Arkansas Brewing Company

Arkansas Brewing Company (originally Riley-Lyon Inc.) was a short-lived brewery in the 1980s based in Little Rock (Pulaski County) that anticipated the wave of later craft breweries to be established in the state.

Arkansas Brewing Company was founded in 1983 by William Lyon, a Fordyce (Dallas County) businessman and politician, in a warehouse complex along the Arkansas River in Little Rock. In a 2017 interview with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Lyon cited “boredom” as his main reason for starting the brewery.

From the beginning, the operation was plagued with problems, including bacterial infections that rendered some batches undrinkable. Too, Arkansas law at the time prohibited food sales at breweries and made it illegal to sell alcoholic beverages directly from the site of manufacture. Lyon did, however, manage to convince state leaders to change a law disallowing tastings, but as he put it later, “It just allowed me to give the beer away.”

The brewery offered four products over the course of its life: Riley’s Red Lyon (an English-style ale), White Tail (a lager), Ten Point (a lager), and Arkansas Sesquicentennial Beer, made to coincide with the 1986 Sesquicentennial Celebration. Although Riley’s Red Lyon finished seventh in the Great American Beer Festival, sales never took off. The death knell for the brewery came, however, when Alcoholic Beverage Control removed from shelves the entire run of the Arkansas Sesquicentennial Beer for a failure to register it with the state as an official sesquicentennial product. The brewery closed in October 1986.

Lyon’s short-lived operation saw him connected to one of the great political scandals of the 1990s. To start the brewery, he took out a loan from Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan. Long after the fact, Jim McDougal of Madison Guaranty asserted that Lyon’s brewery had received favorable treatment from the Alcoholic Beverage Control due to Lyon’s connection to Governor Bill Clinton, who appointed Lyon to the Arkansas Banking Board in 1980. Lyon was thus called to testify in Washington DC in the investigation of what became known as the Whitewater Scandal.

Although Arkansas Brewing Company failed, it helped set the stage for later brewery operations, such as Vino’s and Diamond Bear Brewery.

For additional information:
Sorensen, Brian. Arkansas Beer: An Intoxicating History. Charleston, SC: American Palate, 2017.

Steed, Stephen. “Small Brewer Missed State Wave but Sheds Few Tears in the Beer.” Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, October 15, 2017, pp. 1G, 2G. Online at https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2017/oct/15/small-brewer-missed-state-wave-but-shed/ (accessed November 22, 2024).

Staff of the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas