The smell of malt and hops used to hang over the Everett Turnpike at certain times of day, a sweet, yeasty announcement that you were approaching Merrimack. Drivers who had never stopped in the town knew it anyway by that scent, the olfactory signature of an industrial presence that had anchored the area since 1970, when the first cans of Budweiser rolled off the line and the parking lot filled with cars bearing New Hampshire plates.
For fifty-five years, the brewery employed fathers and sons, neighbors and cousins, the kind of workplace where employment applications were passed across Thanksgiving tables and retirement parties were attended by generations of the same families. It paid wages that allowed workers to buy homes in the town where they worked, to raise children who attended the local schools, to build the kind of rooted lives that have become increasingly rare in an economy of remote work and transient populations.
Then came December, two weeks before Christmas, when Anheuser-Busch InBev announced that the Merrimack facility would close early in the new year. The news arrived in corporate language—efficiency initiatives, portfolio optimization, strategic realignment—but its translation in the homes of the 125 affected workers was simpler and more brutal. The job that had seemed permanent was not. The plan that had stretched toward retirement dissolved. The identity that came with wearing the uniform to the grocery store, with being known around town as someone who worked at the brewery, would soon require past-tense construction.
Paul Micali, Merrimack’s town manager, understood immediately what the closure represented beyond the economic calculus of 125 lost jobs. The brewery was woven into the town’s fabric in ways that did not appear on tax rolls. “It’s people’s brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles,” he said. “If you grew up in town, there was always somebody who worked at Anheuser-Busch that you knew.” The facility had provided not just employment but a narrative of belonging, a story that Merrimack residents could tell about their community—that they made something there, something tangible that traveled to bars and refrigerators across New England.
The loss arrives at a particular moment for New Hampshire manufacturing. Goods-producing industries in the state shed more than 1,200 jobs in the past year, continuing a long erosion of the sector that once defined the region’s economy. Textile mills closed decades ago, followed by shoe factories and paper plants. Each closure was explained individually—foreign competition, automation, changing markets—but collectively they tell a story of transformation, of a state remaking itself from a place that made physical things into one that provides services, that hosts tourists, that houses remote workers earning salaries from distant cities.
AB InBev, the Belgian-Brazilian conglomerate that acquired Anheuser-Busch in 2008, is the world’s largest brewer, a company of such scale that the Merrimack facility represented a rounding error in its global portfolio. Its brands—Budweiser, Stella Artois, the portfolio of mass-market beers—will continue to be sold in New Hampshire, produced elsewhere in vast automated facilities that employ fewer people per barrel. The company has promised severance packages and relocation assistance, the standard script for corporate closures, but for workers with mortgages in Merrimack, with children in local schools, with aging parents nearby, relocation offers little comfort. The geography of their lives cannot be as easily restructured as a corporate supply chain.
What is being lost is difficult to quantify. It is the institutional knowledge that disappears when experienced workers scatter to other employers or early retirement. It is the tax base that supported municipal services, the volunteer coaches and Scout leaders who had stable schedules because they worked stable shifts. It is the sense that a person without a college degree could find employment that paid enough to raise a family, that offered health insurance and a pension, that recognized loyalty with seniority rather than regarding every employee as a variable cost.
The brewery building itself will remain, a hulking industrial presence on the landscape while its fate is determined. Perhaps it will be redeveloped into the kind of mixed-use facility that has become fashionable, with craft breweries and artisanal food producers and loft apartments marketed to Boston commuters. Perhaps it will sit empty, another monument to departed industry, its parking lot cracking as weeds push through the asphalt. Either way, the smell of malt will fade, and with it a certain way of knowing Merrimack, a sensory marker of honest work being done by people who lived nearby.
The last batch of beer from the Merrimack facility will roll off the line sometime in early 2026. After that, the kettles will cool, the bottling lines will fall silent, and 125 workers will clean out their lockers, turn in their badges, and drive home through a town that smells different now, changed in a way that cannot be reversed by tax incentives or economic development grants. They will join the long history of New Hampshire workers who made things that were consumed far from where they were produced, who built lives around steady employment that their children will not find in the same place, who witnessed the slow transformation of an economy that once promised permanence and now offers little more than the next quarterly earnings report.
Based on reporting from NHPR, WBUR, Valley News, and the New Hampshire Union Leader.