6 October 2024
By Anne Sara Bien-Aime, Forum News Service
Two former Hawley, Minn., residents are working to pick up the pieces after Hurricane Helene destroyed their business in North Carolina.
Brian Fetting and Dan Juhnke were at Junkyard Brewing Co. in Moorhead, Minn., before they started their business venture together in 2020. Just a year later, they opened the New Origin Brewing Co. in Asheville, N.C.
“North Carolina was kind of the perfect place for us because the temperature year round was great, and the beer culture was phenomenal with so many breweries there, it’s also a tourist city. They have really high quality water,” Fetting said.
They were prepared for the potential for floods in North Carolina, but they never expected anything like the wrath of Hurricane Helene.
“We had water pumps ready, we had sandbags ready, but this was levels of magnitudes above and beyond what anybody was prepared for,” Fetting said.
By Thursday night, Sept. 26, the storm worsened. Employees and customers were evacuated.
By Friday night, the brewery was destroyed.
“The building wasn’t there, it was a pile of bricks. We could find our logo on various pieces of steel and broken glass. The office building was lifted up and brought away. We’ve been finding our fermenter tanks up to miles, miles away,” Fetting said.
Now that the storm has passed, they’re left worried about recovering.
“We did have to take out a SBA (U.S. Small Business Administration) loan to start our business and that loan still exists, but the collateral, the assets, everything that we had that was generating revenue and we were paying for that loan is now gone. We have flood insurance, but the reality is that only covers a portion of it,” Fetting said.
Between banks, insurance and cleanup, Fetting said it can take years, and anywhere from $600,000 to $1 million, to recover.
They’re hopeful that the rebuild can be bigger and better.
If you’d like to help, you can donate to their GoFundMe page. at gofundme.com/f/support-for-new-origin-brewing-after-hurricane-helene.
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