A taproom can be a powerful way to introduce customers to a cider brand. But when the business model changes, owners have to ask whether that storefront is still earning its place when it comes to dollars, customer connections and even management time.
Portland Cider Company’s recent experience shows that making that call without mistaking a closure for the end of a business. Founder Jeff Parrish told The Cider Business Podcast (see below) recently that the company began in 2013 with a small taproom in Oregon City.
“We would do 10 grand a month, just pouring pints, no food whatsoever,” Parrish said on the podcast. At the time, the taproom helped generate cash and build awareness as the cider maker grew.
The company later opened a pub in Portland’s Hawthorne neighborhood and added a taproom at a larger production facility. Those locations, Parrish said, once made more money than wholesale sales. The model had worked … until it didn’t.
After the pandemic, all three locations saw a 50% drop in traffic and sales, Parrish said. Portland Cider opened a Beaverton location in 2022, expecting customers to return in force, but it just couldn’t draw enough traffic. At its Clackamas site, the company invested $100,000 in a commercial kitchen and hired a chef to improve the food. The effort still didn’t bring in enough customers to support the restaurant.
The lesson isn’t that taprooms or restaurants are bad bets. It’s that a business needs to revisit the assumptions behind a bet when customer behavior changes. Parrish said the restaurant had once been viewed as a way to connect people with the brand, even when it lost money. But the trade-off became harder to defend: the restaurants represented “probably 10% of our revenue,” he said, but “90% of the managerial headaches” for he and his wife, Lynda.
That contrast offers a useful thought process for other owner that you need to evaluate a location not only by its sales, but also by the staff time, complexity and attention it consumes … and by whether it still delivers the marketing value you expected. A venue can be a meaningful brand touchpoint and still be the wrong use of limited resources.
We asked whether Portland Cider had waited too long to make the decision. Parrish said the couple had revisited the question every month for two years: “Is it worth keeping this thing running?” The final decision followed a difficult first quarter in 2026 and the chef’s decision to leave. Parrish said replacing him would mean filling “really big shoes,” and the restaurant had just had its worst quarter.
Making the decision through ongoing review, not a single bad month was the key, but don’t let emotional attachment or past investment substitute for evidence. Parrish said the company consulted its advisory board, which included people in beverage, finance and manufacturing, before closing the restaurant.
The move also clarified what Portland Cider wanted to prioritize. “It allows us to focus our attention on what we do best,” Parrish said, describing that as making cider and promoting it across its regional footprint. The company isn’t abandoning customer-facing events: Parrish said it planned to continue activities such as its annual brewery 5K and seasonal on-site gatherings.
That distinction matters for others considering a shift. Closing a permanent retail operation doesn’t have to mean ending community engagement. It can mean choosing less costly, more targeted ways to stay connected, such as events, sponsorships or sales and marketing work in markets with room to grow.
Closing a taproom can sound like “the end of the brand.” Parrish’s account points to a different possibility: a company can shrink one part of its operation to strengthen another. That doesn’t guarantee growth, but it does give owners a way to frame the decision — not as a choice between preserving every location and giving up, but as a test of where limited resources can do the most good.
