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This post is one in a partnership between the Rochester Beacon and veteran reporter Will Cleveland, featuring articles published on his Substack site, Cleveland Prost.
The first thing James Hilbert ever knew about beer was that he didn’t like it. Keystone Ice in a college dorm will do that to a person. Then someone handed him a Palm Belgian—the one in the green box with the little gold horse—and something clicked. St. Bernardus came next. Then Rochefort. Then came a battered Honda Civic loaded past its logical limit with farmhouse ales from the Hudson Valley at 2 a.m., a broke college kid running product he’d cold-called breweries to get, sleeping in his car when he couldn’t spring for a hotel.
He was building something. He just didn’t know yet how expensive it would get to keep it.
One Stop Brew Shop, the 1,100-square-foot bottle shop tucked into a strip on Ridgeway Avenue in Greece, has been a pilgrimage destination for Rochester-area beer lovers for more than a decade. Over 1,200 products crammed into a space most developers would dismiss as a closet. The selection is curated, obsessively, by someone who learned to love beer one green-boxed Belgian at a time and never really stopped chasing the next great thing.
But in 2026, that pursuit is getting harder, and more expensive, in ways that are stacking up all at once. The Rochester craft beer scene, Hilbert will tell you plainly, is in a slump. “The community is still strong,” he says. “It’s still there. But it needs some excitement, it needs some life in it.” That ambient flatness is its own kind of headwind for a shop that depends entirely on enthusiasm—Hilbert’s and his customers’.
He is not alone in feeling it. The Brewers Association recently reported that the craft segment was down just over 5 percent in 2025, that brewery closings outpaced openings by nearly two to one, and that 60 percent of breweries made less beer last year than the year before. The industry’s own chief economist described the mood at this spring’s Craft Brewers Conference as cautiously hopeful—”the vibe is positive,” Bart Watson told reporters, “it feels like we’re coming out the other side”—even as the numbers told a more complicated story. For the shops and distributors downstream from those breweries, the complications are not abstract.
“The average craft beer consumer now has a lot of knowledge, much more than 10 years ago. So, I have to be hyper-critical on product,” Hilbert says.
The tariff problem nobody’s talking about
When the United States imposed sweeping tariffs on Canadian goods earlier this year, most headlines fixated on lumber and dairy. Few paused to consider what it would mean for a bottle shop in Upstate New York that has built a portion of its identity on importing exceptional Canadian craft beer—labels that simply don’t exist in the American distribution system and can’t be replicated by domestic alternatives. And the tax imposed on aluminum cans, specifically, has made business increasingly more difficult.
Hilbert is a devoted fan of Canadian craft, and One Stop’s shelves reflect that in concrete terms: brands like Burdock, Badlands, Brasserie du Bas, and Blood Brothers represent the kind of deliberate editorial choices that separate a great bottle shop. Getting those beers across the border has always required patience and persistence. Now it requires absorbing costs that the market simply won’t bear on the other end. The landed price goes up; the retail price the market expects doesn’t move; and the shop owner stands in the gap. And One Stop has gotten more creative—bringing the beers over in kegs (to be poured as draft beer) and glass bottles, since they aren’t subject to the same tariffs.
“Right now, the biggest thing in pricing is transport costs,” Hilbert says. “It’s killing us. Obviously, we get shipments from all over—Canada, Florida, all over the Northeast, Texas. We’re seeing a 20 to 40% increase on pallets. It’s tough to pass that along, so a lot of it we eat. But it’s getting harder and harder to do that. Margins are thin as is. But I want to keep getting the good stuff, stuff people can’t get anywhere else. It’s not an option for us to not do that. That’s what we’ve built and what we’re known for, for better or for worse.”
The cruel irony is that the beers most affected tend to be the ones customers are most passionate about—limited runs, regional specialties, things that made someone’s trip to One Stop worthwhile. (Expectedly, the store still does steady business with macro beers and has a number of regulars who come in just to buy their favorites from Anheuser-Busch or Coors.)
The shipping squeeze
Long before the tariff conversation, Hilbert had already been navigating a different kind of cost pressure—one that sits at the very heart of what makes One Stop unusual.
In addition to running the shop, he operates a small distribution arm, working to bring breweries like Delaware’s Dewey Beer, Florida’s 3 Sons Brewing and Arkane Aleworks, and Pennsylvania’s Imprint Beer into the Rochester market. He does this under a grandfathered Class C license from the state Liquor Authority—a designation that functions like a distributor’s license but is issued to retailers.
Only a finite number of these licenses still exist in New York; they cannot be created new, only purchased from an existing holder. It’s a rare instrument, and Hilbert uses it to do something the large distributors have no interest in doing: getting small, hard-to-find breweries into the hands of Western New York customers.
That model requires moving product across long distances in small quantities.
“Transportation costs are probably the number one factor we’ve seen in rising prices,” Hilbert says. “Fuel prices are up and shippers need to get their cut. On top of it, all of our distributors are charging more (to deliver beers to the store). It could cost upwards of $50 more per delivery. We get five to six deliveries a week. You add that up and multiply it by 52 weeks, that’s a lot of added costs for us. Who eats it? It’s just nuts. All of that has just been brutal.”
For a boutique distributor moving small quantities of perishable product—especially hop-forward styles that degrade with heat and time—those per-unit costs hit far harder than they would for a large-scale operation. There’s no volume discount when you’re ordering a pallet from a small brewery in Florida.
The margin trap
The instinctive consumer response to any of this is simple: raise your prices. If the beer costs more to get here, charge more for it. But independent bottle shop economics don’t work that way.
It’s worth understanding what One Stop’s shelves actually look like. Hilbert carries some of the most sought-after brands in the region: Finback from Queens, Celestial Beer Works from Dallas, Heavy Reel from New Jersey, Kettlehead from New Hampshire, and a rotation of exceptional Canadian craft.
On the higher end, it’s not unusual to see four-packs of hazy IPAs north of $20. Those are the products that bring people in, that justify the trip across town. But the shop also carries accessible options—four-packs (mix and match) of 19.2-ounce stovepipe cans for $12—and those tell a different story.
“When you sell budget-friendly options, we’re losing money on some of them,” Hilbert says. He points to one specific stovepipe—a 19.2-ounce can from a downstate brewery—where One Stop clears exactly $0.20 per can. “It’s your milk and eggs, you know. That’s how we’re viewing it.”
The bet is that customers grabbing the loss-leader will also pick up a few other items, something One Stop makes possible as one of the few places in the area where you can buy beer as a single can, whether it’s 12 ounces or 16 ounces.
“It’s still nickel and dime-ing that we’re getting,” Hilbert says. “It doesn’t seem like it’s much. But it adds up and subtracts from the bottom line until you’re like, ‘Where is everything?'”
And that’s before accounting for the experiments that don’t pan out. For a time, One Stop was selling cannabis-infused seltzers and drinks—a promising new revenue stream. Changing guidance from the state Liquor Authority, evolving state law, and ongoing federal gray areas brought that to a halt. The additional income would have helped. Its absence is just another subtraction.
The result is a vice that has no clean solution. Costs rise from below—tariffs, shipping, fuel, labor. Prices are pinned from above by market expectations and competition from larger retailers who can absorb margin hits.
“You have to do something different,” Hilbert says. “We are sandwiched between a Wegmans one mile that way and a Wegmans one mile that way. It’s a lot harder to beat the convenience and the pricing. It really is. But if you want local things to stay around, you’ve got to support them.”
The only real moat: knowing people
Hilbert has never been a businessman. He’s a beer person who built a business. And the distinction matters enormously when you’re trying to understand what has allowed One Stop to survive and even thrive in an environment that has shuttered many of its peers.
“All the closures, it’s tough to see,” he says, “especially some of the brands we worked with for a long time.”
The relationships he’s cultivated—with breweries like Finback in Queens, Plan Bee in Poughkeepsie, Fifth Hammer in Long Island City, and dozens of others across the Northeast—were not built through salesmanship. They were built by showing up. Sleeping in his car when he couldn’t afford a hotel. Loading his Honda Civic past its logical limit. Cold-calling breweries that had never heard of a bottle shop in Greece, and convincing them, over time, that he was worth trusting. Those relationships are now One Stop’s most durable competitive asset. They are what allow Hilbert to get allocations and access limited releases that larger or less connected shops simply can’t touch. No tariff changes that. No shipping surcharge eliminates it.
“A lot of times I meet these breweries through other breweries we work with,” Hilbert told me for a previous story. “So, it can be pretty seamless as friends introduce us to new breweries. It happens very organically.”
Curation is the other half. When you have a small space and a finite budget, every product has to earn its spot. That means saying no—a lot. It means having opinions. Hilbert is not trying to carry everything; he is trying to carry the best version of everything worth carrying.
There’s no triumphant resolution to offer here, no third-act pivot that makes the economics of independent beer retail comfortable in 2026.
What Hilbert will tell you, if you ask him about the future, is that the plan is the same as it has always been: expand carefully, keep listening, keep getting the products nobody else will bother to get.
“I really want to listen to the customers,” as he told me previously. “We won’t give you as many options. But I want to come in here and know we are giving you the best options.”
Will Cleveland is a Rochester Beacon contributing writer. A former Democrat and Chronicle reporter, he writes about beer in the Finger Lakes region and Western New York on Substack.
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