Black Star Co-op Announces Permanent Closure

The Black Star Co-op Pub & Brewery, the beloved Central Austin neighborhood institution and the world's first cooperatively-owned and worker self-managed brewpub, has announced it will be closing permanently on Jan. 12.

Announcing the news on Jan. 8, the Black Star Co-op board of directors invited customers for "a final Vulcan and Black Star Burger" in these final four days of operations. No specifics were given for the decision, but the board simply said that the hard choice "comes after careful consideration of the many challenges we’ve faced in navigating the world’s first community-owned, democratically managed brewpub."

The co-op will host its already-scheduled members' assembly meeting on Saturday, Jan. 11 at 9am to discuss the future of the co-op as an entity before closing at 10pm on Sunday.

For the last decade and a half, Black Star has been an Austin institution and source of innovation – and not just in the 55 different original beers it had produced over the years. As co-founder Steven Yarak told the Chronicle in 2010, what he envisioned was "a beer bar that was owned by the regulars." The original idea dated back to 2006 at the beginning of the craft beer explosion. After years of membership drives and fundraising, the team finally settled on a brick-and-mortar location at Midtown Commons, at the corner of Lamar and Airport. The first pints were poured during a soft opening in September 2010 before opening fully that November.

Since then, Black Star has become a community fixture, both in the neighborhood and amongst beer lovers at large. It also didn't simply pioneer the idea of the beer co-op but extended its egalitarian ideas to the staff, becoming the first restaurant in Austin to pay a living wage. It also became an environmental trailblazer when the U.S. Green Building Council certified it Gold in its Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design system in 2013. As beer team leader Jeff Young told the Chronicle at the time, this may never have happened if it wasn't a co-op. He said, "Five or 10 years ago, breweries weren't an industry that could be thought of as leaders in sustainability. ... The directive to be green came from our member owners and so did the investment."

Grab a last pint at what we called "the first member-owned, worker self-managed, fair-labor co-op brewery on Earth" before Black Star closes on Sunday at 7020 Easy Wind Dr., Ste. 100.