Hartwick College plans to close its on-campus brewing lab by April 1, a little more than a decade after it opened for student and staff-driven research.
The brewing lab, located in the Johnstone Science Center, is part of the college’s Center for Craft Food and Beverage.
Hartwick spokesperson Gail Glover said Wednesday, Jan. 28 that the college’s Board of Trustees made the decision earlier this month following a college senior leadership team recommendation based on “extensive review and some due diligence that was conducted over the past several months.”
“In recent years, the lab has faced sustained challenges that have just limited its ability to operate effectively,” Glover said. “It has experienced a multi-year decline in revenue, and of course, there’s been changes in the brewing and research industry that have also impacted the lab in that it’s reduced the size of the customer and research community base.”
Consumer behavior, Glover added, has shifted away from alcohol consumption to health and wellness trends, like mocktails. Staffing vacancies and aging equipment also have contributed to the strain on lab operations.
The Center for Craft Food and Beverage “conducts research and offers food and beverage quality testing services for areas like malting and brewing and distillery and now milling and baking,” Glover said.
The work is conducted through two labs — the on campus Beverage Innovation Lab, or the brewing lab, and the Baking Innovation Lab at 34 Dietz St., which opened in fall 2024 and will remain open, continuing “to contribute to the vitality of that surrounding area and to the community,” Glover added, with some workshops scheduled in the spring for millers and flour professionals.
In the upcoming months, she said the college would be working with brewing lab staff and faculty to “reimagine” the space.
The idea for the center emerged in about 2013, Glover said, and grant applications began in 2014. The school hired an inaugural director in July 2015, and the brewing lab began running tests in fall 2015. It officially opened Jan. 22, 2016, with the process spanning about three years.
Glover said the lab offered opportunities for research during the school’s January term, which runs from the end of the holiday season to about the end of January. She added that summer internships have been offered through the lab, with research typically attracting chemistry and biology students, especially in the past few years.
These opportunities helped students to acquire testing skills and familiarized them with lab equipment, Glover added.
“The experiences that we were offering through the brewing lab have not been as robust, and robust of a student opportunity that we originally had hoped for,” Glover said. “We still offer and will continue to offer students the ability to acquire those skills, the lab techniques, the testing skills, those kinds of things, through the work of the Baking Innovation Lab down there on Dietz Street, as well as other departments within the science division.”
To help lab clients transition after the closure, Glover said, the college is working with industry professionals who “understand the capabilities of other labs throughout the country” to help the college make connections for clients to move to other facilities.
The brewing lab received start-up support grants in 2015, including about $80,000 from the Appalachian Regional Commission and about $67,000 from the Empire State Development Corporation, Glover said. The center has not received additional funding from the two sources since then.
Glover said the Baking Innovation Lab was a “component of a $19 million Dietz Street mixed use development,” part of the Oneonta Downtown Revitalization Initiative. The Dietz Street development project received about $1.4 million from Oneonta’s $10 million DRI award.
Staff vacancies were part of the challenges that the lab faced in recent years, Glover said. The lab typically saw one or two students doing research or completing internships in the space per year.
“The staffing challenges then of course present the ability to supervise students, and that impacts the number of students we can offer these experiences to,” Glover said.
The brewing lab has two staff members currently, and at the lab’s peak four staff members, including a director, a manager and two lab techs, were employed. She did not disclose who the two remaining staff members were or their roles.
She added that the lab was not generating enough revenue to cover the total cost of operating it, though she did not provide specifics regarding how much revenue the lab was bringing in or how much it cost the college to run the lab.
It has seen a multi-year decline in revenue of several thousands of dollars, Glover said, and has not met projected revenue goals since 2023. Closing the lab will likely save the college about $75,000 in 2026 budgeted operating costs, she said, with future savings anticipated in future fiscal years.
“Closing the lab was an extremely difficult decision, but here on campus we really are committed to continuing to engage in meaningful research and continuing our legacy of academic excellence and developing long and strong partnerships in our community with clients and with friends of the institution,” Glover said. “At the same time, it has to be guided by thoughtful and sustainable use of our resources.”