USA, GA: South Main Brewery coming to Watkinsville sometime this summer
As the hot summer settles on Northeast Georgia in coming months, the taps at a new craft brewery in Watkinsville are expected to flow with fresh, cold beer, the Athens Banner-Herald reported on March 9.
South Main Brewery, which adopts its business image from an early 20th-century gas station along South Main Street, will operate out of Wire Park, a large commercial and residential development under way off Barnett Shoals Road a few blocks from downtown.
Four men — Dutch Guest, Brock Toole, Darrell Goodman and Nic Farley — have combined their individual talents and business acumen to stage the taproom, where new flavors and styles of beer will fill glasses and mugs.
The brewery, which they expect will open sometime this summer, will showcase several beers including lagers, India Pale Ales, Hazy IPAs and ales along with other styles with an idea of finding what local customers prefer.
“We’ll definitely pilot batches to get a feel,” said Farley, who was brought into the partnership as the head brewer. The community’s response to the beers will decide which will become a staple at the location, he said.
The brewery is under construction in the food court of Wire Park, which will house several restaurants. An ordinance crafted and approved by the local government provides a pathway so the brewery didn’t have to include a restaurant, according to Guest.
Recently, some members of the partnership traveled to Oregon, where the brewery machinery was purchased from Portland Kettle Works.
“We are a taproom-only model right now, but we’ll have the ability to double-batch and grow our capacity with this system, where we could eventually go into distribution if we wanted to, but really we want to focus on servicing Wire Park,” Guest said.
Toole agreed.
“Slow, methodical growth — we want to build the foundation. We’re not getting into this for the short term,” said Toole, who along with Goodman are co-owners of Satisfied Food Co., which makes and distributes homemade pimento cheeses and a Bloody Mary mix. The corporate office for Satisfied Food is on South Main Street and it owns the old gas station that inspired the brewery logo.
In Oregon, Toole said they met with the president of Portland Kettle Works and the “customer service they showed us made us feel good about what we were investing our money in.”
The three Watkinsville businessmen found their beer-making expert in Farley, a native Georgian who grew up in Marietta.
“The creativity that Nic brings to this team is unmatched. He brings a level of experience in brewing that allows us to open our doors,” Toole said.
Farley, who has been brewing beer for about 15 years, worked for The Beer Connoisseur magazine in Atlanta as a graphic artist, but he also became interested in the actual brewing of beer.
“I wanted to know more about the beer,” Farley said, “so I started homebrewing at first making beer on the stove top. The first few batches were not very good, but I kept with it and almost 15 years later I feel like I’ve got a good handle on it.”
“At the point where I was getting really good at homebrewing, I had the dream of opening my own brewery and lo and behold I met Brock and Dutch. And now it’s coming to fruition,” said Farley, who's planning a move to this area with his wife and young son.
“We wanted to find someone who had the passion and knowledge to really focus on new products,” Guest said. “Nic passed all those tests in flying colors.”
More: Brewery, second location of Athens Running Co. among newly announced Wire Park tenants
More: In-progress Watkinsville development to feature food hall, indoor baseball facility & more
The naming of the brews will be done collectively, Toole said.
“We have the best time doing that,” he said. “We throw names out — takethings from our past and present.”
Expect a wide range of brews pouring from the taps at South Main.
“We definitely want to do your classic American-style lagers. We will also dabble in Czech-style pilsners,” he said, adding the slate will include seltzers infused with different fruit flavors and sours.
“If the community likes fruity sours, we’ll make tons of fruited sours. I do like sours myself, so we’ll brew those on tap,” Guest said.
There are seven craft breweries now operating in Clarke County, and the idea of establishing a brewery in Oconee County was fermented over some glasses of beer.
Brock, president of the Oconee Rotary Club, and Guest, the vice president, found out that Rotary Clubs around the nation have beer clubs. The two men decided to try to make some beer themselves.
They bought what Guest called a “pretty nice homebrew system.”
“It was a mess at first. None of us knew what we were doing, but we had a good time figuring it out,” Guest said.
They began sharing their homemade beer with their friends along with Toole’s three flavors of pimento cheese.
“People kept telling us this beer is awesome, good as any beer you’ll get at any other brewery,” Toole said. “We knew it was good. We were making it and having fun, but everybody kept saying, ‘No, it’s really good.”'
A potential business venture began to simmer from their sharing of the homebrew, but when they came across Farley, the brewery plan came into clear view.
“Like us,” Toole said, “he was a homebrewer, but a whole lot better one.”
09 March, 2022
