Riverhead's Long Ireland Beer Company to close

It’s last call for one of Long Island’s pioneering breweries. New Year’s Eve will be the last service for Long Ireland Beer Company in Riverhead. 

Dan Burke and Greg Martin have been making beer since 2009 and, in 2011, they opened their brewery in an old Agway on Pulaski Street in Riverhead. Long Ireland was one of the North Fork’s first craft breweries — Greenport Harbor in Greenport also opened in 2009 — and, two years later, it was the first Long Island brewery (and one of only 14 statewide) to receive the new designation "farm brewery," which signified that a certain percentage of New York-grown ingredients is used for the beer.

"it’s never an easy decision to close," general manager Sheila Malone told Newsday by phone Monday. "But we wanted to go out on our own terms, to tell all of the people who have been there for us and to give them time to come in and see us and have a few last beers."

According to Malone, who started doing the brewery’s social media in 2015 and came aboard as tasting-room manager in 2019, the pandemic spelled the beginning of the end. "We spent 83 days unable to pour a beer and never really recovered from that punch."

Before COVID, Long Ireland beers were distributed throughout Long Island by Clare Rose and sales were pretty evenly split between the tasting room and the hundreds of supermarkets and bars that carried the product. But, about three years ago, Clare Rose downsized and Long Ireland was one of the craft breweries that didn't make the cut. After that, sales became concentrated in the tasting room.

"We were doing our own distribution," Malone said, which meant that she and head of operations Kevin Leonard were doing deliveries. Hiring a dedicated sales person would have meant paying a salary they couldn’t afford. Meanwhile the cost of everything — ingredients, supplies, labor — has gone up, but Malone also cited the "shifting consumption of alcohol" as a brewery stressor.

"So many people have stopped drinking or cutting back," she noted. "For the younger generation, beer is not their first choice of alcohol. And alcohol often isn’t their first choice for socializing — marijuana is legal and it has no calories."

In 2023, Burke and Martin put the business up for sale. Malone said that "we what we thought was a solid offer, but the deal didn't go through. We were hoping that there would be another opportunity, but it just didn't materialize." 

As its name suggests, Long Ireland exploited the connections between this island and that island. The logo featured distinctive Celtic knotwork on a green ground and the flagship brew was Celtic Ale, a malty Irish red. The Hooligan Stout gave Guinness a run for its money.

In years past, the brewery has held a New Year’s Eve party focused around a ball drop at 7 p.m. — midnight in Ireland. This year, Malone expects the party to extend into the wee hours. "And if we have anything left over, we might open on New Year’s Day to drink the bar dry."

Newsday's Maureen Mullarkey contributed to this story.