How On-Site Breweries And Signature House Beers are Transforming The Traditional Golf Clubhouse
From brewhouses beside the 18th green to exclusive tournament ales, golf clubs are swapping generic taps for high-margin, local craft beers.
More and more golf clubs are moving to having their own proprietary house beers, sometimes even their own on-site breweries. The motives for doing so are prestige and financial.
Clubs are looking to diversify their income streams, especially as the golf trade is seasonal and bad weather can close the club’s main source of income, the course itself.
The modern consumer often shies away from generic mass-produced beverages in favour of locally crafted ones.
So golf clubs having their own beers, or even breweries, makes the clubhouse bar or terrace a hospitality destination attractive not only to golfers after a round, but to non-golfers and craft beer enthusiasts.
Moreover, not only does this give clubs freedom over their tap lists, it can bring higher profit margins.
Golf clubs with their own breweries
These golf clubs are among those with their own on-site breweries.
Ironclad Golf & Beer Garden, Hampstead, North Carolina, USA
Belvedere Country Club opened in 1970 but closed in 2020 due to financial difficulties.
Ironclad Brewery bought the site and reopened the golf course as Ironclad Golf & Beer Garden, moving the business away from the exclusive country club model, which had failed here.
The golf course was redesigned, pickleball courts came in the stead of the tennis courts, and the swimming pool was filled in and replaced by a multi-level outdoor beer garden which can accommodate more than 500 guests.
This beer garden features a stage for live music, fire tables, lawn games such as cornhole, and fresh craft drafts pumped from a custom beer shack by the driving range.
Canyon Lakes Golf Course & Brewery, San Ramon, California, USA
This public course designed by Ted Robinson Sr. opened in 1986 overlooking the San Ramon Valley and providing vistas of Mount Diablo.
It has a reputation as an easy place to lose golf balls. But humour can be restored on the patio of the brewery, conveniently close to the 18th green.
Canyon Lakes Brewery’s ten-barrel brewing system opened in September 2017, and the following year its O.B. Brown Ale, a full-bodied ale boasting rich caramel and toasted nutty chocolate notes, won the gold medal at the Best of Craft Beer Awards.
The brewery now produces 18 revolving taps of craft beers.
Shawnee Inn and Golf Resort, Pennsylvania, USA
The beer garden at Shawnee Inn and Golf Resort offers a different vibe to the typical 19th hole
Then known as the Shawnee Country Club, this club hosted the 1938 PGA Championship, in which Paul Runyan defeated Sam Snead in the final.
On the banks of the Delaware River in the foothills of the Pocono Mountains, ShawneeCraft produces small-batch beers.
Using ingredients grown directly on the resort's on-site farm, it focuses on authentic European-style sessionability. Its Clubhouse Kolsch won first place in the Pale German Ale class in this year’s Pennsylvania Farm Show Beer Competition.
The Fairways of Halfmoon, Mechanicville, New York, USA
The club's 18-hole course opened in 1999 and there is also a nine-hole par-3 course here and a brewery.
Two local high school teachers had started brewing in the clubhouse basement in 2013 as a hobby. By 2018 this had snowballed into the Hank Hudson Brewing Company, and in October that year it officially opened its rustic, British-pub-inspired taproom.
Glendoveer, Portland, Oregon, USA
Von Ebert Brewing was founded in 2018 by father-son duo Tom M. and Tom S. Cook, in Portland. One of its three breweries is situated at Glendoveer Golf & Tennis, where it operates a functional seven-barrel brewhouse.
Glendoveer has two courses, the East, which has been celebrating its centenary this year, as has the club, and the West which opened two years later.
Remedy Oak, Dorset, England
In 2018 Stu Betts, a former Campaign for Real Ale branch chairman began using a pilot kit to experiment with flavour profiles and recipes in 100-litre batches (roughly 175 pints)
He did so in the corner of an old farm building within the 256-acre grounds of Remedy Oak Golf Club.
When it was time to scale up into a commercial business, Mr Betts teamed up with the owner of the golf club, Bill Riddle.
Mr Riddle allowed him to redevelop an unused barn in the golf club's grounds. The first commercial batch of the flagship amber ale 1552 was brewed in October 2020 there and named after the year King Edward VI visited the historic local Remedy Oak tree.
Fraser Edmundston Golf Club, New Brunswick, Canada
This golf club dates from 1926, when a group of golfers established a course on the Madawaska River basin. But the current course dates from a commission given to course architect Albert Murray in 1947.
Microbrasserie Ateepic opened in the clubhouse in May 2022, with the taproom serving craft beers from around the province of New Brunswick.
But later that year they began their own on-site brewery and launched their first four house-brewed beers. Golfers can now sample up to 21 locally hand-crafted beers.
Golf clubs with their own house beers
For those clubs without their own brewery, they can still have the prestige of having their own house beer.
Not only does it create a sense of exclusivity, it can also reinforce the club’s history or standing. Typically the names chosen for the beers reflect this.
A proprietary house product also gives a club higher profit margins as customers willingly pay more for a speciality beer.
Royal Cinque Ports, Kent, England
One of the members at Royal Cinque Ports, Alex Cork, co-founded Match Play Brewery, with Charlie Hood, who runs his own design company, and James Justin, a branding strategist. They concentrate on coming up with custom-crafted signature club beers.
Its first collaboration was with Royal Cinque Ports, for which it designed Hut Lager, a 4.2% ABV Pilsner named after the club’s famous halfway hut, with cans branded in the official club colours.
Other subsequent collaborations have included one with another Open venue, Royal St George’s, as well as with Worplesdon, and Hesketh golf clubs.
Hesketh Golf Club introduced a new Pilsner at the halfway house
Oakmont Country Club, Pennsylvania, USA
In 2016 Jeff Becker began secretly experimenting – he did not even tell his wife – by making craft beer with small-batch brewing equipment and learning more about the process by attending craft fairs.
When attending the Masters Tournament in 2017 he was “blown away by the control Augusta National had over its brand.” This gave him the idea of combining his interests of craft beer and golf to make house beers for golf clubs.
The upshot was that he gathered partners and founded Links Brewing.
Oakmont’s official house beer, 1903 Ale, was launched in May 2020. The name reflects the foundation year of the club that has hosted eight US Opens, and is due to host the 2033 and 2042 US Opens.
Augusta National, Georgia, USA
The famously secretive host of The Masters does not say who makes the Crow's Nest wheat ale sold only during tournament weeks, only that it is “brewed locally”.
It takes its name from the amateurs’ lodging area in the clubhouse and is served in green souvenir cups. It debuted in 2021, replacing Blue Moon, which had been the club’s featured craft beer since 2016.
St Andrews Links, Fife, Scotland
The Home Of Golf has two custom beers – Road Hole Lager and Tom Morris Scotch Ale – which were launched by the St Andrews Links Trust and the St Andrews Brewing Company in September 2019.
