From the city of Avondale Estates “City Happenings” email…

It’s official! Wild Heaven Craft Beers has signed a lease on an 8,000 square foot building at the end of Maple Street next to the MARTA tracks with plans to renovate the vacant facility into a world-class brewery in Avondale Estates. Congratulations!

“We’re hoping we can be a part of reinvigorating the downtown, especially in the wake of (the Publix development) falling apart,” said Nick Purdy, president of Wild Heaven Craft Beers. “Our brewery is meant to be a destination, with tours, tastings and live music – so we hope to bring lots of people into Avondale in the coming years.”

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Looks like Decatur, Georgia is now home to a beer company!  From Atlanta Beer Master…

Wild Heaven is their name – Belgians are their brew of choice. Nick Purdy, Paste Magazine founder has taken on Wild Heaven as his newest project.

Launch Beers:

Invocation – Belgian Golden Ale, 8.5% ABV. Sweet candi sugar nose, with a light malt body.

Ode To Mercy – Imperial Brown, 8.2% ABV. Brewed with a special blend of coffee from 1,000 faces in Athens, GA.

…These beers will arrive on tap handles in Decatur, Georgia starting next week.    Brickstore Pub, & Cypress Street will be among the first to tap.

Salon asked former Paste Associate writer Rachel Maddux to write an account and reflection on the life and death of Paste Magazine.  As usual, she doesn’t disappoint.  A great piece.

And then, on Tuesday, my bosses — three guys who built the publication and the company from the ground up — gathered our dozen-person staff into the conference room, slid the doors shut and said, “We have bad news.” And it was bad: The whole staff was furloughed effective immediately; the print magazine was dead; the website would continue, but under uncertain auspices.

I’ve cried over lesser things at work and in life, but for some reason, just after the announcement, I found myself having to stifle a laugh. Minutes later, seemingly in a burst of hysteric dyspepsia, someone in the room burped loudly. Then I laughed. And then I cried.

UPDATE II: According to AP, Paste’s Print Edition is dead.  The website and online components will live on.

UPDATE:  Damn, Wikipedia is already referring to it in the past tense.

Aw hell.  From Gawker…

We heard earlier today that Paste Magazine was in imminent danger of folding. Looks like it’s already happened.

A tipster tells us “They announced it internally yesterday in an afternoon meeting, giving employees approx… 2 hours notice.” Rough. A few (former) Paste editors took to Twitter:

I saw Rachel Maddux’s Tweet about needing work last night, but never followed up.  This is a sad flippin’ day.

FOLIO reports that over $250,000 in donations have saved Decatur-based Paste Magazine from folding.  And according to an email from publisher Nick Purdy, things are looking up.

“We’ve published two issues since the campaign began, sent a third to the printer and are seeing advertising pick up for the fall and expect to be around for a long time,” publisher Nick Purdy wrote in an e-mail to FOLIO:. The campaign officially closes this month, he said.

Wow…is it just me or is $250,000 an incredible amount of money to have raised?

Great news!  Keep on keepin’ on Paste.

h/t: InDecatur

In this morning’s AJC, fellow Decatur resident and recent not-just-a-food-writer, John Kessler, sits down with Paste’s editor Josh Jackson for an in-depth look at the “Save Paste” campaign.

In the article, Kessler discusses Paste’s long-standing mission, the not quite success of the Pay-What-You-Want campaign, their ties to Decatur, and throws out a few key numbers:

• 1 million uniques a month for PasteMagazine.com:

• 205,000 people subscribe to the print version of Paste

• The company has raised $240,000 of $300,000 needed to stay afloat

Kessler even gets some response from the Atlanta music community on Paste’s move to ask for money: Stomp and Stammer’s publisher is opposed (saying the effort “comprises you what you do”), while the owner of Criminal Records supports it.

Here in Decatur, we’ve been around this block before.  First it was Wordsmiths Books that asked for donations to stay afloat (though ultimately folded) and now Paste.  And though editor Nick Purdy informed me that Wordsmiths’ decision didn’t influence Paste’s fundraising idea, it seems more than mere coincidence that this idea is only being pursued here.

Why?  It might just be that community effectively blurs the idea of “charity” and removes it from it’s black-and-white context in the stark global economy.  As Wendell Berry wrote in 2001,

In a viable neighborhood, neighbors ask themselves what they can do or provide for one another, and they find answers that they and their place can afford. This, and nothing else, is the practice of neighborhood. This practice must be, in part, charitable, but it must also be economic, and the economic part must be equitable; there is a significant charity in just prices.

Good luck fellas.  In addition to much the music world, Decatur is behind you.

Fresh Loaf has a press release from Paste Magazine announcing that it has reached the halfway point in a campaign to raise $300,000 to keep the music magazine afloat.

So far we have raised $148,000! That was the minimum that we needed to keep us going into the summer; we never expected to hit this goal so quickly. Thank you! We have the most amazing readers in the world, and we now know—in a very real way—that we hold this thing called Paste in trust for you and will work diligently to honor that.

We still have a ways to go. Most of our debt will be paid out of revenues when the economy starts to rebound and advertisers return, but we need $300,000 to take care of bills that spiraled up during the ad slump. We’re halfway to that goal and more confident than ever that Paste will make it.

As a way of saying thanks for donating, Paste is giving charitible readers access to over 120 tracks in the Paste Station Download Vault…and the list of artists seems to just keep growing!  Click here to donate.