Remembering Larry Winans: Jackass Brewing Company Co-Founder and Friend to the Lewisburg Community

The Pennsylvania craft beer community is mourning the unexpected loss of Larry Winans, co-owner and co-founder of Jackass Brewing Company in Lewisburg. For the past seven years, Winans helped turn a friendship, a shared love of homebrewing, and a little too much beer into a brewery that became part of the fabric of the local community. Now, as Jackass Brewing Company moves forward, the people who knew Winans are remembering not only the brewer and business owner, but the friend, community member, and relentlessly positive presence behind the beer.

 

Jackass Brewing Company Carries On the Legacy of Co-Founder Larry Winans

For seven years, Jackass Brewing Company has been part of the craft beer community around Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, bringing locally made beer, friendship, and plenty of good times to the area.

Now, the brewery is moving forward without one half of the friendship and partnership that started it all.

Larry Winans, co-founder of Jackass Brewing Company, has died at the age of 61.

But for longtime friends, customers, and the people who helped build the brewery alongside him, the story of Larry Winans isn’t simply about the loss of a brewery owner. It’s about the loss of a friend—and the legacy he leaves behind at Jackass Brewing Company and throughout the Lewisburg community.

From Friendship to Homebrew to Jackass Brewing Company

The story of Jackass Brewing Company begins, appropriately enough, with two friends and a batch of homemade beer.

Winans, a dentist by profession, and Skip Kratzer, a school teacher, became friends through fitness. The two eventually started talking about brewing beer together after meeting at a pub located across the street from where Jackass Brewing Company would eventually open.

Kratzer asked Winans if he wanted to make beer.

They did.

What started as two friends experimenting with homebrewing eventually became something considerably larger.

“We always joked that we ended up, we had a problem, we had more beer than we knew what to do with,” Kratzer said. “We started giving it to our friends, and eventually, when the demand kept going, we decided this would be a great adventure.”

And so Jackass Brewing Company was born.

The brewery opened in East Buffalo Township and gradually became a fixture in the Lewisburg-area craft beer scene.

For Kratzer, however, the brewery was always about more than beer.

It was about people.

“The Gold Standard of What a Friend Is”

When Kratzer talks about Winans, one word keeps coming back to him: friend.

“If I could use one word that I think the whole world would describe him as, is he was a friend,” Kratzer said. “He is probably the gold standard of what a friend is.”

That friendship was the foundation of Jackass Brewing Company.

The business may have involved beer, taprooms, recipes, equipment, employees, customers and all of the other things that come with running a Pennsylvania brewery. But underneath all of that was the relationship between two best friends who decided to take something they enjoyed doing together and turn it into a business.

That’s a familiar story in the craft beer world.

Breweries frequently begin with a couple of friends making beer in a garage, basement or kitchen before eventually asking the much bigger question:

What if we actually did this for a living?

For Winans and Kratzer, that question became Jackass Brewing Company.

Seven years later, it had become a community.

Jackass Brewing Company Isn’t Going Anywhere

While Larry Winans is no longer here, Kratzer says Jackass Brewing Company will continue.

The brewery’s Lewisburg and Williamsport locations will remain in operation, with Kratzer and the rest of the Jackass Brewing Company team carrying the business forward.

That doesn’t mean moving on from Winans.

If anything, Kratzer says the opposite.

“We exist to carry his memory forward,” he said.

That’s an especially meaningful statement considering what the brewery—and the broader hospitality industry—has already experienced.

Kratzer specifically pointed to the community’s support during the COVID-19 pandemic, when breweries, restaurants, bars and other small businesses across Pennsylvania faced an incredibly uncertain future.

“This community has kept us alive during the difficult times of COVID,” Kratzer said. “I have no doubt that they will continue to do so in the future. We’ll find our way forward from this.”

For an independent craft brewery, community support can mean everything.

People don’t simply visit their local brewery because they want a pint. They go to see friends, meet new people, celebrate birthdays, listen to music, grab dinner, bring their families, watch a game, or simply spend a couple of hours somewhere that feels like home.

That sense of community appears to have been particularly important to Winans.

Captain Positivity

Kratzer described his friend as “Captain Positivity.”

And that positivity wasn’t something he kept to himself.

According to Kratzer, Winans had an infectious personality and a natural ability to bring people together. His legacy, he believes, will be rooted in the way he cared about other people and the community around him.

That’s perhaps one of the more fitting legacies for someone who helped create a brewery.

Beer has always been about more than what’s in the glass.

At its best, craft beer is about bringing people together.

A brewery becomes a meeting place. A table becomes a gathering point. A beer becomes an excuse to sit down with somebody you haven’t seen in a while.

And people like Winans become part of the reason those places matter.

A Bucket List and One Remarkable Item

Among the memories Kratzer shared was something particularly interesting: Winans had a handwritten bucket list containing things he wanted to accomplish during his life.

One item stood out to Kratzer.

Winans wanted to receive “an abundance of public adoration.”

Looking back, Kratzer believes his friend accomplished exactly that.

“I believed he’s achieved it, whether or not he knew he did, is that one of his Bucket List items was to receive an abundance of public adoration,” Kratzer said. “The public adored him.”

It’s a striking thought.

Not because public adoration is necessarily something most of us would put on a bucket list, but because it says something about the relationship Winans had with the people around him.

A successful brewery can be measured in barrels brewed, pints poured, locations opened, awards won or years in business.

But there are other measurements, too.

How many people knew you?

How many people considered you a friend?

How many people felt welcomed when they walked through your doors?

And, perhaps most importantly, how many people are going to miss you when you’re gone?

By those measurements, Winans appears to have left quite a legacy.

The Future of Jackass Brewing Company

Jackass Brewing Company will now enter another chapter.

The brewery will continue operating in Lewisburg and Williamsport, while the people who knew Winans work to keep the spirit of what he helped create alive.

There will inevitably be difficult days.

There will also be beers poured, conversations had, friends reunited and new memories made.

That’s the strange thing about breweries.

They are businesses, but they can also become landmarks in people’s lives.

A place where someone had a first date.

A place where friends meet every Friday.

A place where somebody celebrates a birthday.

A place where a family gathers.

A place where two friends once decided they had made too much homebrew and wondered what might happen if they turned their hobby into something bigger.

That decision eventually became Jackass Brewing Company.

And now, even without Larry Winans physically there, the brewery remains one of the places where his story continues.

Jackass Brewing Company isn’t just carrying on a business. It’s carrying forward a friendship, a community and the legacy of one of the people who helped create it.

Larry Winans is survived by his wife, two adult children, family and friends.

Services will be held Sunday, June 28, from 12 p.m. to 2 p.m. at Rooke Chapel on the campus of Bucknell University.

He was 61 years old.