Market Garden Brewery Brings in New President to Guide Next Phase

For the past 23 years, Sam McNulty and Mark Priemer have seen their Ohio City neighborhood grow, and along with it, they have slowly expanded and grown up and down West 25th Street since their first concept opened in 2003. However, as the beverage, craft beer and hospitality business is rapidly changing, so is Market Garden Brewery.

Their latest expansion occurred in 2025, when the business partners opened the “dream come true” Irishtown Bend Taproom inside their production brewery, located next to the West Side Market. This past year, they also opened their Canopy Rooftop Bar atop the Market Garden brewpub. 

Their production brewery has been brewing since 2016. Soon, McNulty and Priemer will look to diversify their beverage offerings, all of which will be made in Ohio City.

“People think of us as if we’re taking over the world,” McNulty says. Instead, they are focused on their campus and have grown to about 200 employees.

Other nearby breweries have struggled in recent months. Bookhouse Brewing closed this past year after seven years in business, citing unpredictable post-pandemic realities. Voodoo Brewery in Cleveland Heights closed after six years.  

According to the Ohio Craft Brewers Association, more Ohio breweries closed than opened in 2025, following a national trend. 

“I think what a lot of people still don’t grasp about food, beverage, hospitality post-pandemic is that everything is so totally different and those intervening years were so similarly unpredictable,” Bookhouse Brewing owner Vaughn Stewart says. “Everything was just gone as far as any kind of structure, predictability.”

McNulty and Priemer characterized the craft beer industry as undergoing a necessary “correction” in which many breweries were closing, and success would depend on quality, consistency and strong brand building.

“There’s going to be a little bit of a Darwinian thinning of the herd,” McNulty says. “But that’s every market that sees irrational exuberance, there’s a correction. I think we’re seeing that correction now.”

To strengthen Market Garden’s brand building, McNulty and Priemer did something unprecedented for their business: They brought in a new partner and president. They landed Paul Corto after months of recruiting. 

Corto started in his new role in October, but before that, he spent 15 years in various roles at Solon’s Superior Beverage Group, a major distributor that also serves Market Garden Brewery. Corto retired from Superior in June. 

This summer, he focused on spending time with family and running the Spiders Lacrosse Club in Hudson, which he started three years ago.

McNulty and Priemer knew that Market Garden Brewery needed Corto’s seasoned business leadership — and that his extensive background in beverage distribution could help guide the brewery’s strategic growth.

“It’s one thing to be great creators, but when you can partner up with somebody that really says, ‘All right, we’re going to take all this creative might and technical abilities and focus it here,’ that’s a real winning combination,” Priemer says.

Corto’s vision for the brewery’s future includes diversifying its product portfolio to include domestic lagers, flavored malt beverages and non-
alcoholic options, aiming to insulate the business from the volatility of the craft beer-specific market.

The brewery is now making decisions based on market data and consumer trends rather than on the personal taste or gut feelings of the brewers or founders. 

“You can make the best beer in the world or the best cider in the world,” Priemer says. “But if you’re not great at getting it out to the market or branding it in the way it should be (it’s going nowhere).”

For example, non-alcoholic options have been steadily growing in the beverage industry. A Gallup poll from 2023 found that only 62% of U.S. adults aged 18-34 report drinking, down from 72% in 2001. 

To become a multibrand power, Corto laid out the Boston Beer Co. as a blueprint for evolution. He said that the company has gone from its flagship Samuel Adams beer to a broad portfolio that includes Twisted Tea, Truly and Angry Orchard.

“I don’t even think most consumers even realize that Boston Beer produces and manufactures Twisted Tea,” Corto says. “They’re very tactful and are able to build that portfolio and that brand.” 

“I’m not saying we’re going to turn into Boston Beer overnight,” Corto adds. “I think we can take some of those strategies and we can build a portfolio of brands that play outside of just craft beer.”

One of Market Garden Brewery’s biggest advantages is the ability to be nimble and innovative. Corto stated the team could develop a new brand from idea to production in just eight weeks.

That claim has been put to the test with new variety packs, which will allow Market Garden to test some brews in groupings, while testing others as drafts. And these decisions’ resulting data will be collected right next to the production brewery. 

“The luxury that we have here is having our restaurants and being able to have 200,000 people coming through,” Corto says. “We can glean data, we can glean information that can help us make data-driven decisions and more informed fact-based decisions.”

However, none of this would have been possible, Corto says, if McNulty and Priemer had never invested in their beverage lab that enables them to test with a two-barrel system and then scale up.

McNulty adds that this allows them to be adventurous because “if that batch doesn’t meet standards, it goes down the drain and it’s far less of a risk at that point.”

That adventure started this past December, with their new Cleveland Lager that launched in their Cleveland Classics variety pack.

“The response that we’ve gotten already has been overwhelming,” Corto says.

Just one post on social media led a wave of solid feedback, and made an impact on Market Garden’s distributor partner. Others have taken notice. Priemer said a major retailer reached out about a new variety pack it wanted to see as soon as possible, so Corto and the team got to work. 

“A big retailer asked, ‘Could you guys do a variety pack with this, this and this?’” Priemer recounted. “And they talk about speed. (Corto’s) like, ‘Yeah, we could do that.’ And they’re like, ‘Could you give me a mock above that by this afternoon?’ And literally they turned it around in hours.”

Before Corto brings Market Garden Brewery into national focus, he wants to double down on the company’s home market for sustainable growth by staying in Northeast Ohio. 

“I wake up every day with just a burning desire to win and work with guys that I love, locking arms with them and the team,” Corto says.

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