By Jason Genegabus

Tuesdays are normally the busiest day of the week for me, since it’s when the majority of content for our weekly HiLife section is due here at the newspaper.

Still, I couldn’t stop myself from doing a double-take when the first post showed up on Twitter around lunchtime.

Brew Moon had closed?

For good?

For real?

I passed along the message, then went back to working on this week’s column and the January edition of Barfly that got pushed back a week. But rumors kept spreading and the tweets kept coming.

By mid-afternoon, fellow Star-Bulletin columnist Erika Engle had picked up on the story. She spent a few hours sifting through the noise to get multiple confirmations that the restaurant and microbrewery had, in fact, shut its doors.

About an hour ago, she got the story posted online at Starbulletin.com.

As of 30 minutes ago, there was “no sign, no nothing except a vaccum cleaner” in the restaurant. Check out a picture here.

So that’s it. After 10 years in Ward Centre, it looks like the end of the line for my favorite place to drink freshly-brewed beer.

Some people criticized the restaurant’s opening during bad economic times (and were validated by the bankruptcy filing by its former owners in 2000), but I’d like to think the quality brew kept things going through the lean times, all the way up until the period when Marcus Bender sold the restaurant in 2007.

Sadly, another economic downturn hit the islands and the restaurant’s new owners couldn’t weather the storm. Former brewmaster Greg Yount saw it coming, leaving his post last year to join the staff at Mehana Brewing.

My final visits to the bar came just before he left, when I was enlisted to help produce a video about Brew Moon’s brewing facilities. I think I stopped by just once more for a beer after shooting that in June 2008.

I’m going to miss hanging out at the Ward Centre restaurant, along with its sister location in Waikiki that closed a few years ago. I’ve spent many a lazy evening on the lanai there, sipping on glasses of the liquid goodness Yount worked so hard to perfect.

Now all I have left is a pair of growlers I bought when the City and County of Honolulu decided to legalize the sale of beer in such containers four years ago.

Today’s closure also has an effect on this weekend’s Pro Bowl revelry. Sunday’s “Hip-Hop Luau” at the restaurant will not take place as scheduled.

No word if the party will be relocated to another venue.

***

UPDATE (2/4/09): Erika Engle’s full story about the closure appeared in today’s paper. The “Hip-Hop Luau” will still take place on Sunday; it moves a few doors down at Ward Centre to E&O Trading Co.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009 at 7:48 pm and is filed under Nightlife, Food & Drink, Outside The Club. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.