Placebo Brewing Company

I quit drinking alcohol on June 6, 2019. After 20+ years of heavy drinking, I needed to know I could stop. It was too much a part of my personality. All my hobbies involved drinking beer outdoors. But it was just masking deep anxiety and allowing my mental health to deteriorate into an endless cycle of drinking until I felt numb enough to feel OK.

At the time, Athletic Brewing "blues" were just becoming more readily available where we were living in Massachusetts, and they became my secret to success, my hand-held placebo to use amid all my hobbies which invariably involved drinking beer outdoors. That sparked the idea.

During Covid-19 shut-down I was working on the River Park project through a period of great uncertainty in the market, and I needed a creative outlet. So I got introduced to a former founding brewer for a Vermont beer success story, and put together a framework for a non-alcoholic brewing company called Placebo Brewing Company, with a handful of hypothetical offerings ranging from Quitter IPA, to Fakie, to Designated Driver. 

A Federal Trademark Application was filed for Placebo Brewing Company.

At Paragon Boardwalk we had looked into opening an ocean-side brewery in a former Burger King space that ultimately became the Paragon Beer Hall. One early lesson was that there were 50+ start-up breweries registered in the state of Massachusetts that year, so instead of being the 51st we pivoted to being a beachfront host to dozens of great Mass breweries, with an arcade next door. That same approach to family-friendly fun would do well in the Upper Valley, or so was my operating theory in 2022.

One of the opportunities allowed by the Zoning in West Lebanon at the time was that in the Industrial (IND-L) zone we could have 10% of an industrial use be customer-focused: e.g. brewery. Placebo was a placeholder or a pathway to a tenant that could bring a river-side brewery to West Leb.

When the River Park project was blocked, this got back-burnered. The non-alcoholic beer space has filled up in the years since, but I still believe there's a missing piece of that market that would appreciate a fun non-alcoholic beer brand. Or as the slogan says, "non-alcoholic beer for those of us at little risk of running a marathon."