Mark
Hellendrung

A bar argument that turned into a brewery

Walk into the Narragansett beer hall on Tockwotton Street in Providence today and you are standing inside a bet that paid off. Twenty years ago the brand was a ghost - a name on faded coasters, a memory that older Rhode Islanders defended a little too fiercely. Today it brews on the harborfront, it sells across the East Coast, and the man who runs it can tell you exactly which Newport bar started the whole thing.

The argument went like this. Mark Hellendrung, between ventures and unimpressed by the taps in front of him, told a bartender there was nothing interesting to drink. An old-timer down the bar overheard him and barked the only correct response: "Give him a Narragansett!" The room lit up. Strangers traded stories about a beer that had basically vanished. Hellendrung listened to people get emotional about a lager nobody could even buy anymore, and filed it away.

Most people would have finished the beer and forgotten the night. He bought the company.

In 2005 he pulled together a group of New England investors and bought the Narragansett brand out of the Pabst/Falstaff portfolio for less than $100,000. The recipe had been knocked around for decades by out-of-state owners chasing cheaper production. So he found Bill Anderson, a brewer who knew the original formula, and put the lager back the way it was supposed to taste. The first job wasn't marketing. It was getting the beer right.

The homecoming nobody thought would happen

For more than 30 years, no Narragansett had been brewed in Rhode Island. The beer was contract-brewed elsewhere, which kept the lights on but gnawed at the brand's whole reason to exist. You cannot sell "local" from another state and expect anyone to believe you. Hellendrung knew it, and he said so plainly.

In 2017, that finally happened. Narragansett began large-scale brewing again in Pawtucket through The Guild, a cooperative where several small breweries share equipment and space - a setup he likened to a farmers' market for beer. "None of us could have created this on our own," he said, "but collectively we could." The first batch out the door was an IPA with the on-the-nose name It's About Time.

Then came the exclamation point. In 2019 he bought a warehouse at 271 Tockwotton Street in the Fox Point neighborhood of Providence, right on the water. By 2021 it had become a working brewery with a European-style beer hall attached - a place an architecture critic later praised as a genuine gathering spot on the harbor. The ghost brand now had an address you could walk to.

Before the beer, there was juice

Hellendrung did not arrive in beverages by accident. At Brown, where he graduated in 1990, he played baseball and - in a detail that reads like foreshadowing - ran the beer distribution for his fraternity, Theta Delta Chi. He was in the same orbit as Tom First and Tom Scott, the duo behind Nantucket Nectars. He joined their juice company in 1994 and was running it as president by 1996.

That experience cut both ways. Nantucket Nectars eventually sold to a much larger owner, and Hellendrung saw up close what happens to a quirky, beloved brand when the big guys take over. The soul changes. It is the exact outcome he now refuses for Narragansett, and he says so without hedging.

A stint as interim president at Vermont's Magic Hat in the mid-2000s filled in the brewing side of his education, coaching the sales and marketing teams. By the time he sat in that Newport bar, he had spent close to two decades learning how Americans fall in love with the things they drink. Narragansett was the brand that let him use all of it at once.

Patient, local, and a little stubborn

Ask him about growth and he does not reach for hockey-stick charts. Rhode Island is only about 20 percent of the business now, but it is the number he watches hardest. "If you can't make it here," he has said, "then the rest is all kind of secondary." The home market is the proof, not the afterthought.

He is also allergic to the copycat reflex that grips a lot of craft beer. "The frustrating thing about beer now is that everything sort of becomes copycat," he said - which is part of why Narragansett leans on its own oddball history instead of chasing the trend of the season. The brand has played up its links to author H.P. Lovecraft and to Dr. Seuss, both of whom have threads connecting them to 'Gansett, and built limited beers and stories around them. Heritage, it turns out, is a moat the big guys cannot buy.

His own taste is unfussy. "During summer, I'm drinking lager all day long," he has admitted - which is roughly the most honest thing a lager evangelist can say. He is selling what he actually drinks.

Two decades in, the bet has held. A brand that was nearly gone now anchors a stretch of the Providence waterfront, employs a staff, brews at home, and ships beyond New England. Hellendrung still frames the future the same modest way he framed the start: keep it independent, grow it smart, and never forget that the whole thing began because a stranger in a bar refused to let a good beer be forgotten.