On Thursday, December 17, Henceforth will cease serving food. If there is beer left, they may stay open for beer service beyond that date, but the H Street NE brewpub will not be making it to 2027, per a social media announcement: “Despite our best efforts to find a sustainable way to operate, the customer traffic at this location hasn’t been enough to support the size our our space and the costs of running it.” The brewery opened in May of 2025, and the cause of closure is a lack of foot traffic. Neither an invitation to Snallygaster nor a Great American Beer Festival medal could save the business, which already went through a round of restructuring, declaring Chapter 11 bankruptcy at the end of October, 2025, during the longest federal government shutdown in history.
That same October Henceforth bested a dozen local breweries with their Grodziskie, a Polish-style smoked ale at the DC Brewers Guild Really Loc-ale festival in Anacostia’s Bridge District. The brewery quickly made a name for themselves with lower alcohol options. “What surprised me the most is I’m brewing a lot less hazy pale ales than I was at other breweries, which is great because I personally am over it,” head brewer Ben Mullet told us last year. He relished the chance to brew more hard-to-find styles of beer like Grisette, which was proof of concept to keep making lower alcohol options.
In a way, this was baked into Henceforth’s DNA from the start. The two founders, Michael Spinello and Ben Mullet, debuted beers at Dock 5 behind Union Market in 2024, a cream ale and an IPA. The cream ale ran out first. Few other area breweries can boast the selection of the H St. brewpub. Who else has witbier, Grodziskie, brown ale, a lager made with 38% local rye, cream ale, and a Czech-style dark lager all on draft at the same time? Sure, we see wonderful examples of these styles of beers from breweries much older than Henceforth at Churchkey and Shelter at the Roost, but overall this diversity of styles is hard to come by on-site at a brewery. What’s not hard to come by at Henceforth is the feeling of comfort.
Henceforth sports no stools. You won’t find uncomfortable steel seats or folding beer hall benches, often ubiquitous in our favorite warehouse breweries. Maybe televisions would have helped, although the brewpub did concede to putting up a projector for some sporting events. It’s disappointing that Henceforth’s concept–broadly, a brewery for grownups–did not resonate enough with the public, and that sense of comfort will be missed most of all. “If we are impersonal about it and treat it like business that could be devastating to that person, but if we act as our home and they’re our guest we could make their day,” founder and managing partner Spinello says.
Unfortunately, there were not enough of those guests. The rise and fall and rise and fall of H St is well documented elsewhere, but “It would be hard to overstate the combined impact that the federal law enforcement surge, ICE presence, government employee layoffs, and government shutdown had on the business environment in DC, and we certainly weren’t spared. [2025] was a really unusual and tough year to run a brewery in DC, much less to open one,” Spinello told us. While 2026 was better in terms of business, it wasn’t good enough.
We asked both Spinello and Mullet about the dual challenges of the brewpub model, being responsible for both a brewery and a restaurant, and what role that might play in the upcoming closure. Again, both said it came down to foot traffic. Maybe a new Commanders stadium will again revitalize the corridor, but it comes too late for Henceforth. “This is a very large space that requires a certain amount of foot traffic and a high amount of labor because of the size and layout of the floor plan. So our labor costs are high, the occupancy costs are high, then that requires a certain amount of foot traffic to make the economics make sense. Our neighbors have been incredibly supportive, both the businesses and community, and have been wonderful guests, but the foot traffic from the neighborhood alone is not sufficient. When H Street was a destination, there was enough foot traffic to sustain a business of this size. And I think with the developments on the horizon, H Street will get back to that, but not for a few years. and we simply don’t have the financial runway to survive that long.”
With regards to the brewing business, Mullet adds, “I don’t think the closure is because we are a brewpub… If you look at the industry as a whole, which is struggling, the brewpub category is the most promising. It just gets back to all the other things that Michael mentioned. We avoided distribution intentionally because it is a margins game.” In order to make distribution work as a revenue stream breweries have to sell large amounts of beer off-premise. Henceforth wasn’t built for that. “The logistics that go into distribution, and being a small team, that was going to be better spent activating the space, we didn’t design the space for distro,” notes Mullet.
The closure in December also gets out ahead of dry January, the slowest month of the year for alcohol-focused establishments, and avoids having to file paperwork and taxes for 2027. Unfortunately, it also means leaving beer in the tanks, including the next batch of Baltic Porter, their GABF medalist. This news comes on the heels of uncertainty around H Street’s original beer-focused destination, Granville Moore’s. The Belgian bistro remains open for now and may continue to operate in a smaller footprint on the first floor of 1238 H Street while the rest of the space becomes something else. As always, we’ll keep you updated. You have another month to visit Henceforth. We’ll be there, keeping it under 6%.
Jacob Berg wrote this post with input from Michael Stein and Brandy Holder. Holder works for Henceforth.
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