Oyster City Brewing Company is no longer the tiny little brewery from Apalachicola. The brewery’s parent company, Made By The Water, LLC has been building up their first brewery by adding facilities and tasting rooms first in Tallahassee then in Mobile, Alabama. This weekend, Made By The Water made another purchase to add to Oyster City’s family of brands: Catawba Brewing in Asheville, North Carolina and Palmetto Brewing in Charleston, South Carolina.
According to a recent article in the News Herald newspaper, Catawba owner Billy Pyatt, “We built a brand that’s really important in the southeast, and the guys that are buying us, they think like we do, and they are so excited to grow those brands,” Billy said. “No, it’s not going to change. The cool thing about it is people who live in Florida, that have wanted our beers for forever, will have an opportunity to get them. They’re going to expand us and do the things that we always hoped we could do, so it’s just great.”
Made By The Water CEO Alexi Sekmakas is excited to bring all of these celebrated southeastern brands under one roof and make all of the brands available in their taprooms across the southeast and he wants it to happen as soon as possible.
In celebration, Oyster City Brewing posted to their social media:
Keep your eye out for OCBC brews coming soon to their taprooms, as well as, seeing the amazingly crafted and delicious Catawba Valley and Palmetto brews on tap at the Apalachicola, Tallahassee, and Mobile breweries! We are thrilled to join forces with these good people and their historic craft beer culture. You can consider us one big happy family that is making damn good beer together! Now it’s time to celebrate the good news, cheers!
About Catawba Brewing
The roots for Catawba Brewing Company are strongly held in the mountains of western North Carolina, more specifically, the Catawba River for which we are named. The river is formed where the Pyatt boys grew up and winds down through Morganton, where the production brewery is located. It was important to us that our new logo and branding reflect that heritage, while also demonstrating our continued expansion beyond the region.
About Palmetto Brewing
The original Palmetto Brewery in Charleston opened in 1888, by John Doscher.
The original Palmetto Brewery survived the hurricane of 1886 and the earthquake of 1887, it even survived the Civil War, but did not survive the prohibition in 1920. The brewery closed in 1916 due to bankruptcy and that was the end of beer being brewed in Charleston for almost 80 years.
In the late 1980s Ed Falkenstein and friend, Louis Bruce, took a windsurfing trip to Oregon. While they were there, they visited a local brewery called Full Sail and Ed peeked in the brewhouse and thought “I could do all of that.”After years of back and forth with the State, they were finally legally allowed to build and operate the first brewery in the state of SC.
The first beer was poured in April of 1993; the Amber Ale, our oldest recipe brewed to this day. Ed Falkenstein has been coined the craft beer pioneer for South Carolina, and Charleston would not be where we are in the craft beer scene without that windsurfing trip.
January of 2018, Catawba Valley Brewing Company purchased Palmetto Brewery from the owner at the time, Larry Lipov. As of 2018, we are still family owned and operated under the Pyatt family who founded Catawba Valley Brewing Company in 1999. With a very similar background, we were destined to become one big family and help each other thrive in the Carolinas.
About Oyster City Brewing
The Oyster City Brewing Company was conceived in 2012 on the barstools of The Tap Room in Apalachicola with one frequently asked question: “What’s your local beer?”
Committed to thorough, practical research, we sampled hundreds of pints of craft beer from all over the state and region. Tough work for sure, but slowly it began to dawn on us, “We might could pull it off.”
Eventually, we put together a plan and transformed an old dive bar into a little brewery and got to work, guided by the mission to improve our beer with every batch. To this day, we still start each morning committed to making our little slice of coastal paradise proud. Cheers!