Lost Coast Brewery goes up for sale as founder Barbara Groom retires

Barbara Groom has put Lost Coast Brewery up for sale as she retires, closing a 37-year run that helped turn the Eureka brand into one of Northern California’s recognizable craft names. The move is not tied to distress or a shutdown. It marks a founder-led handoff for a brewery that began with a restaurant in downtown Eureka and Great White wheat beer.

Groom and Wendy Pound developed the idea in 1986, founded Lost Coast Brewery in 1989 and opened the pub in 1990, making the business part of Humboldt County’s early women-led brewing story. Lost Coast says Groom started the company after six years of hard work, and that Great White was the beer that started it all. Today, Great White remains a signature beer, alongside Tangerine Wheat, one of the brewery’s longstanding mainstays.

The company’s current brewery sits just south of Eureka in a custom-built facility designed to grow with the business. Lost Coast brewed its first batch there on August 20, 2014. The brewery says the plant can bottle and can up to 1.2 million beers and fill 1,400 kegs a day, while another current page lists 225,000 beers bottled and canned daily and 800 kegs filled daily. Lost Coast also says it offers tours, a café and distribution across the United States, details that will matter to anyone watching what a buyer chooses to keep, expand or rework.

That mix of brand history, production capacity and regional reach is what makes the sale significant. Lost Coast is not a startup looking for footing or a troubled plant heading toward liquidation. It is a legacy brewery with a built-in customer base, established wholesale relationships and a name that still carries weight far beyond Eureka. For a buyer, the attraction is clear: a functioning brewery, a known portfolio and a story that still resonates.

The timing also fits a broader shift across craft beer. The Brewers Association said U.S. craft brewers produced 23.1 million barrels in 2024, down 4.0% from 2023, and that closures outpaced openings for the first time in nearly two decades, with 399 closures and 335 openings. Its 2025 report showed production falling another 5.1%, with the number of craft breweries down 2.9% even as craft held about 13.3% of beer volume. Against that backdrop, Lost Coast’s sale looks like another chapter in the industry’s generational reset, as one of Humboldt County’s early brewing institutions moves beyond the founder who built it.