In a building that has been a dozen different grubby little businesses in the recent past, these guys have built a clean and bright taproom that doubles by day as a working brewhouse. When they're ready for crowds to come in, they grab some portable little wire fencing (pleasantly decorated), and cordon off the tanks and kettles from the tasting space. It's a cool transformation, and a great model for a little brewery to build up a following in the heart of town.
It's right next to a busy Mexican restaurant, just a couple blocks up from the antique stores and restaurants that most people think of as the heart of downtown. It has nice semi-circular windows framed in by brick arches, and plenty of traffic driving by--good location. Through the main door, you see a long row of stools and a couple little circular tables. There's lots of industrial re-use happening here. The round tables used to be cable spools, the stools are upholstered with old barley malt bags; the ceiling tiles are old wooden pallets. It's visually witty, and hopefully saved them a few bucks. They've added a unisex bathroom, framed out a bit so you have room to turn around. As of this writing, you can still smell the fresh-cut 2x4s, which enhances the hand-made, bootstrappy feeling of the place.
At the far end of the room there's a small bar with a nice tap lineup. There are half a dozen house beers and a guest tap, though no doubt these numbers will change all the time. You can get a growler to fill here, and they'll fill your growler if you bring it in. They turn over kegs quickly here, so if you like something that's on, fill that growler before the keg coughs.
The house beers are nice malty American ales--blonds, ambers, IPAs, and so on. They're made well; they're clean and approachable. Only one (the IPA) had off flavors (a bit of popcorn butter), and one of us couldn't even taste it, so the lineup is damn near squeaky clean. They add fresh spicy peppers to one beer, and smoked spicy peppers to another. They add fresh basil and juicy Citra hops (taste like grapefruit) to their best beer, the Cit Bay Citrus Basil Ale. There aren't many basil beers out there, and it's not something everybody might love, but we both found it very refreshing and perfectly balanced. I could see this one selling out fast at a festival or on a hot day.
There's a TV tuned to the game, and popcorn machine tuned to whatever you tune popcorn machines to. The prices are solid. read more