Destroyed in the Lahaina Fires, Koholā Brewery Grows and Rebrands

Robert Burn, the head brewer at Koholā Brewery, had spent the day at work waiting for the power to come back on. It was August 8, 2023, and hurricane-strength winds were tearing through Lahaina, a seaside city on Maui’s westside. When he heard the solar panels being ripped off the brewery’s roof, he knew it was time to leave. 

The storm kicked up brush fires, quickly turning the area into an inferno. Burn arrived at Mary Anderson’s door completely covered in ash.

By the time the last of the flames were extinguished, the Lahaina fires had become the deadliest in the United States in the last century. The fires killed more than one hundred people, caused $5.5 billion in damages, and wiped out nearly all of Lahaina. 

Burn lived with Anderson for a few months. Another staff member and his wife lived with their boss for a full year.

Nothing left

Today, if you type “Koholā Brewery, Lahaina” into a typical maps app a sudsy white stein in an orange circle pops up like the promise of something good. On the screen, the brewery building stands in a gray outline, as does the rest of the ostensibly bustling oceanfront town on Maui. Maps, however, say the brewery is “temporarily closed.” Click on nearly any Lahaina restaurant or store and you receive the same two words. 

Driving through Lahaina makes those “temporarily closed” notes clear. Most of the lots are still empty. Construction crews have just finished clearing the rubble. Koholā’s brewery and taproom in Lahaina had burnt to the ground, too. 

The first few new houses have started to go up. Improbably, six surviving restaurants dish up meals on beautiful Front Street, a microcosm of what Lahaina once was and will be again. Koholā also found a way to emerge from the ashes. 

Brewery growth delayed

A month before the fires, Anderson, the brewery president, had just installed a brand new 80-barrel tank, increasing to a 10,000-barrel capacity annually and becoming one of the largest operations in a state with fewer than 20 breweries. She had also secured investors to open a new taproom in Wailea on the other side of the island. 

“We started to really hit our stride for stateside distribution,” Anderson said.

And in an instant it was all gone. The fires had destroyed the Lahaina building, the equipment, the beer, everything. And the investors, who’d also lost a great deal of capital in the fires, pulled their money from the Wailea taproom. 

Anderson had experienced brewery disasters before. She purchased Koholā when it was failing during the pandemic. But the Lahaina fire was clearly worse.

“I didn’t think we would be able to keep the company alive,” Anderson said. 

Across the archipelago, however, one of Koholā’s direct competitors presented a solution. 

Production moves to the Big Island

On the Big Island, Kona Brewing Co. offered to contract brew Koholā’s beer at their Kailua-Kona facility.

“My intention was to get them off the ground,” said Ryan McVeigh, director of brewing operations and brewmaster at Kona Brewing Co. “Let’s make sure this [beer] doesn’t go away.”

Burn moved to the Big Island to help oversee production. Three months after the fires, Koholā’s Talk Story Pale Ale was back in kegs. One month later, their draft beer was back in the market.

In July 2024, nearly one year after the fires, Koholā finally opened its taproom and restaurant in Wailea. Ritzy Wailea is quite different from the West Maui warehouse brewery that everyone referred to as “Lahaina’s living room.” The new taproom is open-air and nice; the old brewery was hot and industrial. 

A show of thanks

The offerings in the Wailea taproom include all the familiar favorites. One can order a Lahaina Haze, a New England-style IPA, alongside some poke nachos. Or a soft shell crab masubi with a Kapena West Side IPA brewed to honor the Maui-based sailing excursion company Trilogy. The company sent two of its boats to Lahaina to assist the overwhelmed Coast Guard with search and rescue. In the days after, Trilogy sailed in food, gas, and first aid. Koholā felt it necessary to honor the Trilogy Kapena, Hawaiian for captain.

This past July, Koholā also purchased one of the two other breweries on Maui: Mahalo Aleworks. While it’s nowhere near the size of the original Koholā operation, the 1,500-barrel Mahalo Aleworks space allows Koholā to start brewing again. Anderson recognized that her brewers needed “to get [their] hands in the soil.”

While most Koholā beers are still contract brewed by Kona, Mahalo is their research and development space. 

“We’re trying to bring back more of our small batch recipes,” Burn said about the Mahalo operation. Before the fires, Burn had dedicated one small tank to start the brewery’s lager program. He aims to bring that back. 

Burn also wants to produce beers that remind him of the old brewery, like a cream ale that he used to brew. It was the perfect complement to the lost brewery, which was a metal warehouse that always felt hot and sweaty in the heat of a Maui afternoon, where temperatures in the taproom could reach 90 degrees Fahrenheit. 

Old friends usher in a new era

After Burn brewed his Mac Nut Stout, which uses local macadamia nuts, Koholā posted about the release on social media. Many of their old regulars showed up for the event. Some made the trek all the way from their new homes on the mainland. It was a day of drinking beer and reminiscing about the old parties at Koholā, like the annual Halloween dog costume contest.

For Will Newhouse, a musician who performed at Koholā weekly, the brewery had always been “the hangout spot.” Some nights he went to perform to an “intimate” crowd; some nights it was a “rager.” Sometimes he just went to Koholā to relax, check out an art show, eat at the pop-up food trucks, or watch an obscure soccer game. 

As a corporation, Koholā on paper has always been Lahaina Brewing Co. Now, given everything that has been lost, and everything that has been acquired since the fires (like Mahalo Aleworks), Koholā is much less and much more than its former self. 

On September 9, 2025, Anderson will officially change the brewery name to Lahaina Brewing Co. The new logo features a sunrise behind the West Maui mountains. 

“It’s kind of the rebirth,” Anderson said. “The phoenix from the fire.”

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