 27 closure. His emotion was less about the end of the business, though, and more about sharing the painful details of having to pay his landlord $80,000 to return the building to its original condition. Gobien wiped away tears as he explained the details of a GoFundMe campaign that he set up, asking for the financial assistance needed to ease the burden.

Gobien’s speech would elicit empathy from most normal human beings. But it particularly resonated with me on a personal level. Before I began writing about beer and spirits, I was a business owner, running a local escape room. Just before COVID, we faced a lease renewal demand that would’ve raised our $6,000/month rent to over $11,000. Gobien’s predicament is eerily similar.

He’s facing a similar rent increase of 40%. In both our cases, the original landlords we signed with no longer owned the buildings, and neither seemed flexible enough to make a renewal worthwhile. Like pre-pandemic escape rooms, the craft beer industry has seen a slight contraction in recent years, despite many more breweries continuing to open, and others expanding and planning for the overall market to grow.

In fact, for Gobien, things are actually worse. He renewed his lease in 2021, one of his best years ever. “2021 was a banner year, a boom year,” he says. As COVID restrictions waned, customers were eager to visit the brewery and socialize. But starting in 2022, the brewery went into the red. “The bottom dropped out,” he recalls.

Fortunately for Gobien, he leveraged his engineering degree into a brewery-consulting business called Evolve Brewery Outfitters. He’s set up brewing systems, upgrades and expansions for over a dozen businesses in the area, including breweries like Fritz Family Brewers, River North Brewery, and Black Shirt Brewing.

That consulting business was thriving in 2022. “I didn’t mind paying Copper Kettle’s losses, because [my consulting] was doing great business,” he says. Gobien’s plan was to ride out his lease expiration in 2026, and then consolidate operations by renting a smaller footprint. He says that he would’ve been willing to pay the 40% rent increase, just on a smaller space. Copper Kettle occupies multiple units that were combined to create its space, so downsizing seemed typical and is not out of the ordinary in situations like his. The landlord seemed fully on board too. 

Two things ran against his plan. First, fewer new breweries were openings in 2024. Used equipment became, and remains, incredibly cheap. This meant that Gobien’s consulting business slowed down. “It’s not as lucrative as it used to be, but it’s still worth doing,” he says.

The second problem was even larger: his new landlord didn’t seem interested in letting him downsize his space. Worse, the landlord was taking an aggressive view of the lease terms and not budging on the demand to return the unit to its pre-modification state. The landlord gave Gobien the option to do the work himself, but it would’ve been time-consuming and costly, requiring him to shut Copper Kettle down sooner and miss out on revenue.

So Gobien chose the other route: Pay the landlord to do the work instead. He’ll have to come up with $80,000 by the end of the month. And he’s not even certain that the landlord has the obligation to use those funds to restore the unit to its prior state.

Gobien doesn’t have many options. He’s still repaying a COVID-era SBA loan by selling his brewing equipment. He has personally guaranteed the lease, so he can’t just walk away from the business. He’s settled on having to come up with the funds by the end of the month.

Gobien stresses that he doesn’t believe his landlord is doing anything illegal. But he feels that it’s been made clear that the landlord is not interested in working with Gobien on terms, either with a smaller rent hike or a reduced space at full market rates.

The more the story went on, the more flashbacks I had to my own experience. My own lease had a “return to original state” clause in it. My partners and I had a personal guarantee on our space, but it had expired. We had other locations and didn’t plan on closing up the business, plus, despite the heavy increase in rent, we wanted to “do the right thing.” At the end of January 2020, we closed our business a week early, ordered moving trucks and roll-off dumpsters, and paid employees to help us clear our space. The total costs, including missed revenue, likely exceeded $15,000. 

At the beginning of February, our landlord’s realtor walked through the space with us, inspecting each area. He thanked us for returning it in such a good state, and we handed over the keys. He told us the security deposit would be in the mail. We felt tired, but proud of our hard work. The landlord never sent our deposit. Through a combination of COVID, our lack of having that realtor sign anything after the walk-through, and a determination that the landlord was likely in major financial jeopardy due to the pandemic, we never got our money back.

I certainly learned a lot about making sure to have every detail logged and clear in writing. Gobien, for his part, offers a similar account of lessons learned. “I’ll never be a tenant again,” he says, adding that if he starts another business in the future, he would have to gather investors and purchase a building.

The fundraiser has currently raised over $13,000. Gobien isn’t looking for a miracle, but he hopes that people who enjoyed the brewery over the years might pitch in a bit to ease some of his pressure. “If enough people chip in 20 bucks, it starts to add up,” says Gobien, adding that he will likely have to take out a home equity line of credit or cash out some of his retirement fund in order to make up the difference. But he’s grateful to anyone willing to help out.

“I’m hoping to find enough to at least blunt a little bit of the pain,” he says.